I started playing a new game in the colony building / survival genre: Mind over Magic. In this case you are building a magic school, which is threatened by an advancing fog that you need to repel with magic. While many colony building games are horizontal, Mind over Magic is mostly vertical, in a sort of 2.5D, where there is only a limited depth. Your magic school is thus mostly a tower, although you can make it wider than the original foundation over time.

The first challenge of Mind over Magic is understanding how the game works, and what you are supposed to do. I think in part that is working as intended, the game wants you to play around with the systems and see for yourself what works. The tutorials are text-based, with no narrator, and unless you click on them in the upper left corner, they won't pop up by themselves. The game is early access, so maybe they will introduce a bit more hand-holding. But right now you can either experiment yourself (in which case I would urge you to click on all UI elements and existing structures in the school and there read about all the options you have), or you can get some tips from the internet. If you don't want to watch a video, I will list in this post some of the fundamental mechanics of the game and how the game loop works. Don't read on if you don't want those spoilers.

You start the game with 2 or 3 staff (depending on chosen difficulty), and after you repelled the fog for the first time, you get the ghost of the founder as additional helper. The ghost is the weakest mage possible, with a stat of 1 in all forms of magic, but doesn't need to eat or sleep, and is thus quite useful. Everybody else has some forms of magic they are better at, with the element of magic that corresponds to their wand being the strongest (3 at the start). Each element of magic corresponds to some activity, for example Lightning is used for research. Once you realize that, you can tune the priorities of your characters (Shift + 2, or the second button on the bottom right UI bar) to preferably use the best character for each activity.

Pretty early in the game you are going to start to summon students. Students have stats like 0/2, which means that they *can* reach a stat of 2, but are currently at 0. Thus you will have to build a classroom, in which somebody from the staff will teach the students for most of the day, which leads to their actual stats rising up to their potential. Students also have a list of trials, like "eat 10 gutberries", and when completed these trials turn into medaillons, which boosts their non-magic stats, e.g. their hit points, speed, or power. To summon a student, you first need to craft a wand for him, and the element of that wand will be his strongest magic potential. Higher level wands give students with higher potential, but the trials are also more difficult. At some point the student will have reached his potential and won't be able to learn anymore. Annoyingly by default they are still on their regular schedule and hang around uselessly in classrooms all day. I recommend exploring the Manage Groups (Shift + 4) functionality and create a group for skill capped students, so you can let them do more useful work by creating a new schedule for them. Having said that, students can only perform a limited selection of minor tasks, like cleaning and hauling stuff. They can't chop wood, hunt animals, or harvest plants.

That gets us to the big game loop of developing your characters: Once a student is fully trained, you can either do a graduation ritual, which means he leaves the school, but gives you some scrolls. Or you can use those scrolls and promote the student to staff, so he can do those more advanced tasks. The one thing to keep in mind, and there are several complaints in the negative section of the Steam reviews about that, is that once a character is staff, their stats never improve. Which means that especially once you researched the second tier of wands, your students will often be better than the original staff. So even if that seems counterintuitive, the best thing to do is to retire your original staff over time and replace them with promoted ex-students with better wands and skills.

To the left and right of your school there are resource nodes. Lower level resources are closer to your school, higher level resources further away. Behind the resources is the fog, and the fog will come closer to the school every evening, destroying all the resources and nodes it covers. Note that unless you hauled the resources back to school and into a chest, they can be either eaten by the fog, or destroyed by rain. Thus I tend to keep fully trained students around for a while, having done as recommended above and set them a schedule where they haul resources from outside back to school all day. The fog can be repelled with a ritual at the Mana Font, with the Superior Repel Fog ritual costing three times the cost of the normal one, but giving four times the effect, thus being preferable. The closer the fog is to the school the lower level resources the repel fog ritual requires. Thus one good way to handle this is to gather the wood and gutberries needed for the lowest level ritual in sufficient quantities safely inside chests in the school, and letting the fog come close to school before repelling it. That has the advantage that when the fog is repelled, new resource nodes spawn in the liberated areas. That includes resource nodes like stone and metal, which unlike plants, animals, and trees don't respawn.

On a normal day, with probably one of your staff busy teaching students, while another is doing research, the availability of manpower is your main constraint. The game allows you to plan ahead, for example mark a lot of resource nodes for gathering while simultaneously planning the construction of the next level of your school. That is where many players get into trouble, because they don't understand in what order characters perform tasks. Characters follow a schedule (Shift + 1), which for example determines when they eat and when they sleep; you need to modify that schedule occasionally, for example adding some recreation time once you researched and built the enchantophone. If the schedule says a character should do tasks, they follow their personal list of priorities (Shift + 2); if you haven't set any priorities, they'll follow the list from left to right. Note that for example the priority list has chop - hunt - mine in that order, so as long as there are trees to chop and nobody has a set priority to mine, your stone will go unmined. The solution is to either queue up fewer tasks, or to use the third tool, task priorities for specific items (3); for example, once you have built planters to grow plants, so you don't need to hope for random respawns, it is a good idea to set their specific priority to 4, so they get harvested when ready before people do other stuff. There is even a fourth priority tool, where with a character selected you can right-click on something to give that as an immediate task to that person. The system is extremely deep, and you have to find your own comfort level between letting everybody doing whatever and micromanaging every step.

The research tree of Mind over Magic is pretty large. However, pretty quickly you will come to levels that require Arcane Scrolls to unlock. Those aren't the same as the Adept Scrolls (or Savant Scrolls at higher levels) you get for graduating students. For Arcane Scrolls you need to fight monsters in turn-based combat. And for that you need to do the Unlock Underschool ritual at your mana font, which isn't obvious if you don't know it. Once you did that ritual, you can explore the chambers under the school, fight monsters and get Arcane Scrolls, plus some other resources, like Mana Crystals. You can make a group of staff and students for these fights; while sometimes students *need* to fight for their trials, you should at least wait until they gained some levels in their main magic stat, otherwise they are rather useless. The type and level of wand determines what spells your characters can cast in combat, and their other stats determine things like their hitpoints or modify damage dealt. Once you either found potions or learned how to brew them, characters can also use those in addition to the spell they cast each turn, which makes potions extremely powerful. Note that the deeper you "dig" into the underschool, the more monsters will be unlocked that occasionally spawn in your school, like a poltergeist destroying your furniture.

F1 to F6 show you different view overlays of your school. For example F2 shows how well lit your rooms are, with rooms that aren't sufficiently lit producing voidshrooms that drain your mana and make people unhappy. The most important one is F1, the room overlay. It hides a menu that describes the qualities that a room needs to have in order to give certain bonuses. For example bedrooms usually need to be "private", which means they can only have one point of entry. If you follow these instructions, you can for example create a specific Dormitory room once you have unlocked the necessary requirements with research, and students sleeping in there will gain +5 conviction, that is to say will be happier. Your school will be a lot more efficient if you follow those specific room building instructions, rather than just putting up furniture wherever.

I am still on my first game, on relaxed difficulty. The higher difficulty is called relentless, and that starts you with fewer staff, and makes it more difficult to keep everybody's conviction (happiness) up. If conviction gets too low, a character may experience a Break, which will result in a Trauma penalty, and possibly even death. Apart from making the game thus more difficult, relentless difficulty also randomly changes the keywords you need to build each specific room, so that you will need to build your school differently each game. That provides replayability to a game which already in early access has a good length until you reach the end of the research tree. For $25 this is pretty good value, and I would recommend Mind over Magic if you like the genre.

- posted by Tobold @ 11:26 AM Permanent Link