Naturally, as an author of Myth’s longest and most epic plugins, my Read-Me is going to be a little long-winded too. Thanks for bearing with it.

It is my hope that Mazzarin’s Demise V  will not only be enjoyed over the course of a few games, but that it will remain a staple plugin for the Myth community for however long Myth endures. Towards this goal, the re-playability factor received a great deal of attention. There are many things that you can find only once in a hundred games, so hopefully there will always be some degree of surprise and newness. The tradeoff for this kind of re-playability is intense complexity and a steep learning curve. I don’t care how good you are, the first time you play Mazzarin’s Demise V, you will be a Noob.

Therefore, I strongly recommend that you not even attempt Heroic or Legendary until you’ve beaten lesser settings. The easier difficulties are meant as training for the many new attacks, weapons and monster strengths and weaknesses. Playing Legendary, or even Heroic, without learning how many things work will only make for a very frustrating, overwhelming, and confusing game that won’t be much fun at all. The following is meant as a guide for how the difficulty settings can be used.

Timid
Very easy. Suitable for a small group of inexperienced players or as a solo challenge for one expert player.

Simple
Roughly two to three times more difficult than Timid, but still fairly easy. Suitable for a medium or large group of inexperienced players, or as a challenge for a very small group of expert players.

Normal
Roughly two to three times more difficult than Simple and no longer easy. Suitable for a large group of moderately experienced players or for a medium sized group of expert players with decent teamwork skills.

Heroic
Two to three times more difficult than Normal and noticeably more difficult than Legendary on Mazzarin’s Demise 4. Not suitable for inexperienced players. An epic challenge for a large group of expert players with strong teamwork skills.

Legendary
Roughly three times more difficult than Heroic, and possibly as difficult as a Myth map can get without being impossible or just plain ridiculous. Only suitable for a minimum of ten or more expert players capable of clockwork-precise defensive teamwork while simultaneously maintaining a sustained average kill rate of approximately 50 monsters a minute. Most likely will never be beaten.

Also, please read the in-game hints or it could take you a long time to figure certain things out such as how your units can regain mana.

I’ve read somewhere that good art is more than the sum of its parts. I don’t know if that’s true for Mazzarin’s Demise V  or not, but the individual parts of it, contributed by a great many people, can stand alone as impressive achievements. So here is a long thank you list which I hope isn’t too boring; as it stands, I’m sure I’ve forgotten half the people who deserve mentions.

Khellek - Creator of the amazing new units that you will see for the first time on Mazzarin’s Demise V. Without Khellek there would be no Mazzarin’s Demise V, yet these units were originally intended to premiere in Laws of Evil. Due to an unfortunate setback, Laws of Evil has been delayed, but it is still steadily being worked on. Khellek very generously has allowed me to use these units in Mazzarin’s Demise V  before Laws of Evil. The typical policy for Project Magma’s authors is to allow any other mapmakers to use or borrow our work after we have first released it ourselves - but in this case I ask that no part of Mazzarin’s Demise V  be used for other plugins until after Laws of Evil is completed. Please respect this wish as it is mutual respect among mapmakers that helps create an environment for all our work to flourish.

Jagman - Started out as one of the early beta testers but before long earned co-authorship of the plugin. Jagman fixed many bugs and technical issues that were way beyond my ability to figure out. Many of the neat new special effects were created by Jagman, and finally, his ever persistent and astute analysis of every last technical detail helped create the balance of game-play that exists in Mazzarin’s Demise V.

Iron Duke - For programming in all the new Myth II 1.5.x gameplay features that make Mazzarin’s Demise V  fun, and for the use of quite a few of his gorgeous units.

Myrd - For debugging and fixing all the obscure Myth II issues that originally prevented Mazzarin’s Demise V  from pushing the Myth 2 engine the way it can now. The stability of this plugin is rock solid in terms of virtually no OOS errors, FPS drops, crashes or other issues, and it’s mostly thanks to Myrd.

Silicon Dream - Creator of many of the really wild special effects originally intended for Laws of Evil.

Ozone - For creating one of the colormaps for Mazz 4 which has now been expanded and reused for Mazzarin’s Demise V. Ozone’s colormap for Mazz 4 has been very underplayed due to a false rumor that it was more likely to cause OOS errors. Mazz 4 did have occasional OOS problems under Myth II 1.4.x, but these had nothing to do with whether the ‘oz’ or ‘Teep’ version of the map was played. Hopefully now ozone’s work will finally get a chance to be appreciated.

Discman - I don’t think I’ve ever met him, but two of the key units in Mazzarin’s Demise V  are borrowed from Discman’s excellent modeling and animation work in The Woods out Back.

oogabooga and Haravikk - Who both did all the tedious Ambering work for Khellek’s new units.

GHOST - Whose compact and efficient scripting techniques on Mazz 4 I studied and emulated in order to be able to script Mazzarin’s Demise V.

Grasshopper - Whose beautiful music compositions still grace the pre and post games of Mazzarin’s Demise.

scrapnjack - Who created most of the new artifact icon artwork.

lank - From whom I borrowed a special effect or two (Iron Duke, GHOST and ozone certainly deserve mentions in this category as well).

Graydon - For an Amber fix he provided before I started learning how to do that sort of thing myself.

woof - For creating the QuickTime Trailer for Mazzarin’s Demise V.

Doobie - For managing Project Magma’s server and uDog’s HotLine.

And finally, but most certainly not least, all the beta testers. It is no exaggeration that approximately two thousand man-hours (the amount of hours typically worked in a full time job in one year) have been spent testing Mazzarin’s Demise V  since the first of over 60 betas back in early January. The benefit of such testing for any game is hard to adequately calculate. You won’t see how much it polished Mazzarin’s Demise V  in just a few games, but play it one hundred times, and you’ll be able to appreciate the balance, replayability and all the little things that work so well because of fanatical testing.

I am indebted to all the testers (and if you look carefully, you’ll see their names in the game) but most of all, a BIG thank you to the true Mazz V diehards: Ara, Death’s Avatar, Giliath, Gleep, Jagman, scrapnjack, Shocker, Wismuth and woof. If you get to play this map with any of them, and you want to win, listen to what they might tell you; they know exactly what they’re talking about.

The first team to submit a winning Heroic game film will be immortalized on Project Magma’s website. The film as well as a brief synopsis of the team’s exploits and statistics will be posted on a permanent page.

The game must be multi-player with at least 2 players. If more than 50% of the units (based upon unit % value) are controlled by primary beta testers of Mazzarin’s Demise V  (the nine players listed in the thank-you section plus myself) the win will be disqualified.

Pre-vetting units by playing on an easier difficulty first will disqualify a win.

If an exploit is found and used, even unintentionally, to cause the total game time to exceed 2 hours and 30 minutes, the win will be disqualified.

Immediately after a win, please post the results on Project Magma’s forum and submit the film, zipped, to ebreer@hotmail.com. Good Luck.

If you want an additional, albeit silly, challenge try to find the unit named Waldo out of the 6,000 enemies on the map.

My sincere thanks for playing the Mazzarin’s Demise series of Myth plugins. Please let me know what you think of it on Project Magma’s forum or by emailing me at ebreer@hotmail.com.

And one last thank-you to the beta testers for all the laughs, fun and friendship. I love you guys!

-- ChrisP

This plugin was created with the use of Fear and Loathing applications and is in part Copyrighted by Bungie Software.

www.projectmagma.net