Lords of Magic: Special Edition

As a child I LOVED this game, but, sadly it did not stand up well to the test of time. I should note that I rate games very harshly, and try not to let nostalgia influence. To someone who has never played it before: The Cons: The RTS combat honestly falls very short. You have limited control over units, they bunch up, they react slowly, you start too close to the enemy army, and the RTS animations are choppy at best (even for 1998) In the world map turn based part, the enemies roam too far from their home and leave it undefended, and the diplomacy is poorly implemented. The Pros: The game has wonderful atmosphere, lots to explore, an interesting spell discovery system, and most importantly, gives you the freedom to play as you like. It is still an interesting game, but in 2013, you will notice its shortcomings.

Unfortunately I chose Chaos as my first race. The game really requires a patch because entering level 1 encounters with a weak army is not fun when you find a level 8 epic pegasus. This is clearly a bug and I'm surprised it has not been officially fixed. Luckily I did find an unofficial patch by Ascension64.... I don not like using unofficial patches though. Please fix this GoG.

Lords of Magic is a beautiful game. It was also one of the most buggy games ever made. Look for the Mantera community patch.

I remember getting so lost in this game just before high school and it being a good friend over the years. I still play this over 20 years later every year for a few weeks and have an amazing time doing it. It’s so awesome seeing my kids start to play these games and have them being engaged even though they’re used to games like fortnight. Highly recommend :-)

I remember thinking of Lords of the Realm the moment I first saw this game in a box. A good analogy, but the gameplay is unique. The game has 8 factions representing the 8 religions of the setting: Order (mages), Chaos (barbarians), Life (elves), Death (undead), Fire (fire giants), Water (merfolk), Air (sprites) and Earth (dwarves). Although there's some overlap, the factions are asymetrically balanced, with Life having extremely good archers who can shoot across the whole battlefield but extremely poor fighters whose utility lies on blocking the enemies from the archers while Chaos' pathetic stick throwers are instead designed to safely hit-stun enemies while their fragile but high damaging berserkers mow them down. Death is somewhat better than everyone, but mostly because they boast an incredible hero key to the story, still you need to defeat the game once before going with them. Ranged combat is iffy, as ranged units have problem calculating the shoots and the AI is very good at dodging, but that somehow balances the game as otherwise ranged units could be too good. Thieves are also of dubious use, especially because of the weird way they do an sneak attack, but once mastered they can be used as effectively as the mage and warrior heroes as expertly assassins. Units are difficult to heal. The fastest way is to pay crystals (one of the resources) at cities, but it gets expensive and limits your ability to hire and mantain magical unities, otherwise you have to rely on spells and resting, which are slow but cheap. One important point about spells is that a mage researching does the equivalent of one day of research a turn by experience level it has, and as you upgrade the mystical building you can put more mages researching, so it is a trade-off between using the mage in combat or using him to make better spells available, but only the mage of the faction can do the research. Spells are key in combat, and some can be used to win combats single-handed if well aimed. Finally, the first thing you must do in a game is to recover your great temple, as you need it to be able to gain followers, which are used to hire cheaper to maintain units (which can be bought as mercenaries, cheap to hire but expensive to maintain, or followers, which are the opposite) and to acquire resources at your city. You can't do it right at the beginning without a lot of skill, so first loot some nearby ruins to hire a good number of mercenaries, and when you have enough to hire a few, storm right to the temple. Disband the exceeding mercs afterwards. All in all, a very satisfying game with a lot of replayability, as each faction plays very differently. The beginning can be frustrating because of difficult combats with unexperienced weak units, but once you get your followers well trained and the stronger units the game goes smoothly. A sure buy at good price, especially because it is the special edition, which has several extra features that make it even more worthwhile.