It feels like Caesar III, but with some excellent quality of life improvements. Buildings have zones of influence instead of requiring their workers to happen to walk by buildings frequently enough. Stock needs to be brought to warehouses and granaries, but from there it can be used by any building in the city, so there's less waiting for goods to move around between buildings.
I've been playing a bunch of this game, and I'm already thinking about different things that I want to try on future playthroughs. There are so many different ways to approach every situation, it really is a masterfully done CRPG. My whole D&D group is raving about it.
For decades now, the original Master of Magic has been the first game I install on any new computer. No other games in the 4x genre come close to doing all the things that Master of Magic did. Finally, there's a game that lives up. If you haven't played the original, and you have any sort of interest in 4x games (like Civilization), I think you'll be impressed with this game. There's so much room for replaying this game. You can do a dozen different games with Life magic (which is a good place to start), playing as different races and trying different strategies. Then, when you've the hang of that, you can switch over to Chaos magic and you'll have to come up with entirely new strategies to deal with enemies you thought were simple before. If you've played the original, I think you'll be surprised not only at how faithful they were to the original, but at how well those mechanics hold up so many years later. There are some updates, and some quality of life improvements (like build queues), but overall this game still feels like a prettier version of the original. The biggest improvement, in my opinion, is in all of the different starting options available. You can set the difficulty separately for enemy wizards, neutral towns, and for lairs. You can set the map size larger or smaller, to allow you more space to prepare before running into enemies, or to force yourself to fight over every scrap of land. You have a lot of room to play the game in the way that's most interesting to you, and to play slightly differently every time.
I really wanted to love this, but I find I'm put off by too many of the changes. There's no way to maximize the game on a widescreen monitor without the whole game getting stretched horizontally. The graphics for terrain are all worse, for some reason that I can't fathom. Even if you select the option to display mountains the old way, they're still uglier than they were in the original. The building tree is bloated with a bunch of extra buildings, but none of them make the game more interesting for me. The opponent wizards' AI is aggressive to the point of being obnoxious (a Wizard Pact as a deal where the player agrees to stay clear of the AI's cities, and the AI agrees to leave armies right beside all the player's cities). The 'Quit' button is gone, so you now have to Alt+F4 out of the game, by design. Locking high-tier buildings behind a spell that you have to research and cast... feels like it misses the point of the design esthetic of the original game (you're a wizard gaining power, it's not Civ where you're researching new techs to build better units & cities). Overall, the game suffers from a lot of things that have been redesigned, but not improved. Multiple screens have had their appearance completely redone, and in most cases they just look a little bit sloppier than they had originally. There are also plenty of positive improvements. Giving more units 2 base movement was a good change. Starting heroes out more powerful was good. The beginning of the game feels more lively, for sure, and the list of options when you're starting a new game is impressive. I'm not giving up on it yet, but I certainly won't be getting the sort of longevity out of this game that I did out of the original.
I've come back to this game so many times, over the years, and it still holds up.
It was a great game in its day. It would be nice if the download came with a manual though, since fumbling blindly through the controls is going to be a little painful.
