Off of the bat, this game is wonderful. Master of Magic is genuinely one of my favourite games, and this is unaffected by nostalgia, I first played this game in 2015-ish after over two decades of gaming. However, the rights to the game were bought up by Slytherine games, who have recently added in a launcher, this is not the company who made or funded the game and their launcher has a single purpose - to advertise their game library, social media and company website. You can download a 'classic' version of the game from GOG, however this will then be updated automatically via GOG Galaxy immediately to contain the launcher which - again - exists solely to advertise to consumers products with absolutely no relation to the game they are playing or the creative teams or design philosophies. I hate this, I hate this so much I haven't been able to bring myself to play the game since this update. For people who don't care about that: Fantastic 4X game, you can see the blatant DNA of Master of Orion (including straight up featuring the Klackon race). Fourteen preset wizard avatars (with their own skill/spell book choices already made), plus a custom wizard option. Custom wizards use any of the fourteen preset wizard avatars (precluding that wizard from being in the game under AI control). You can then spend a number of points to pick a combination of eighteen skills and buying spellbooks of different colours (more books makes you more powerful in that colour). Spellbooks are Chaos (Red) - Damage, fire, lightning, mutation. Nature (Green) - Minor heals, summons, geographic mutation. Sorcery (Blue) - Manipulation, flight, illusions. Life (White) - Healing, summoning, buffs. Death (Black) - Summons, turning your creatures into more powerful creatures. Skills can effect research speed, how much you can cast per round, item creation. There are two dimensions, an earthlike and an underdark world you can travel between. You cast spells all across the world an in battle.
