Back in the day there was a company called Microprose and it was good.
If Microprose published your game, you were one hell of a developer.
Master of Magic was one of these games. From the HUGE install back in the day (like 25 Megs) and the HUGE 1.5 MB intro (I'm old. Sue me. I know what a 2400 BAUD is) this game had it all. I'd spend hours in the creation portions. The game is old to be sure, however, it will hold up. All the good from the awful 'Heroes of Might and Magic' series (seriously. Boooo-ring) and all the good from civilisation made this into a powerfully addicting game. When I heard GOG was releasing it I had to go change pants.
Good for GOG. Good for the developer. Good for you for reading this and buying it....even if you personally like HOMM.
I have an original 3.5" disk version of MOM with packaging and a version on CD. It has been installed on every computer I have owned since the day it came out. It is a true classic.
This is the strategy game I use to introduce my children to strategy games. Easy to get into, moderate complexity and a ton of re-playability. It has real combat strategy, true racial differences, hero characters and crafting of items.
One of my favorite things to do is start a game with some crazy configuration like only two nature spell books, myrran, Klackon and a random assortment of wizard attributes. I then start a game and save it on the first turn, email the save game to a friend and we play at the same time to see which of us scores better.
Loads of fun.
Look out for the human paladins, I never seem to have an answer for them.
I'm practically a milennial, only two years off of it in fact, so I grew up with Game boys and the Playstation two. So I can say this review comes from the eyes of someone who's used to 3D graphics and not seeing pixels in a game.
This game is amazing.
Overall it plays like a Civilization game, but with magic. Really good magic. Instead of Gandhi running India it's Gandalf ruling the Hobbits, so to speak. Without magic it would play like Civ 2, albeit permenantly set in the middle ages. In this game research is on magic, so instead of going from cavemen to mechanised troops its going from summmoning skeletons to binding demons to your will.
There are a variety of fantasy races ranging from human to dwarf to draconians (read: anthro-dragons). Each has a unique bonus (which isn't covered in the manual, but the wiki covers it and is quite detailed.) Hobbits make good farmers, but poor soldiers as they deal less melee damage. But they're lucky, getting a +1 to almost everything. Some races are good soldiers -trolls are amazing in that, but suck in everything else- and others are good for running an economy -dwarves and gold go hand in hand-. You may absorb other races into your empire, fielding Troll troops defending Dwarven cities, or wipe useless races from the map.
Magic is divided into five branches: life, death -life and death are mutually exclusive-, chaos, sorcery and nature. You can pick up to 11 spell books in any category or buy perks like warlord which lets you unlock the highest experiance level in the game for units. The magic is balanced: No magic is superior to the others. You can summon monsters to bolster your army, curse enemy units, buff your own units, and so on.
The graphics might be pixelated, but they're good. At no point do you say "I have no idea what that's supposed to be", except perhaps on Myrror - the alternative dimension in the game - but that's the point. It may be a forest, but it's a warped one.
Go watch some gameplay.
The Best Turn-Based Fantasy/Strategy Game EVER MADE, as of 11/3/12.
This game seriously is the best turn-based Fantasy/Strategy Game ever made. There is no question about that fact. I know newer generation gamers want their perfect graphics and I can see where they're coming from because they grew up with picture perfect graphics and the downgrade is a huge slam in their face. I just have to say to you newer gen kids if you can just get past the graphics issue you will treat yourselves to the best game in this genre that you have ever had the pleasure to experience.
I'm a nerd and have been playing games since I was literally like 4 years old. The first game I ever played was seriously Space Spartans on an Intellivision 1981, I've loved video games of almost every genre since I was old enough to play them. When it comes to the genre of turn-based/fantasy/strategy this is the best game that was ever made, to date, for that genre. I know. Trust me, I’m really that lame, or cool, depending on how you look at it.
The game starts you as an overlord wizard that is basically in charge of a kingdom/race of people. You are started with one small town, a hamlet. You can build things (buildings, upgrades, etc.) in the town/hamlet (just like in civilization series of games) which in turn allows you to build the more powerful army units and increase economic growth, as well as mana growth. Each town can also produce settlers of their own race to go out and build other outposts which eventually populate into hamlets. The races, fourteen of them, each have special racial abilities and race specific armies, each of the different armies with specific special abilities and buffs. You can have as few as one other opponent and up to four. Each Wizard has special abilities given to them and magic spell books to learn from, there are 6 schools of magic ranging from Arcane, Nature, Chaos, Sorcery, Life & Death. There are also preset abilities and you can choose to set them differently for your own wizard if you choose to. This is all done before you start into the randomized map screen. There are two worlds Arcanus and Myrror. The two worlds are physically linked to each other by special portals called Towers of Wizardry, allowing units to travel between worlds.
Your main overlord wizard “You” can cast permanent sustaining spells (if you have the mana to cast and maintain the spells) on each individual army you own to give them awesome buffs in battles. Each army you own, or build from one of your cities gains xp just like many of the newer turn-based strategy games now have. Each time your armies go to battle on the over world map you enter a new screen where you tactically get to battle out each battle. This feature is one of the things that totally draws me into this game, you get to tactically battle it out. It’s not just “oh I tried” and then your army just flops over dead without an explanation. Each individual army you own has personal hp, buffs, mana to cast spells (if applicable) etc. and you get to take out what you can before receiving death or glory, plus “You” the overlord wizard can also cast spells on opposing armies in these tactical battle encounters making the each battle more and more interesting, fun and uncertain.
Finally, I have to mention my favorite part of the game. The Heroes! Everyone who truly gets into MoM will find their own thing, glitch, or whatever you want to call it that they love the most, but mine is the heroes. You can get up to 6 heroes, they each have individual talents and specific abilities/buffs, they can use up to three items each. Those items are always magically imbued items, with several possibilities which can increase each hero’s abilities and damage tremendously. Then the heroes themselves can be imbued with several spells from you the overlord wizard. On top of all those awesome goodies the heroes can level two levels higher than normal units. Making an army of 6 maxed out heroes fully clad with good items and imbued with awesome spells from you the overlord wizard virtually unstoppable.
My point all together regarding this game is that to date this is the best game of the genre titled as follows: Turn-Based Fantasy/Strategy
They could have made a sequel and they still should not only because the game is AWESOME, but because it seriously will make a killing ton of money! HOWEVER, the ONLY things that need to be changed are the following:
#1 Better and more strategic AI
#2 Multiplayer option
#3 Desperately needed upgraded graphics for everything throughout the game, runes, cities, improvements, nodes, zoom over world options, etc... This game is too great to fade in one game and the newer generations just won’t accept the old school graphics.
#4 Army/Unit option to explore automatically
#5 Not mandatory, but it would be cool to add some more wizard pic options so if you love the name but just want a different looking wizard kind of deal.
Everything else except for bugs and crash issues needs to remain the exact same and I mean everything! No, if a group of armies kind of close to the current battle taking place decides to join in the battle they can crap, like in Age of Wonders wanna be MoM2 (NOT!) crap. People who say Age of Wonders was, or is MoM2 they are dead wrong! The game and it’s successors were and are a bad wanna be rip off of MoM and it sucks crack compared to MoM!
Whew! Well, that’s a hefty explanation for this game and truly I didn’t cover the half of it there is still much, much more involved in this game. It’s truly the best game of this genre to date, updated patches are just making it better. Do yourself a huge favor if you like or even remotely enjoy this genre of game and buy it, $6.00 is nothing for hours upon hours of awesomeness you won’t regret.
This is my favorite game of all time. Still have my original manuals. Why a bad review? Well this version of MoM comes with about 100megabytes of advertisements for slitherine's website.
And when I bought the caster of magic dlc directly from slitherine, it won't work at all, the file is basically a zip folder with two passwords, and you need both the caster of magic serial from slitherine and the master of magic serial from slitherine to unlock that zip folder.
Meaning I now own a copy of caster of magic that I cannot unlock/open/use that I paid 3$ for. This just makes me appreciate GoG even more. GoG has a refund policy, slitherine has a policy to never give any refunds for any reason ever. AND that they won't provide troubleshooting support for any products that aren't theirs.
Thing is my copy of master of magic on GoG is 100% slitherine's product, how can you tell? Because GoG added 100megabytes of slitherine advertisements to the installer! That very much means to me that both the GoG copy of master of magic and the slitherine copy of caster of magic are slitherine properties they're responsible for troubleshooting.
