best strat game ever (in my heart, anyway). the gameplay is really complex and the whole world is in perfect balance. it's a crime they never got to update it for the next generation of computers.
Master of Magic was my first purchase from GOG, bought on a whim because I had heard it was so good. I was not disappointed. MoM brings out all the things I liked about Civilization, while removing one particular element I disliked: the random combat. MoM features full tactical combat, and I feel it works well. Spells can be cast by either the player or his heroes, various features of units affect attacks, and overall the combat adds an element of player skill other than judging if your five hellhounds can take down the enemy's archers. The map movement works well, with various spells that can affect the layout of the map. There are a variety of races to control, each of which have certain useful features and building restrictions. This game has gotten me into the turn-based strategy genre for real this time, and I hope to continue enjoying the game as many others have.
The top reviews for this game way over-hype it. Game-design-wise, it's fairly good, but hardly impressive, and has several glaring problems, mostly in the area of its interface: lots of information that is really important to keep an eye on is needlessly extremely tedious to track down. For example, when an enemy attacks one of your towns at the start of the game, when you have 3, you can usually guess which one, but when you've got 30 in the endgame, and they all look pretty similar, if you fight of an attack, but lose troops in the process, the only way to tell which town to send reinforcements to is to tediously check every town one by one til you find the one with depleted troops. Not once in the entire "getting attacked" process does it display the name of the town where the attack is happening!
Even worse are the technical issues. The number and frequency of bugs aren't too bad, but there seems to be literally zero error-catching, so every bug is an unrecoverable application freeze. While crashing the game is bad enough, the Linux port also uses Dos Box to do the port, and the people who applied the port were stupid enough to make it intercept ALL keypresses, even ones that should never be intercepted without exceptionally good reason, and that the game doesn't use at all. For example, the game makes no use whatsoever of alt, control, or tab, and uses delete only in one place where it's redundant with backspace. Capturing these keypresses anyway turns every application freeze into an unrecoverable system freeze, forcing hard reboots. This goes beyond "bad game" territory, and skirts dangerously close to "malware" territory!
I've played most of the strategy games on PC (and some on Android). Fantasy, Sci-fi, Historical, you name it. With a few exceptions, most of them have been uninstalled or ignored after less than an hour of gameplay. In many cases the graphics were the reason, in some the gampeplay.
So why does a game with such dated graphics and classic gameplay (note: I've played many other TBSs before this, so it's kind of retro-gaming) keep me so entertained?
Well, I don't care, this game is absolutely awesome. I have a good mind on making this with improved 2015 graphics. Or at least Disciples II graphics. That would be fantastic.