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Master of Magic

aka: Civizard: Majutsu no Keifu, MOM, Master of Magic Classic, Maître de la Magie
Moby ID: 200
DOS Specs
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Description official descriptions

The plot of Master of Magic is to become the dominant wizard on two 'planes' of existence, the normal Earth-like one and the fantasy based plane "Myrror". You can do this by destroying your competing wizards (up to 4 computer players) or by casting the Spell of Mastery.

Game play is carried out in a 2D top down perspective. You move your armies around the board, fighting monsters to get treasure, and more importantly 'nodes'. Once you control a node you can summon a spirit to meld with the node and gain mana from it. You also must build up your cities so you can support and train your army. City management is very much like Civilization. You also must allocate your mana for use, or research. You must research to learn new spells. You can do battle with the enemy in a quasi-isometric perspective or you can have the game simulate the battles.

The game ends when your home tower is destroyed; you banish all the other wizards (by destroying their home tower) or someone casts the Spell of Mastery.

Spellings

  • シヴィザード 魔術の系譜 - Japanese PlayStation release (Japanese spelling)

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Credits (DOS version)

48 People (46 developers, 2 thanks) · View all

Design
Programming
Art
Composer
Music Producer
Sound Effects
  • Midian
Marketing - Product Manager
Marketing - Packaging
Producer
Art Director
Quality Assurance Lead
Manuals - Writer
Manuals - Editor
Manuals - Design & Layout
[ full credits ]

Reviews

Critics

Average score: 79% (based on 19 ratings)

Players

Average score: 3.9 out of 5 (based on 121 ratings with 11 reviews)

Boundless yet sorely limited. Bursting with awesome variety and damnable tedium. An imaginative triumph that's an unbalanced mess.

The Good
Master of Magic is a great game. Its environmental depth, the thrilling malleability of its heroes and creatures, its gloriously overpowered spells--what a mountain of effort they represent! A truly remarkable achievement on the part of SimTex.

MoM is often described as a synthesis of Civilization and Master of Orion, and that's pretty close to the mark. A more or less standard 4x empire builder is the core of the experience--the player starts from a single hamlet and seeks to conquer the randomly generated gameworld, settling/capturing new cities, mastering obstacles, controlling resources and researching technology (spells!) to achieve supremacy

The biggest change from your standard Civ clone is the world map. Dotted all around the world are not just opposing civilizations but monster lairs, magic nodes, neutral cities, temples, towers, and wandering critters spawned from all of the above. Scattered on two whole planes of existence (Arcanus and the magical Myrror), this local menagerie encourages exploration and defense in ways that faceless Civilization-style barbarians never have, and moreover they provide the player with a near endless list of varied obstacles to surmount. Long after dealing with the various enemy wizards scattered about becomes a bore, the "neutral" foes of the map will still pose a challenge (fear the great worms!) to even your finest stack of units.

And your units are wonderfully fleshed out. All gain experience and levels, and the boosts to their abilities are critical to beating the game. A complex system of mechanics controls all characters in the world. Grounded by routine combat statistics and elevated by supremely imaginative special abilities, this allows almost limitless possibilities, richly rewarding creative spellcasting from the player. Want to create a flying fleet of invisible fire-shooting warships? Want to eschew ships entirely and have your armies just walk on water? Do it! The degree to which player creativity is encouraged by these unique combinations of units and enchantments is one of the best features of the game.

Heroes in particular have some very satisfying and useful special skills. Worried your army is going to get wiped out? Just bring along a hero with High Prayer and your attacks and defense will be 30% more effective. Have lots of green, inexperienced units scattered about? Stack them with an Armsmaster and they'll be elite in no time. Falling asleep while your armies trudge one slow square at a time towards their goal? Add in a Pathfinder hero and a Forester/Mountaineer and they'll have their arrival time cut more than in half.

The magic system is also beautifully detailed and in-depth. Based on each magic book your wizard has of a certain discipline, you receive a certain number of common, uncommon and rare spells. The spell pool for each discipline of magic is varied and vast enough to allow for meaningfully different experiences based on which spells you happen to get, and what sort of race you've chosen, and what sort of opponents and obstacles exist in your worlds. Magic comes from a wizard's "power base," which is gained from city buildings like temples and magical nodes scattered about the map. The latter can be defended by some awe-inspiring monsters, especially on Myrror.

The overwhelming power of some of the rarer spells is immensely satisfying when casted by the player, and supremely terrifying when casted -at- the player. This is all to the good--if you're making a game about all-powerful wizards waging war, you can't be skittish about putting some devastatingly potent spells in the game. Bland, weak, or limited magic has ruined many a similar title.

The robust, flexible units and powerful magic make combat a real joy. Combat takes place not by one tile squashing another (or a whole stack!) a la Civ, but in an isometric perspective, where each of up to nine units on either side move and attack individually. Hit points, statistics and tactics all therefore become serious considerations. Battles in fact require some serious tactical acumen early on, as the choice of which spell to cast or whether or not to move or attack, etc. can actually make or break the battle. For this reason it's often worth saving before an encounter, because the outcome is never certain if the forces are relatively balanced. While doing so in other similar games often feels like a repetitive chore of gaming the random number generator, in MoM there really is a world of creative possibilities for the player to try out in each encounter, and smart choices actually -will- affect the outcome.

Adding to this variety (somewhat) is a wide variety of playable races. More importantly, each of the magical disciplines has a distinct character and playstyle. Since one's starting wizard can be made from a preset character or wholly customized, the many possible combinations of magic books allow for even more diversity. There are also over a dozen available wizard attributes (with varying degrees of usefulness) that provide bonuses to the player's avatar, such as Alchemy which allows for cheaper creation of magic artifacts, or Warlord, which allows for Ultra-Elite military units. One's choice of wizard therefore greatly increases the longevity of the game, as there will always be a new combination of magic, abilities and race to try.

This makes MoM a -huge- game. Far bigger than its older brother Master of Orion. I've played this game for years off and on and still haven't fully explored all the possibilities.

All this works together (given the latest patch!) for an extremely long-lived experience. It will take you an unbelievably long time to explore all of MoM's ins and outs. It also remains extremely addictive to this day, despite its flaws.

The Bad
And there are many.

What could go so terribly wrong with such a vast, deep and malleable game containing so many possibilities? What could undercut such a marvelous focus on creativity and tactical/strategic knowhow? Well, those very qualities result in a few familiar failures, and the usual suspects are to be found here--balance, pacing, AI, and diplomacy.

As for balance, the races, the wizards and the magic disciplines are horribly imbalanced. Many of the wizard attributes are fairly worthless (Charismatic!), and combining a few of the right ones in a custom wizard will render the player almost unstoppable. Moreover, Life and Nature magic in particular are far too powerful against all other magics. A simple combination of Web/Cracks Call can bring down almost any creature in the game. Playing as certain races (Dark Elves) represents almost a guarantee of victory, while others (Klackons, Gnolls) create challenge in the most tedious ways (lots of unrest in captured cities, lack of available units/buildings). A lack of balance can be seen as creating challenge, wherein race/wizard selection becomes a sort of difficulty selector, but the challenge shouldn't be arbitrary and ultimately boring. It often is in MoM.

Speaking of tedium, the Civ-style "the player must click to build each and every building" falls down into dullness -hard- in MoM. City micromanagment eats up a -huge- portion of each game turn. As in too many Civ-style games, there is no customizable general build list for all cities--the player has the ugly choice of guiding every single new city through the same tedious production path building by building, or using the inept AI "Vizier," which is worse than useless. Waltzing down the same path of buildings every turn for every city in a large, growing empire absolutely kills the pacing of the game.

The AI is hopelessly inept. The AI's units march about aimlessly, throwing away their lives to no clear purpose. Worse, an enemy army can flee several times a turn from combat, so vagrant squatter armies will gather about your territory, and there's no wiping them out until they attack (since the defender always moves first). Two consecutive attacks on such an enemy army might go like this: "fireball->flee, fireball->flee" with the player never getting a chance to do serious damage or even move her units. Not a thrilling experience.

The AI can, however, do a relatively solid job of garrisoning their cities and building their military/power base. They can also ably cast some terrifying spells. Yet the opposing wizards -still- never represent an honest challenge. Even the strongest AI foe on the hardest difficulty cannot stand against a mediocre player with one great stack of units and decent magic--all one needs to do is simply march to the enemy fortress, destroy the defenders and seal up the wizard. Why? Because any mediocre player can use those wonderful unit mechanics -far- better than the AI, which is a bad thing. Just gather a mob of slingers with enchantments and a few heroes, and you've won. Winning this game on any difficulty is thus never a question of "can I?" but rather a question of "should I?"

And why should you? Because diplomacy is broken. Despite a similar system to Master of Orion, your options for mollifying or threatening your enemies are sadly degraded from MoO's very workable standard. The penalty for growing too strong happens almost immediately in MoM. Lacking trade to win friends and being faced with the insta-Alliances AI opponents frequently make with one another, the player is almost always embroiled in constant war against multiple opponents. Gone are the fun probing raids and cold wars of Master of Orion, and likewise the Machiavellian spying, framing, backstabbing, etc. We're back to Civ-style "your tile has touched mine, it's war!" So almost everyone hates you, their enchantments or wandering hobo armies annoy you very quickly, and the only long-term solution is sealing up the offending wizard, which is trivially easy to do. That's a bad situation for pacing. There's no buildup to a storm, just a long uneventful drizzle dotted by frustrated wizard-sealing. The most fun you will have once you learn the game is in building up your heroes.

The other pacing problem is endemic to Civ-style games that rely on exploring the world and lots of combat. Moving. Is. Very. Slow. This wouldn't be a huge issue if every turn didn't start off with five minutes of "built granary, build smithy; built smithy, build marketplace..." times twelve. As it is, it ruins the pace. Long turns of emptiness with a few flashes of brilliance is not a good recipe for a 4x game.

The Bottom Line
But those flashes are truly brilliant! I only describe the flaws so exhaustively because the core greatness of this game makes them stand out all the uglier. MoM is truly a monumental achievement and a must-play game. If you are expecting the sort of elegant, well-paced and situational experience of MoO, however, you will be disappointed. Running around Heroes of Might and Magic style and slaying ultra-mighty monsters through creativity and skill is an absolute joy. Unfortunately, most of the city-building and opponent wizard interaction will feel like a bothersome distraction from this.

DOS · by J. P. Gray (115) · 2008

Empire building game full of game elements to keep you busy

The Good
Like any other SimTex game, Master of Magic just has so much to it. There's exploration, empire building and city management - which by themselves establish it as an above average CIV clone. This non-magic element of the game is so good, I played my first few games of MOM almost completely ignoring the magic aspect. (Don't ask me why I hadn't discovered the spellcasting - It's great, I guess I was too busy building catapults or something) There truly are many ways to play MOM - you can build a completely non-magickal army out of catapults like my dumb ass, or create a completely summoned army consisting of only goofy looking stone giants with big heads and fuzzy bears. A closer examination of the units, though, reveals that each unit has a lot of stats and special abilities - and this gives the game its depth. Add in heroes - superunits that carry artifacts worth 10 times as much as they are, and building armies and attack groups becomes more fun than any other strategy game of this type.

The Magic also adds a lot of depth. A player chooses or creates a wizard when beginning a game of MOM - with proficiencies in one or many of 5 books of magic, and special abilities. Each book of magic requires a different style of playing. Life magic will assist your armies and towns, but won't help you much when you want to be really mean to an opposing wizard, whereas Chaos magic will allow you a lot of spells with direct attack damage to enemy armies.

What to do with all this destructive power? Even at peace your armies will find some heads to bust open. Much of the game consists of the player fighting neutral creatures in nodes - sources of power, and keeps, temples, etc. for gold, artifacts and other goodies (even extra spell books that you hadn't picked at the beginning!)

The best thing about MOM is that even with this high level of detail - you don't have to keep track of everything if you don't wish. You can ignore whether or not your Dragons have firebreath or not and just send them to eat some people. But once you know the special abilities of each unit, it helps to decide what to use in special situations.

The Bad
The only significant problem with MOM is it isn't as much fun as it should be fighting the enemy wizards. The diplomacy seems much weaker than in Master of Orion, as are the enemy wizards personalities. Hatred of the enemy - as could develop in games like Master of Orion and Civilization, never develops. Also, they don't seem to put together attacking forces with any kind of order, hordes of 1 type of unit will often roam about your territory until you get annoyed enough to do something about it. Though they do use magic well (at least in v1.31) and will cast something nasty like Counter Magic at the beginning of a major battle.

The graphics weren't great, even for the time, and I constantly get hounded for playing something so "crappy looking." If that happens to you, just cast a bunch of overland spells. Those have pretty pictures. The sound stinks and the music is awful when you're trying to establish yourself in your mind as an evil wizard of death and chaos. (Turning off the sound will also free up a lot of conventional memory) The interface for moving your armies around is a bit quirky, but the patches have just about fixed the pathfixing and moving units around in groups of nine is a hellofalot less time consuming than moving 1 at a time.

And with any strategy game with so many units and variables it's tough to keep everything balanced, but Master of Magic does a good job nonetheless, adding in unit weaknesses to balance out the strengths, and a way to defeat almost any strategy.

The Bottom Line
So accessible yet so complex, MOM is likely to be 'playable' for a long long time.

DOS · by Nathan Kovner (49) · 2000

Fantasy Civ perfected

The Good
The game has incredible depth of play. The sheer number of inventive and interesting spells that can be researched and used transforms what would otherwise have been a mediocre 4x game into something classic. At the start of each game the player is able to choose what kind of spells they would like to concentrate on (life, death, chaos, nature, sorcery), what special powers they will use (alchemy, warlord etc) and what mythical race they will command (Elves, Dwarves, Humans, and about a dozen others), each with their own units and buildings, abilities and handicaps. For instance the Dark-Elf race can build the special Warlock unit, but have a higher rate of rebellion. The Klackon race is highly productive but cannot build Universities to advance your spell research. The races are much more specialised than they are in the Civ titles, and make a great difference to how you play the game.

This combined with customisable maps and random opponents means that each game is very different from the last. Add to that the traditional Civ-like exploration, war/diplomacy and city building and you have a very addictive game with loads of replayability.

The Bad
The graphics were adequate at the time it came out, and today it's looking badly dated. Really in need of a revamp. The diplomacy is pretty much redundant as every opponent wants to wipe you out. They will stay hostile and defiant even when they have one tiny unit left and are facing your army of dragons. And it can be buggy unless you treat it just right, though that could be a result of running it in a Dos-box environment.

The Bottom Line
Transforming a game like Civilization into a fantasy realm is not as easy as it seems. But MoM managed to get the balance right and retain all the addictiveness. If you like classic 4x games like Civ and Master of Orion etc, then you have to give this a try. Tons of interesting spells, powerful mythical units to fight with, and interesting realms to explore and conquer. Despite being rather old and having poor graphics, it has so much gameplay that it will still keep you hooked in this day and age.

DOS · by StJude1 (4) · 2008

[ View all 11 player reviews ]

Discussion

Subject By Date
Dragonsword has moved to Realms Beyond Hans Noe Oct 23, 2010
MoM unofficial patch v1.40 kyr ub (1) May 16, 2010
Active fan site at dragonsword.com Hans Noe Apr 24, 2010

Trivia

References

One of the merchants may try to sell an item called "idspispopd". This is a cheat for Doom.

Release history

The original game had an onslaught of bugs that almost prevented playing. Microprose released a patch and later a completely new version of the game (which had a different manual and disc). The original disc and manual can be considered a collector's item.

Unofficial patch

There is an fan-made, unofficial patch (v1.40) that focuses on the correction of many bugs still left in the 1.31 version and tries to improve the game's AI performance. The download link can be found in the related links section.

Awards

  • Computer Gaming World
    • November 1996 (15th anniversary issue) – #141 in the "150 Best Games of All Time" list
    • November 1996 (15th anniversary issue) – #13 Most Rewarding Ending of All Time
    • May 1997 (Issue #154) - Introduced into the Hall of Fame

Information also contributed by Andrew Grasmeder El-ad Amir, and kyr ub.

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Related Sites +

  • Help Site for Master Of Magic
    This is an interactive guide on Master of Magic. For those who do not have the manual paper because they download abandonware version of this video game.
  • Master of Magic: Hero Page
    A site dedicated to everything about heroes in Master of Magic, including cheats, oddities and descriptions.
  • Sector 5, Ratai's Realm
    Master of Magic Online Guide. Has other things like chat rooms and custom wizard submission.

Identifiers +

  • MobyGames ID: 200
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Contribute

Are you familiar with this game? Help document and preserve this entry in video game history! If your contribution is approved, you will earn points and be credited as a contributor.

Contributors to this Entry

Game added by Tomer Gabel.

Windows added by Picard. PC-98 added by Trypticon. Linux added by Lugamo. PlayStation added by Yanis Lukes.

Additional contributors: Andrew Grasmeder, Kalirion, Laey'zur Tiberius Hawke, Thibault Droulers, 6⅞ of Nine, Cantillon, Patrick Bregger, Plok, Yanis Lukes.

Game added August 10, 1999. Last modified August 2, 2024.