Master of Magic

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.