Master of Magic

The Good
No game has made me feel like being a cybernetic extension of the mouse as MoM. Play the role of a sorcerer in a fantasy world struggling to conquer your fellow mages, an do so by raising armies of fantastic creatures, expanding your territory, funding and developing cities, recruit heroes to lead your army… and making use of magick, of course. More than 200 spells are your powerful magical weapons: extremely varied, well designed and well fitted in the game. Enhance magically your armies, conjure creatures, throw balls of fire, cover the entire map with titanic enchantments… add to that the possibility of designing your mage through 5 schools of magic and lots of magical abilities, and the sum is a true epic game.

The system will be very familiar to Civ players; in fact, MoM can be called Fantasy Civ. However, there are substantial differences. There is no tech to research: instead there are spells. You can win by conquer, but instead of building a spaceship you can research and cast the Spell of Mastery. And wonders have not a place, although there are heroes (and magical items for them to use). But there’s something, and I don’t understand why Civ2 and SMAC didn’t take the idea. Guess what? Yes! Tactical combat. The combat rules are very well designed: each unit has attack and defense values, like in Civ, but in battle they roll for attack and defense simultaneously (I mean, defenders do not wait hoping their armor will protect them from the attacker’s blows, like in SMAC). Creatures (and heroes) can have also a lot of special abilities for both overland and tactical game. Creature size is also taken in consideration, as in a square cannot be as many skeletons as storm giants, for example. And ranged fire is now true ranged fire. Oh, and spice all this with spells. The variety of strategies to use, combining your armies and heroes with magic, is limitless.

Each game (a random map!) promises an epic fantasy campaign. Not only exploring the world, but discovering ancient ruins, dark dungeons and magic-filled nodes… and fighting their jealous guardians, not so eager to give you their treasures. Oh, you think a world is not enough? Well, how about two? MoM has two planes of existence to explore and conquer. I could go on explaining, but there’s only one way to get an idea: playing it.

The Bad
Bugs.

I can’t remember so painful blow in the stomach like the game crashing when fighting Wraiths or Shadow Demons, or trying to cast a Disjunction. I don’t understand how those bugs weren’t detected. Fortunately, patch 1.31 fixed them.

Apart from bugs, unfortunately MoM was purely a game about war. Even with the AI improvement provided by the patch, was nearly impossible to maintain peaceful relations. Merely meeting another wizard was enough to be at war, and a long-standing one. That was sometimes very frustrating. Also, diplomatic model was even more simplistic than in Civ. Very, very few options, and lack of spies or diplomats.

City management was also simplified, as you cannot place citizens at will to exploit resources, and there weren’t revolts except as random events. Terraforming was also gone, except for roads. And so was government and corruption. Well, this is a Civ fan’s point of view, and comparisons are inevitable in “cousin” games like Civ and MoM. However, MoM has features Civ doesn’t (tactical combat, character customisation and many others…).

Sincerely, I fear an hypothetical MoM2 (which was planned before Microprose went out!). I think a really good, well designed sequel of this game can truly be the ultimate strategy game, but… Hope if anyone ever makes MoM2, does a really good work, in the spirit of the original, full of good and new ideas, and keeping ALL that made MoM the masterpiece it is. MoM doesn’t deserve less.

And the music… well, no comments.

The Bottom Line
Master of Magic is THE classic of all fantasy strategy games, and one of the classics of strategy in general. No other fantasy strategy game has reached its level, even many years later. And that’s one of the points that define a classic. If you’re a strategy fan, don’t wait anymore and get it.

But don’t forget to get the 1.31 patch too!

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.

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.