Master of Magic
Through the wonders of YouTube, I have been reconnecting with some awesome old computer games. The first is Master of Magic. Man, this game could be the greatest game ever made. Imagine if they combined Civilization with Magic: the Gathering (unliscensed, but distictively Magic). You play a wizard, choosing a premade character or creating your own. You have 1-4 opponents. (There can be no peaceful resolution in this game.) The world size is customizable, too, as is the difficulty, of course.
There are two sides to the world (the other being called Myrror), with travel between the worlds possible via towers. One of the character abilities is to start on Myrror, which is an advantage for a few reasons: one, it isolates you from the other wizards, and two, the Myrrin races are better than the normal ones, and three, you have access to extra enviromental factors like mithril.
But let me back up. While creating (or choosing) your wizard, you have a bank of points to spend. At first you have a limited number of skills accessible and the ability to put points into various colors of magic. The colors of magic are nearly identical to Magic: the Gathering -- white, black, blue, red, and green. Putting points into each color influences your starting spells and other factors. You cannot have points in white and black magic at the same time. You can put all your points into one color of magic, giving you immediate access to all common spells, four uncommon spells, and one rare spell. (Yes, they have rarity like Magic, too.) Different skills become available after you add enough points to a certain color. You can even have a magic-less wizard who relies entirely on his skills.
You also select your starting race. The races are mostly fantasy staples, like elves, humans, halflings, orcs, etc. Each has its own advantages and disadvantages, plus at least one unique unit.
Once you start the game, you get one mid-level city to start with. You can toggle how many people are farmers, producing food, and how many are builders, producing whatever you have the city building, either a building or a unit. If you don't allocate enough of your citizens to farming, you lose population at the end of the turn due to starvation. There are also neutral cities, which send raiders periodically and can be conquered. I'm not sure if all races will appear in every game, but they may. At any rate, you will end up controlling many races by the game's end. Cities grow slowly, and you can set a city to "population growth" to accelerate this. You also make money, relative to the population and taxes, though units and many buildings require money (and food) upkeeps. Setting the taxes too high creates rebels who don't produce anything and basically are a waste of space. At first your turns will be mostly hitting "end turn" and letting your "days until complete" tick down, but eventually your turns will become very long and complex as you control tens of cities.
You also start out generating a small amount of mana. You will find that you have a three-way meter in one of your menus that controls where you put your magic focus: mana production, spell research, and spell skill. Mana production is simply how much mana you produce in a turn. Mana is expended in casting spells, plus summoned units and enchantments have a mana upkeep. Spell research is how fast you get new spells. You start out researching a spell from a randomly generated list of ten. The complexity of the spell determines how long it takes to research. After you research a spell, a new randomly determined spell appears on your list and you make another selection. You can also find spells or trade with the other wizards. Spell skill determines how much mana you can expend in a combat. It goes up by an amount determined by the aforementioned meter whenever you cast a spell. Certain buildings add mana and spell research every turn, which adds up to quite a bit when you have many cities.
One of the first things you'll want to do is summon a spirit, which is a weak flying unit that can scout around for you. There are neutral towns, as I've already said, plus various random spots like ruins. These yield a spell, gold, mana, or even a skill. Some are unguarded, but most have monsters in them and will require an army to assault. Collecting the unguarded ones via spirit is key to a good game. There are also towers connecting the two worlds, as stated above, and mana nodes. Mana nodes disrupt your spells sometimes, but if you defeat the monsters guarding them, you can link a spirit to them and get a bonus amount of mana very turn. The nodes conform to the colors of magic.
There is also the option to build settlements. You get your surveyor and look at the spots on the map first. Mineral deposits and food sources make your cities prosper, and each spot has a maximum city size associated with it. Further, engineers make roads, allowing for much faster travel between spots.
Destroying tough monsters or conquering cities can get you reputation. Reputation causes random mercenaries (basically randomly determined units, normal or monstrous), heroes, or merchants selling artifacts. Heroes are strong units with a number of special skills (bonuses mainly) who can be leveled up to extreme levels and equipped with artifacts. A hero decked out with many enchantments and artifacts becomes extremely deadly. For this reason, killing enemy heroes early is a good strategy. You can have up to six heroes, but if you have all slots filled, new heroes won't come looking for you and you won't know what you're missing. Killing settlers or engineers and razing towns reduces your reputation.
Now on to the enemy wizards. While you're dealing with all this, the enemy wizards are somewhere out there doing their own thing. At first you are neutral with all of them, but they each have their own personality, some being more volatile than the others. They are randomly selected from the pre-made wizards you can select. (You can make sure one doesn't appear by selecting his portrait for your own wizard!) You can make pacts with them and trade spells with them. They are surprisingly forgiving in some cases, seeming to understand that the pacts are only a temporary reprieve from the inevitable war between you. You must be careful when trading spells, since they will be used against you later.
Magic is fun. You can summon monsters, many being suspiciously similar to Magic: the Gathering cards, or make enchantments, some on creatures, some on towns, and some universal -- many of these also resemble Magic cards. You can make your own towns prosperous or enemy towns suffer. Some spells do what they do and then are done, but the aforementioned types require an upkeep and can murder your mana resources if you cast too many to maintain. The final spell is the Spell of Mastery, which wins you the game if you cast it.
You have a tower, which serves as your home, and a summoning circle, which is where summoned monsters and new heroes and mercenaries appear. There is a spell for moving the summoning circle. If the town with your tower in it is conquered you are banished and immediately begin to cast the spell of return. While this spell is casting, you continue with the game, but you can't cast or research spells and your mana doesn't increase. This can lead to your enchantments breaking and your summoned units vanishing if you don't have enough mana to maintain them. While devestating, it's hardly the end of your game. To truly conquer a wizard, all of his cities must be conquered or razed.
Obviously Master of Magic is a staggeringly complex game. It's also tremendous fun and very intellectually stimulating. It is truly a marvel of what I consider the greatest age of gaming. There are many viable options: you could stick all your starting points into black magic and get the rare Wraiths spell. Wraiths can fly and are non-corpeal, plus they drain life. This means they ignore environment, including water, can only be hit by magic, and gain back life when they hit a unit. This makes them extremely deadly early on. You could pick halflings and spam the humble-seeming halfling slingers. But halflings are all "lucky" which gives them +10% on many things, making large numbers of their slingers devestating for their cost.
The problem is that early releases were riddled with glitches and crashes; later patches fixed most of these problems, however, plus the balance was improved. Due to the lengthy turns, there is no multi-player mode. The game can take many hours to complete, and randomly-generated matches are the only game mode. I bring this game up because my friend mentioned it was on Gog(?). I have to recommend it highly!
There are two sides to the world (the other being called Myrror), with travel between the worlds possible via towers. One of the character abilities is to start on Myrror, which is an advantage for a few reasons: one, it isolates you from the other wizards, and two, the Myrrin races are better than the normal ones, and three, you have access to extra enviromental factors like mithril.
But let me back up. While creating (or choosing) your wizard, you have a bank of points to spend. At first you have a limited number of skills accessible and the ability to put points into various colors of magic. The colors of magic are nearly identical to Magic: the Gathering -- white, black, blue, red, and green. Putting points into each color influences your starting spells and other factors. You cannot have points in white and black magic at the same time. You can put all your points into one color of magic, giving you immediate access to all common spells, four uncommon spells, and one rare spell. (Yes, they have rarity like Magic, too.) Different skills become available after you add enough points to a certain color. You can even have a magic-less wizard who relies entirely on his skills.
You also select your starting race. The races are mostly fantasy staples, like elves, humans, halflings, orcs, etc. Each has its own advantages and disadvantages, plus at least one unique unit.
Once you start the game, you get one mid-level city to start with. You can toggle how many people are farmers, producing food, and how many are builders, producing whatever you have the city building, either a building or a unit. If you don't allocate enough of your citizens to farming, you lose population at the end of the turn due to starvation. There are also neutral cities, which send raiders periodically and can be conquered. I'm not sure if all races will appear in every game, but they may. At any rate, you will end up controlling many races by the game's end. Cities grow slowly, and you can set a city to "population growth" to accelerate this. You also make money, relative to the population and taxes, though units and many buildings require money (and food) upkeeps. Setting the taxes too high creates rebels who don't produce anything and basically are a waste of space. At first your turns will be mostly hitting "end turn" and letting your "days until complete" tick down, but eventually your turns will become very long and complex as you control tens of cities.
You also start out generating a small amount of mana. You will find that you have a three-way meter in one of your menus that controls where you put your magic focus: mana production, spell research, and spell skill. Mana production is simply how much mana you produce in a turn. Mana is expended in casting spells, plus summoned units and enchantments have a mana upkeep. Spell research is how fast you get new spells. You start out researching a spell from a randomly generated list of ten. The complexity of the spell determines how long it takes to research. After you research a spell, a new randomly determined spell appears on your list and you make another selection. You can also find spells or trade with the other wizards. Spell skill determines how much mana you can expend in a combat. It goes up by an amount determined by the aforementioned meter whenever you cast a spell. Certain buildings add mana and spell research every turn, which adds up to quite a bit when you have many cities.
One of the first things you'll want to do is summon a spirit, which is a weak flying unit that can scout around for you. There are neutral towns, as I've already said, plus various random spots like ruins. These yield a spell, gold, mana, or even a skill. Some are unguarded, but most have monsters in them and will require an army to assault. Collecting the unguarded ones via spirit is key to a good game. There are also towers connecting the two worlds, as stated above, and mana nodes. Mana nodes disrupt your spells sometimes, but if you defeat the monsters guarding them, you can link a spirit to them and get a bonus amount of mana very turn. The nodes conform to the colors of magic.
There is also the option to build settlements. You get your surveyor and look at the spots on the map first. Mineral deposits and food sources make your cities prosper, and each spot has a maximum city size associated with it. Further, engineers make roads, allowing for much faster travel between spots.
Destroying tough monsters or conquering cities can get you reputation. Reputation causes random mercenaries (basically randomly determined units, normal or monstrous), heroes, or merchants selling artifacts. Heroes are strong units with a number of special skills (bonuses mainly) who can be leveled up to extreme levels and equipped with artifacts. A hero decked out with many enchantments and artifacts becomes extremely deadly. For this reason, killing enemy heroes early is a good strategy. You can have up to six heroes, but if you have all slots filled, new heroes won't come looking for you and you won't know what you're missing. Killing settlers or engineers and razing towns reduces your reputation.
Now on to the enemy wizards. While you're dealing with all this, the enemy wizards are somewhere out there doing their own thing. At first you are neutral with all of them, but they each have their own personality, some being more volatile than the others. They are randomly selected from the pre-made wizards you can select. (You can make sure one doesn't appear by selecting his portrait for your own wizard!) You can make pacts with them and trade spells with them. They are surprisingly forgiving in some cases, seeming to understand that the pacts are only a temporary reprieve from the inevitable war between you. You must be careful when trading spells, since they will be used against you later.
Magic is fun. You can summon monsters, many being suspiciously similar to Magic: the Gathering cards, or make enchantments, some on creatures, some on towns, and some universal -- many of these also resemble Magic cards. You can make your own towns prosperous or enemy towns suffer. Some spells do what they do and then are done, but the aforementioned types require an upkeep and can murder your mana resources if you cast too many to maintain. The final spell is the Spell of Mastery, which wins you the game if you cast it.
You have a tower, which serves as your home, and a summoning circle, which is where summoned monsters and new heroes and mercenaries appear. There is a spell for moving the summoning circle. If the town with your tower in it is conquered you are banished and immediately begin to cast the spell of return. While this spell is casting, you continue with the game, but you can't cast or research spells and your mana doesn't increase. This can lead to your enchantments breaking and your summoned units vanishing if you don't have enough mana to maintain them. While devestating, it's hardly the end of your game. To truly conquer a wizard, all of his cities must be conquered or razed.
Obviously Master of Magic is a staggeringly complex game. It's also tremendous fun and very intellectually stimulating. It is truly a marvel of what I consider the greatest age of gaming. There are many viable options: you could stick all your starting points into black magic and get the rare Wraiths spell. Wraiths can fly and are non-corpeal, plus they drain life. This means they ignore environment, including water, can only be hit by magic, and gain back life when they hit a unit. This makes them extremely deadly early on. You could pick halflings and spam the humble-seeming halfling slingers. But halflings are all "lucky" which gives them +10% on many things, making large numbers of their slingers devestating for their cost.
The problem is that early releases were riddled with glitches and crashes; later patches fixed most of these problems, however, plus the balance was improved. Due to the lengthy turns, there is no multi-player mode. The game can take many hours to complete, and randomly-generated matches are the only game mode. I bring this game up because my friend mentioned it was on Gog(?). I have to recommend it highly!