Master of Magic

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.