Strategy games have been sprinkled across the market, and while not all of them are engrossing or intricate, some of them truly thought provoking. Mechanics in a strategy game are everything to it and the best thing that you can do is paint them up to be pretty. Of course, the word "pretty" is relative, especially when you are talking about a game that came out in the mid 90's. Back in the pre-CD-ROM era, these games had a great number of restrictions and it is truly a comment on their quality that the developers made such a great game regardless.
Master of Magic took a strategy game like Sid Meier's Civilization and added a very prominent magic mechanic to it. The details can be considered complicated, but it's not to the point where you can't understand it. Once you get all of these mechanics down, there is still one to three opponents you need to face along with them. It's not that there are too many of these problems you need to deal with, the real problem is keeping up with them while also dealing with wizards that have just as much, if not more, power than you do. They can cast one single spell and throw a sword into your mechanics at any given point.
You start out simply. You have the choice of any wizard, either keeping with their chosen spell categories or customizing them yourself. Then you have the choice of race in your subordinates, anything from Orcs, Elves, humans or even beastmen. Each of these races have their faults and advantages that you need to learn if you want to use them to their fullest potential. You start with one small city and two units, swordsmen and spearmen. You explore an entire map, which is randomly generated every time, and you need to figure out who you face on the field. These wizards can either start by acting like they're going to be peaceful, or they can come at you with extreme aggression and want to wipe you from the map.
As the master of your armies, you need to make sure that your people are fed and you need to make sure that you have all of your bases guarded. The best thing you can do is leave military units in each of them, while also having an exploration party to go and find riches, magical artifacts and fame throughout the entire world. You need to keep up with your magical power by finding sources of mana while also making sure your normal units and heroes are well equipped and experienced in battle to become stronger.
Heroes will come out of nowhere and want to be hired. The more you play this game, the more you will come to favor some over others. The lower level they are, the weaker they are, and some heroes thrive regardless. The artifacts you find can help them gain in power and thus help you conquer more of the land, and some of them even have their own books of magic that they can use when you are depleted of mana.
There is so much to consider throughout all of this. There are magical units that you can summon, normal units that you can produce in cities, military units that come to you for hire and even units that you can raise from the dead with the books of Death. They can use ranged attacks like bows and arrows along with magical missile attacks, or they can have melee attacks at close ranges. Each of them have their own prowess and misusing these units can be extremely catastrophic if you built them from the ground up to higher levels.
Magic can be the great balance breaker in this game in several different ways. When you reach the higher levels of your given magic, Death spells can literally put a plague on cities and kill the citizens, or Chaos spells can just destroy entire buildings and light the whole thing aflame. Life spells are there for healing and using divine powers to protect, while Nature can be used to grow strong units. Sorcery is a more basic magic and materializes spectres and transdimensional entities such as phantoms. Each one of them has their weaknesses and strengths and all of them have the capacity to shift the tide in your favor.
As intricate and detailed as this game is, it is not without its pitfalls. You can say that a wizard is your ally and you can have them help you in many cases, but the game seems to love just randomly pissing them off for no reason and making them your hated enemy on the turn of the dime. Even when they are considered your ally, they can just attack you without warning and all the sudden, the next time you talk to them, they'll talk to you like you killed their favorite pet and vow revenge on you when you thought that things were perfectly fine between you. Random events can come out of nowhere and shift your cities' economy for no reason, randomly turning your strength into a weakness. The balance in this game is wonky and can even be considered fleeting.
This is very much like a very complicated game of chess. This is especially true in the combat sections, where every unit has an attack and movement. Depending on the unit, they can have very low damage, weaknesses to certain elements and be unable to attack a certain unit because they can fly, are incorporeal or any other number of details that you need to be aware of. Some units are invisible, and some units can move through walls without going through the portculus. You have the ability to affect combat through direct targeting spells or even area of effect spells that give you the advantage, but if you are facing another wizard, they have the same ability, albeit a different approach depending on their magic type.
You may need to play this game a few times to get used to the mechanics, but once you nail down its many details, this is very hypnotic in its ability to make the hours fly by. You build a very large empire and have so much power, but then you can still find yourself in jeopardy once you find that your enemy has learned a new spell that cripples your forces in one way or the next. You can either fight your way through enemies and defeat them by conquering their bases, or you can play the long game and learn all of your new, more powerful spells all the way to the point that you learn the Spell of Mastery. Once you have cast the Spell of Mastery, you have won the game.
This may sound like a simple concept, but it takes many turns to learn even some of the middling spells. You need to put stats in Research, while balancing it with Mana Power and Casting Skill. You'll need to defend your empire while also learning the more powerful spells in anywhere from 50 to 200 turns, depending on how much you have. Cities help this when you build certain structures such as libraries. Everything you have in your arsenal is there, you simply need to be able to keep up with it through keeping up with your population growth, gold management and food. All the while, you're learning and casting spells in order to benefit yourself while keeping your opponents off balance or happy with your conduct, depending on what route you take.
This game is a marvel of its time. I feel like I've tapped the very surface of every mechanic and there still needs to be a trial period where you learn and play the game with your own learned strategy. It is more than worth replaying to find your favorite mixture of magic types, either going monocromatic with just one very powerful spell type or going with two or more lesser strength spell types that can mix together for your benefit. You'll learn what race you favor and what heroes you wish to hire early on when you get to know what benefits they possess early on and later when they level to the final stage of Demigods. It gets so deep into a well that it's hard to believe this only came on 9 discs in 5.25 floppies. It's a very tiny game that fits easily on any modern harddrive. It only demands a bit of thought and some of your time to learn, and you'll find out that, as frustrating as it can get, it can also fulfill your need for strategy and fantasy gaming in one nice little package. Give this game a try if it even partially strikes your fantasy. You'll be glad you did. Just remember to give your citizens plenty of water to drink.
