Looks like an older Civilization, but is set in a fantasy world full of monsters and magic: We have played the new edition of the turn-based strategy classic Master of Magic. Find out why we are in good spirits despite the teething troubles in our preview.
Humans, dwarves, elves, orcs, undead: that’s it for many fantasy strategy games. Master of Magic is just warming up! You can choose from 14 factions here.
Including cool ones like the flying Draconians, who are directly descended from the dragons. Their flying units may be expensive, but they can take a lot of punishment, and their fire breath is darn … hot in close combat. Or how about the insectoid Klackons, the flexible-fleeting Nomads or Elves again, in the High and Dark variants?
And that’s just about the choice of faction, because there’s also your alter-ego mage, including a customisable starting package consisting of a handful of spells (there are over 200 in total!), almost 200 troop types and 60 special abilities.
The original Master of Magic hooked us in 1994 precisely because of this thoughtful variety. Just a year after Master of Orion, developer Simtex and publisher Microprose then created a fantasy world with an upper and lower world through which we roam turn by turn with recruited armies, heroes and summoned creatures such as hellhounds or increasingly powerful elementals. We found and conquer cities, research spells that we use in the global game world or in the also turn-based battles.
Slowly gaining momentum
Then as now, we want to become Master of Magic by defeating the rival competing mages. Due to the many different factions, the approximately 200 spells and troop types as well as the randomly generated game world including underground, no game plays like the other. You can experiment a lot: Throw fireballs, buff heroes, resurrect fallen, summon a wall of fire around your capital or prefer a few cheap skeletons to explore the maps faster?
Our press demo (see box) just scratched the surface, but we liked it already. However, things get off to a slow start, because ground troops don’t get far per turn. With the flying draconians it was quicker, especially since they don’t have to avoid water, but simply flutter over it.
Tip: If you want to play the original (again), you’d better get the Enhanced Version Caster of Magic, which besides standards like Windows compatibility and higher resolutions also improves the AI enormously. Caster of Magic was originally a community mod and is currently available at GOG.com for around two euros The original version was even given away for free for a short time recently.
But back to the new Master of Magic: After the somewhat sluggish start phase, it really picks up speed, because with more cities and troops there is logically more to do. It’s fun to explore the world further and become more and more powerful. Very nice: As before, there are events, for example a free unit, but you can now set in advance whether you can get another gift like gold or mana as an alternative.
New heroes are always a special moment, too: The more fame you collect, for example by conquering cities, the more likely it is that fresh and better warriors will join you. All of them can rise in rank, carry artefacts, and many even cast spells in person.
Fights like in the noughties
The turn-based battles rage on separate hex battlefields. Whereby “raging” is a subtle exaggeration: the battles are visually and technically old-fashioned, but convey the baroque charm of older strategy games. And tactically they are quite demanding.
For example, attacked units basically retaliate simultaneously instead of taking first and then fighting back with the surviving fighters as is so often the case. In addition, troops also defend themselves against multiple attacks, unlike in Heroes of Might and Magic, for example. This means that you already take greater risks in close combat, because you almost always take damage with your own attacks. At least for the time being, there is no prior display with the estimated outcome of a duel.
Special rules also apply in ranged combat, for example, the damage dealt decreases even at short shooting distances – unless it’s spells, because they always hit hard. On the other hand, their cost increases the further away you are from your capital. You can also use the slider to pump more mana into spells, for example, to make a fireball really crack.
(As you progress through the game, you’ll be able to research more and more powerful spells for the global map or the battlefield. Summoning a volcano is just a “medium” spell.)
We have painfully experienced how strongly magic influences a battle: When we take on the unaccompanied mage Ariel with our melee-strong bare-chested Beastmaster hero plus six combat units, we sense an easy game – but the lady covers us so much with her area spells that we can’t even get to her. If only we had believed the odds display before the battle, which predicted a 100% defeat for us …
Editor’s conclusion
I like to measure classic games by how many semesters they cost me at the time. Civilization has a reference value of 1, closely followed by Master of Magic with 0.95. However, to be honest, I haven’t touched the original Master of Magic for ages either – far too dangerous! Now, 28 years later, I was not immediately attracted by the new edition, because the start is very contemplative: my armies can only move two or three fields, the first buildings and fresh troops take a long time until they are ready. The dungeons around my starting area are still full of far too strong enemies, even on the easiest level.
But after about 80 rounds (our demo was limited to 100) the knot bursts, because there is much more to do: The first rival mage comes out of the Nexus, my main army is strong enough for the stacks of monsters that were deadly earlier, I can connect my first cities with roads. 20 turns later I would have liked to continue, a good sign! However, I am also cautious: the Polish-British developer MuHa Games is ambitious, but with five core people extremely small for such a balancing hunk as Master of Magic. But they have shown that they can make 4X games with Thea (2015) and Thea 2 (2018), which are very positively reviewed on Steam.
