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I've been playing this silly game for 11 years now. It never gets old! I'm kind of sad that I can't find the kind of popular forum support that you find for more recent games though. Truly a classic.
It's abandonware now and I would recommend anybody who hasn't tried it to head over to Abandonia and check it out. You'll want DOSbox though.
It's basically civ without wonders or eras. Instead you start with a choice of what kind of wizard leader you are and what race you want to pick. This sounds simple but the options are wonderfullly diverse. There are five styles of magic: Life, Death (mutually exclusive with life), chaos, nature, and sorcery, and you can start with varying degrees of proficiency with any or all of them by selecting up to 13 spell books from each color.
There are also retorts that can be picked in favor of magic books that give special advantages like the ever-popular Warlord which automatically sets your units at one experience level higher and allows them to eventually attain Ultra Elite status rather than the normal cap at elite. Other retorts enhance mana gathering capacity, general spellcasting proficiency, and other special goodies like charismatic and famous which makes heroes and goodies cheaper and more likely to show up.
Being the game's namesake, the devs really put a lot into magic. Spells can be used to directly attack opponents, help/harm cities, summon monsters, buff/debuff units, and cast global enchantments that give a wide variety of benefits or cause serious trouble.
On top of that there over a dozen races in the game. Each has its own special unit types and limits on city building. Only one race, the orcs can build everything with the tradeoff that their units are total junk. Raider races like the lizard men have severe limits on building useful resource gathering structures but have extra beefy starting units so you can go out and capture other races to build their stuff. The strategy of magic/race combos and mixing matching armies of special units to dominate the game is very satisfying.
Unlike the original civs, combat is tactical and takes place on a grid style map. It may seem pretty basic at first, but the wealth of unit and spell possiblities keeps the tactical choices diverse.
Diplomacy is unfortunately the game's weak point. All out warfare with all other wizards seems inevitable short of excessive bribing and diplomacy is mostly an exersize in trading as many spells as possible before the inevitable declarations of war come around.
It's abandonware now and I would recommend anybody who hasn't tried it to head over to Abandonia and check it out. You'll want DOSbox though.
It's basically civ without wonders or eras. Instead you start with a choice of what kind of wizard leader you are and what race you want to pick. This sounds simple but the options are wonderfullly diverse. There are five styles of magic: Life, Death (mutually exclusive with life), chaos, nature, and sorcery, and you can start with varying degrees of proficiency with any or all of them by selecting up to 13 spell books from each color.
There are also retorts that can be picked in favor of magic books that give special advantages like the ever-popular Warlord which automatically sets your units at one experience level higher and allows them to eventually attain Ultra Elite status rather than the normal cap at elite. Other retorts enhance mana gathering capacity, general spellcasting proficiency, and other special goodies like charismatic and famous which makes heroes and goodies cheaper and more likely to show up.
Being the game's namesake, the devs really put a lot into magic. Spells can be used to directly attack opponents, help/harm cities, summon monsters, buff/debuff units, and cast global enchantments that give a wide variety of benefits or cause serious trouble.
On top of that there over a dozen races in the game. Each has its own special unit types and limits on city building. Only one race, the orcs can build everything with the tradeoff that their units are total junk. Raider races like the lizard men have severe limits on building useful resource gathering structures but have extra beefy starting units so you can go out and capture other races to build their stuff. The strategy of magic/race combos and mixing matching armies of special units to dominate the game is very satisfying.
Unlike the original civs, combat is tactical and takes place on a grid style map. It may seem pretty basic at first, but the wealth of unit and spell possiblities keeps the tactical choices diverse.
Diplomacy is unfortunately the game's weak point. All out warfare with all other wizards seems inevitable short of excessive bribing and diplomacy is mostly an exersize in trading as many spells as possible before the inevitable declarations of war come around.
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