Master of Magic

Master of Magic falls among the games which pioneered the 4X game genre. A new game world is randomly generated with every new game. The player can customize some aspects of generation (land mass size, strength of magic, etc.). The player can also customize the skills, spell choices, and appearance of the player's wizard, as well as choosing one of fourteen races for the wizard's starting city.

The player must build an empire from a single starting city. The player sends out units to explore its surroundings, thereby revealing areas covered by the fog of war, finding suitable sites for new settlements, and ruins and lairs containing treasures claimed by defeating their guardians. Players require ships to transport units across oceans, unless they are able to fly. Units travel via Towers of Wizardry or spells between the planes, called Arcanus and Myrror.

On finding suitable settlement areas, settlers can be sent out to establish a new city there. Exploration will also reveal the location of enemy cities, to which the player can send out armies. In these ways, the player's domain is expanded.

To build more powerful or specialized military units, the player first upgrades cities with special buildings. Research of spells and cultivation of the player's magical ability also depends on mana. The only way the player can accomplish these tasks is to build up and exploit an inflow of food, gold, and mana, the game's primary resource. The former is generally gathered by taxing the player's cities. The latter is generally gained by building mana-generating structures. Gold and mana exist as treasures in lairs and ruins, and are interchangeable via an Alchemy option.

Attacks can be launched against enemy wizards (computer-controlled non-player characters). The ultimate goal is to conquer or exterminate all their cities so as to banish them from the worlds. Battles are fought on a tactical close-up of the square under attack. Master of Magic allows players to alternately exterminate the other wizards by researching and successfully casting the game's ultimate spell, called the Spell of Mastery.