Rindis.com

Note: this post largely cribbed from comments on videogamegeek….

After losing as Rjak, I thought I’d play another game of Master of Magic as a default one-realm mage. In this case, I took Tauron, with 10 Chaos spell books and Chaos Mastery (And I think I got all of one chaos node all game. I mostly got sorcery ones and some nature nodes.)

I went quite some time before meeting any of the AI players and was really starting to wonder where they were, but finally ran into Rjak and then Horus way off to the east, near each other.

And then, to the north, I met Sss’ra. He’s the only default Myrran wizard, which meant that he had a world all to himself, and was already powerful enough to take one of the Towers of Wizardry that act as gates between Myrror and Arcanus—not something I felt up to. He’d also taken a Sorcery Node, and had his hero sitting on it. I assume the AI wanted to hold the node until a guardian spirit could be melded to it, but I think it was having trouble with the cross-world targeting.

I eventually found the fourth AI, Oberic to the northwest, behind the small area that Sss’ra was carving out.

Things were stable for me for a bit. Rjak didn’t like me, but the AIs eventually fell into two camps: Rjak-Horus and Sss’ra-Oberic. The two factions did end up at war with each other at one point, but it was a little late, and I doubt anything actually came of that war.

Rjak eventually declared war on me, and Horus followed a bit afterwards. I was rated the lowest in military and magical power and research at that point, but I probably had about as many cities as those two put together, and they were getting just developed enough to count. Most of them were pre-existing cities on road networks. (I really should have started expanding the road network a lot earlier than I did, but it didn’t seem as important when most of them already were connected.)

Everyone else had about one hero, while I was up to three at that point (and eventually got a fourth). In the long run, they were probably the best equipped heroes I’ve ever had in the game, which was good, because I only got the lower level heroes who need some help.

Any rate, I managed to take out Rjak without too much trouble, and while I tried to talk Horus into a peace, he wouldn’t bite, and I ended up overrunning him too.

Oberic declared war during the later stages of the conquest, and Sss’ra declared war quite a while after that, though it was about the time that I was starting to be able to do anything about Oberic. Sss’ra was actually the closest one to my capital, but I took out his hero-garrison, and started poking into Myrror (at multiple points—someone had taken out a fair number of towers), mostly in the east with the forces that had been mopping up the northeast, where Rjak had been near but seems to have never really gotten conquered.

The longest part was getting at Oberic. Sss’ra was locally more of a challenge when I moved on him, but my heroes were nearly untouchable by this point, and taking out Sss’ra’s capital wasn’t that hard. Final score: 1563 (19%), my second-highest.

A much more conventional game for me. Being handed two strings of cities really helped, and I didn’t found any new ones until very late. I didn’t do as much with magic as I should have, but did have some chimeras as roving scout/tough guys, and enchanted a couple magical items. I did get Summon Hero, and should have gotten a fifth hero with it, but I was hoping for a good offer or Summon Champion to turn up.

I started with Lizard Men, though most of my cities ended up Orcish. They’re a bit disappointing on the high end, with no alchemy guilds, but the javeliners are an excellent unit, and I had one non-hero army that was almost entirely them going around and mowing down most opposition. I never really got past shamans or normal cavalry for most everything else.