Originally released in 1994. I remember playing this game with my dad when I was a kid.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_of_magic
http://www.gog.com/en/gamecard/master_of_magic ($5.99 for an XP/Vista/7 compatible version)

Master of Magic is an old single-player strategy game that I love. The gameplay is like Civilization with wizards and magic, also similar to the Might and Magic series but more magic-oriented. It is purely single-player, though there is a mod available that allows hot-seat play with two players on the same computer.

The Civ-like elements are the city building, management of resources, and map play. The game is driven by magic though - you, as the wizard managing cities and controlling armies, choose from a mix of five types of magic (life, death, nature, chaos, sorcery) that can summon fantastic creatures, enchant units or cities, cast overland enchantments, and get involved in combat. There are countless customization options - you have 11 picks to choose spellbooks and abilities, plus a bunch of different races which each have some unique units and things they can build within cities. The gameplay is great, there are quite a few possibilities in both player customization (spells/magic types, different races for cities/units, and difficulty/world options) as well as how you play (you can focus on or balance magic, cities, armies, etc.)

There are a few stability issues that I have encountered that occasionally require restarting, but I haven't had any problems that caused me to lose save files, I can always restart at the beginning of the last turn. There are also mods and user-made patches/updates available.

i play this on dosbox

i used to save all of my shit to get the best enchant spell and make badass weapons with crazy specs that took like 1000 turns to make, then deck out 1 hero and set it to auto battle, conquer everything

and dont forget to survey the land when youre out with your settlers for maximum +gold

My favorite strategy is 11 life books, start with stream of life. Max tax rate, no unrest,8mp upkeep per city- all spell base towards skill, alchemy covers gold to mana, and you can make thousands of gold per turn and buy buildings every turn.

normally I go for six heros and send out a world conquering party

Downloaded a fan-made patch that fixes some stuff and makes the AI more challenging/intelligent. It's called "Insecticide"
http://realmsbeyond.net/forums/showthread.php?t=4211

Since I have played through the game so much with the picks that I'm good with, I'm playing normal/hard with some tough combinations of spell/skill picks.

Currently: 0 spell books + Warlord, Channeler, Myrran, Famous, Charismatic, and Artificier
Myrran makes the game a lot easier in that I can build up heroes without interference from other wizards until I basically choose to go to the other plane, since they take a while to get strong enough to defeat tower guards. The major obstacle I faced was sufficiently fortifying more than three or four cities while actually accomplishing major city/magic growth. This is easy on Myrror, since the races have tough troops and there isn't much to interfere. The Insecticide patch allows the option of neutral cities sending out raiders, which does a lot to make it a bit more challenging without being absurd.

I think my next game is going to involve restrictions for how I play - perhaps a chaos master, with chaos books + chaos mastery, and razing every city I come across. I get sick of managing cities once I have more than a few, but it's a detriment to fame/heroes when I raze them. I'll just wreck the world with volcanoes, corruption, and razed cities, while maintining ~3 well placed cities and fortifying nodes.

Next game:

5 Chaos Books
1 Life Book
Warlord, Chaos Mastery, Archmage, and Artificier

Hard difficulty, large land size, four opponents, 2.5x magic strength. High Men Race.

Self-imposed rules: Raze all but the best placed/resource-heavy cities, keep the number of cities very low (3 to start, 8 or fewer to end the game).

This post has been edited by Zodijackyl on Tue - Dec 20 2011 - 12:41:40

re-trying the above on normal difficulty, it's way too hard with this patch. By the time I have three cities, I'm seeing several stacks of 4-9 units coming at me, the magic/maintenance bonuses for opposing wizards are too much.