Why because MOM was probably the first fantasy based turn based strategy game out that focused mainly on magic, and sad to say it success was never duplicated even after close to 20 years.

Some other games came kind of close, but missed the mark when it came to the spell casting elements. For instance the best one out of these clones was Age of Wonders Shadow Magic. The problem AOW had is that they duplicated damn near everything about MOM, but slacked on the spell portion and this was a dissapointment.

Now we have elemental, and unfortunately Stardock dropped the ball because they tried to reinvent the wheel. Instead what they should have done was take all of the things that everyone liked most about MOM, then slapped some current graphics and sound on to it, put a better AI in and then leave the game open ended to where we could mod the hell out of it.

Here is a list of the items that set MOM apart from the rest.

1. 6 distinct spell books that each had their own strategy of play. These included arcane, nature, chaos, sorcery, life and death.
2. Several distinct races you could choose from that each had their own special abilities and play strategies.
3. Literally hundreds of spells to learn and use. Also the spells were literally powerfull.
4. Hundreds of special abilities for the units. It ranged from regeneration, to having something killed by a ghoul come back as undead.
5. Your wizard could create powerful magic items and artifacts then deck out your heroes with them.
6. Oh and heroes that kicked arse.

In constrast where Elemental falls short is:

1. Very few spells.
2. Little difference between the spells and spell books.
3. No difference between the races.
4. Not enough special abilities for Units and Npcs.
5. Enemy sovereigns very rarely use magic outside of combat.
6. Poor AI.
7. Bugs...

What elemental has going for it:

1. Stardock in that they have dropped the ball but are picking it up.
2. Elemental can be modded heavily.

Seriously once Stardock fixes the bugs, and then adds different races, more monster models, fleshes out the spell books and then fixes the AI this game will be hands down the best fantasy game period, but until then its sad to say that that title goes to a game that is close to 20 years old.

You can buy a version of MoM on Good Old Games (gog.com)that is windows compatible for $6.

Delmoroth, what do you mean heavily modded. I play MoM on Dosbox, which works great on Windows Vista. But I just play it straight with 1.31 update. What other mods are there? I know there's a ITEMMAKE, but I could never get it to work right, and I remember once I corrupted the game if I had too many powerful items there. Are there other mods I'm missing.

For the uninitiated, here's Master Of Magic Spellbook (PDF):

http://www.machinations.org/mom/downloads/Master%20of%20Magic%20-%20Spellbook.pdf

Look at the variety, the creativity. Zombie Mastery, Flying Fortress (ok, this one still doesn't work even after 2 patches). Astral Gate, to travel to the other plane. Stardock says other planes are for when you have small memory and ignores topological implications. You can transform your units into undead, this is permanent and they'll stop healing. Invisibility, Lycantropy, Move Fortress, Planar Seal, Enchant Roads, Spell Lock, Time Stop (I believe it's actually a winning condition if you can pay its ridiculous 150/turn upkeep), Transmute, Wall of Stone/Darkness/Fire, Warp Node, Water Walking, Wind Mastery, Wraithform. There are many others, and these are just spells.

Well there's Multiplayer Shell, for one. For PBEM play. It works by turning one or the other player into AI and back. One drawback is that in player-player battles (tactical combat) only one of you can give orders, the other is played by AI. This of course changes the value of some spells and units. So the most fair way is to use autoresolve in player-player battles.

http://home.no/michbert/mmom42s.zip

For the record though, although there were lots of spells that did lots of cool little things and lots of options you could choose from for your wizard, none of it really mattered all that much. Advanced mundane units were extremely powerful, generally much more so then summoned ones, and you could easily win the game without ever casting a single spell. Meanwhile the AI was so incredibly bad that outside of getting overrun very early in the game, there was no realistic way to ever lose.

Of course it was still really fun to cast epic spells that spawned volcanos all over the world destroying everyones land (except yours) and things like that. But it kind of worked as more of a fantasy empire simulation then as a strategy game. I think the reason why other games never came close is because they cared about the actual strategic game play, rather then just putting in lots of cool and flashy spells that are completely unnecesary to win.

WooHoo feel like im twenty years younger reading this...

As for me, I used ItemMake to nerf all existing artifacts to max +1 movement. Made wonders to gameplay.

Nothing like looking at the past through Rose colored Lenses eh? Mom has and had more then its fair share of problems as well. You had to purposely force yourself not to game the game a lot of the times with it as well. Or have you forgotten that?

(and in case I need to remind you when it came out it was buggy as all fuck, crashed all the time and the AI was garbage, it took a year of patches to make it fairly stable and fix the moronic AI to be better...gee hmm sound like another games recent launch doesn't it?)

I am a huge fan of MoM... I will list a few features that I want Elemental to have and a few features that could fix weaknesses that MoM had.

Disclaimer: I have not bought Elemental yet, but I have been following it for a long time. Once it has a more complete set of features I will definitely buy it but I am content to wait for now. I have read a bunch of reviews, watched all the developer blog videos, and seen an in-game walkthrough so i am familiar with most or all of the game.

MoM had a great Wizard customization system and the races were unique enough that the combinations made it fun to replay over and over even though the actual game play was identical (randomly generated world, conquer your AI enemies).

Another great thing was the way unit enchantments worked. The fact that you could take a group of inexperienced spearmen that were worthless and make them into killing machines with the lionheart spells was really cool. I can see how this isn't crucial to overall strategy but its one of my favorite features.

The RPG progression system was WAY ahead of its time. In addition to having up to 6 heroes that had a mix of pre-determined and randomly generated attributes chosen from a long list, they would also have items that you could create yourself or find/buy. Furthermore, every non-magical unit in the game had experience points too and would gain significant bonuses from getting experience.

Finally, I really liked the tactical combat system in MoM. This is something I have little experience with in Elemantal but I would like for it to have the same ideas of moving your units so as to engage at the right time, keeping a protective formation, and being able to use spells to summon creatures, enchant units, attack enemies, and reshape the battlefield (walls, holes in the ground, smoke screens, etc).

Here are some things I read about Elemental that are promising to me:

The unit customization system seems awesome. This is something I always wanted in a strategy game, Empire Earth's wasn't compelling. If you can customize the following things with it, it would be amazing:
Choose from a large variety of weapons (long sword, short sword, 2 handed sword, lance, shield, bow & arrow, crossbow, axe)
Choose various qualities of materials (bronze, iron, steel, magical, mithril, etc) 
Choose a mount (horse, wolf, tiger, giant eagle, elephant, chariot)
Choose various armor levels (cloth, leather, chain, scale, plate) and also add cloaks, capes, hats, coat of arms etc
Add special abilities to the units (Could be fire enchanted weapons, battle cries, healing spells, carrying poison antidotes into battle, knowing how to fight against cavalry, etc).

I think that the quest system is a good idea. It must have difficult challenges, varied objectives, and compelling rewards.

The city system looks like it might be better than MoMs. I suggest making it so that each city specializes in certain ways, economically and militarily. I also suggest a system where every city has a unique advantage, like allowing a special unit to be built or giving a bonus to units built there, or a multiplier to certain resource income. Also make sure that there is a strong trade bonus or alliance bonus from neighboring cities (minor cities) to give an alternate route to divide and conquer strategies. 

Finally, one main thing that MoM did wrong was make it too easy to win if you went an extreme strategy. If you go all spellpower or all military its too easy in that game, in Elemental there should be trade-offs beyond if you can survive X turns then the game is a cakewalk. In fact, you should strive that the player must try to end the game or at least pressure opponents or else be completely outclassed after many turns have passed.

MoM had simply a purely unbelievable amount of features in a single game. Yes there were severe balance and AI problems, but the game overflowed with ideas and things to do. Even listing them is going to take all the day, so just consider that if something could be imagined in a fantasy strategy game, then it IS included in MoM, and probably in fifty variations.

Add to this that it had a very immersive ambiance. The graphics were very low-quality because of technical limitations of the time, but their design (and the general design of the game) transcended those limitations. It's a bit like Blizzard's cartoony design : there is few polygons and all is very blocky, but you don't really notice unless you actually really try to.

MoM was choke-full of good ideas, features and things, and was immersive. This was sufficient to overlook the (very real) flaws and have a wonderful time. I'm NOT taking about rose-coloured glasses. I STILL play MoM (the last game was only a few days ago) and I'm STILL having a blast. And the thing is, it could be even ten times better with only a few tweaks - balance a bit spells and creatures/units, include Civ4-grade AI and allows us to have more players in the map.

The game is wonderful, and is not that far away of being even more wonderful - hence the very high level of bitterness and angst to see that nobody managed to do these little improvement over a game that is SIXTEEN YEARS OLD.

If you really want to understand how MoM is fantastic, just go to GOG and buy it. It's 6$, which is nothing, and if you're able to not be disgusted by 320x200 graphics, you'll probably find that it's the best bang for bucks available.

I find it fascinating how some people feel the need to discredit MOM in defense of Elemental. That's like admitting Elemental needs the competition to suck in order to stand out. That's sad. Can't Elemental distinguish itself on its own merits ?

It's not just nostalgia. I know full well memory works by discarding unpleasant events. I play Master of Magic to this day because I enjoy it. It's a good game even by today's standards. Dozens of games haven't learned from MOM. It's not easy to rip off a game properly, it requires either blind imitation or strong analytical thinking. Yes, to copy features to a different game you need to understand why they worked in that context and how to make them work again. Good games have consistent philosophy.