One of the best empire builders all time.
This game is about building up a fantasy empire. You start off by choosing/customizing your character. You can choose many different options and can end up with loads of different styles. You will have to choose out of 5 types of magic. Choose one and max it out or choose a couple. If you still have points left you can get some extra abilety's like having stronger units or and ability your magic gets harder to dispell. There are about 30 different abilety's.
Next you have to choose your race. Each race is realy different, they all have different units and some can walk over land or breed faster to improve city growth. Like the lizzardman they can build a gianth firebreathing turtle but they are to stupid to produce magicians. If you choose at the character creation screen for ability Mirmidion you will start on a different plane and you can choose 4 more races that are realy magical like flying, firebreathing dragons or regenerating trolls.
The world is full of dungeons and towers wich can be explored. If you succeed in clearing the enemy's youl get rewarded with mana, gold, magical items or even one of those abilety's or an extra spell book we just talked about.
The spell system is like the technolgy system in civilization. You have loads of different spells to research. Spells that summon hero's or weapons/armors to be used by your hero's. Spells that will summon creatures. spells that will devistate/annoy enemy city's or enhance your city's. spells that make your units better..... Realy.... loads and loads from just lightning beams to global enchantments.
Like i mentioned already, you have 2 planes, one like eath and one darker magical plane. You can switch between them trough towers placed on the map or by spells cast on units.
I could go on for hour and hour about the gameplay, there are just so many options so many different play styles it's insane.
1 minor thing though, the AI of opponents is not that good. But hey this game is old and civilization 4 hasn't got the best AI for it's opponents either.
This game remains one of the best games i ever played.... a shame to all developpers if you know that this game is from 1995.