I'm 61 now, so I guess I was 44?  Back when I was 14 or 15, the best strategy game around was chess -- the old-fashioned kind, against classmates.

Man, honestly? People think so highly of MoM because it was produced almost twenty years ago. I can't think of any game produced that far back that could be feasibly released today. Not SpaceQuest, not Ultima, not Panzer General, not even DOOM, could be released as a finished product today. I'll sit on anything else I was going to say, but I think you need to bear in mind how long it's been before you start bashing MoM. Some of these posters literally weren't even born yet. Every genre has covered a lot of ground in that time.

edit; What I mean to say is that it may only be worth $5 today, but that's true of almost every game released back then. Nostalgia isn't making MoM look better than it was; modern games are making it look worse.. because modern games plug the holes that existed in older titles. They have more powerful hardware to build on, software to build with.. that doesnt make them better, it makes them more recent. View things in context, that's all I'm saying. MoM was better in relation to it's peers than WoM was in relation to it's peers. Ideally FE will outperform them both, but that remains to be seen.

I'm not sure what you are trying to say. If you are saying that I would like WoM if it was the only TBS ever made, then I have to agree, for the same reason that someone dying from dehydration will accept a drink of even brackish water.

But if you are trying to say that I would have been just as enamoured if WoM had been released back when I was in my teens instead of MoM... then a big fat resounding NO WAY!

WoM is a more modern game with more modern graphics but it in comparison to MoM it has little depth, unbalanced mechanics and lacks fun. In terms of gameplay and fun it compares poorly with other good contemporary strategy games of the MoM era like Master of Orion 1 and Civilization 2.

FE however is a different story and looks much more promising.

Well, there is a bit about rose tinted glasses and what not, but I've been playing MOM with insecticide's patch that tends to solve some of the AIs shortfalls and other issues and, well, it wasn't pretty for me.

The original AI was lackluster, yes, but given what has been done with just some extra patching (well, a lot of it) sows that there was a lot of potential in the game, otherwise there would have been no fixing it and it should be.

Exactly.  It wasn't the AI or the balance that makes MoM such a great game.  Those things aren't what makes the game challenging, either.  I realize that, if you survive the first 20 or so turns, it is nearly impossible to lose.  That's not a problem.  It is the world(s) that creates the challenge and maintains the interest -- the battles for the nodes and ruins and towers, the wizards, the races, the units, the schools of magic and the heroes.  The wizards are truly unique with their own strengths and weaknesses and their own playstyle, and you have an idea of what you're going to have to deal with when you meet them on the map.  I knew that I was in for a struggle if I met Jafar or Tauron in the late game -- Jafar constantly killing my spells, Tauron raising volcanoes all around my cities.  Each race was unique, sure they share some low-level units, but even most of those were different from one race to the other because of the racial bonuses.  The unique units to each race were interesting and fun.  Who doesn't love hammerhands or wyvern riders or griffins or paladins, even dragon turtles and stag beetles?  Choosing your magic books when creating a custom wizard would completely define your gameplay -- the powerful summoned creatures of the nature school, the powerful buffs of life, direct damage spells with chaos, the speed and deception of sorcery, death's fear and decay -- and let's not forget the retorts.

FE is moving in the right direction on many of these things.  The world is an opponent.  The wizards and factions are becoming more diverse and specialized.  I'm not a big fan of customized units, but this seems a valuable feature; though from my perspective, it detracts from the faction distinctions.  We need more spells to define the magic schools and make them discrete.

The main area where we are left wanting in FE, when compared to MoM is with heroes.  Heroes were memorable in MoM; and while they become very powerful in FE, they are not memorable.  I have finished two games of the beta, and I am hard-pressed to remember the names of any of my heroes, other than the sovereign.  I remember being really excited in MoM if I managed to recruit Warrax the Chaos Warrior or Roland the Paladin or Allora the Elven Archer (the sky drake killer).  If you pick up Fang early in the game as the OP did, you were in pretty good shape, as well.  Any of the heroes could be powerful, some were always powerful.  There was enough randomness in their traits to keep it from being repetitive.  Most of the time I picked up Mystic X, he would become very good.  Once, his traits were aligned perfectly and he became the most powerful hero I ever had in the game, greater than Torin, even.

Clearly, I could go on and on.  It is my favorite game of all time.  I still pick it up and play a couple of times each year, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.  The point, though, is sure MoM had some problems with AI, buggy spells, et cetera; but what it did well, it did very well.  It was extremely immersive.  WoM did not have that, at all.  FE doesn't, yet; but I'm hopeful.

EDIT:  I would like to note that I like a challenge.  If SD can make FE as immersive as MoM and still make it very challenging and even brutal, like X-Com, I would probably stop going back to MoM, except for nostalgia.

Right. There's a reason why I dearly remember MoM and not all the dozens of games I've played (or tried) at that time and later.

MoM captured the magical, the adventurous, the wondrous that we players were looking for. FE, for the most part, still feels like a Glorified Spreadsheet - and with this I mean: the underlying game mechanics come first, while their meaning (if any) come after. As a result, I can't shake the feeling that I'm playing through a spreadsheet instead of living an adventure. While MANY things were changed for the better in FE, we're still far, for me at least, from preventing such a feeling from becoming increasingly dominant as the game progresses. Alas, feedback of this kind is not what the developers are looking for right now.

FE will end up being a decent (or even good) game I think, but at this point I can safely say that it won't be the real MoM's successor I was hoping to play one day.

Well put. Nostalgia clouds our vision somewhat.

MoM was a very fun game but it had its problems.

I honestly think that FE stacks up pretty favourably right now. There is still a lot of work to be done, of course, so there shouldn't be any swelled heads over at Stardock.

Darklands on the other hand. Now there was a classic.

EviliroN, if you choose the same things everytime, it is no surprise that you don't see much variability from game to game.  Actually, I don't have the mod for MoM.  I'm playing with Microprose's last patch (1.3-something).

I have learned that there are different kinds of gamers.  You seem to be one of those that just wants to get to the end as quickly and efficiently as possible.  Your goal is simply to win in the most complete and crushing way possible.  Am I right?  There is no judgement here, of course.  (By the way, if you want to win in less than 50 turns, you can choose to be draconian with all life books; and just rush your opponents with flying swordsmen with planar travel and heroism.)

For others, like myself, the journey is the most important part.  Honestly, most games I play (excluding MoM), I never finish.  I reach a point where I'm in complete control and then I start a new campaign with different parameters.  I try to avoid obvious exploits and make house rules to make the games more challenging.  My goal in MoM, these days, is to get the highest score I possibly can.  I allow the AI to expand to their hearts' content and only keep them in check with banishments until I've explored every node, ruin and so forth on the map.  Then, I finish the game with the Spell of Mastery, usually with only one AI city left.

There may be problems with diplomacy in MoM, but there is value to trading spells.  There is no value to diplomacy in FE.  I never talk to the opponents, unless they initiate discussions.  Then, it's just to agree to take their money and agree to whatever pact (which I'm not required to follow, as far as I can tell) or tell them no and go to war.  Your research choices in MoM will affect your near-term gameplay.  Research in FE just seems a formality, and you don't need any of it.  I know the heroes in MoM; I cannot even remember the names or skills of any of the heroes in my current game in FE.  Here comes that word, immersive, again.  I feel that I'm part of the world in MoM; I feel like I'm playing a game in FE.

Choice and strategic choice are not the same thing.  The mana points thing in MoM required you to make choices about what was most important to you, especially at the beginning of the game when mana points were in short supply:  spell selection (research), safety net and active spells (mana reserve) or spell skill (which kind of speaks for itself).  In FE, at every point where there is a choice I have more resources than resource requirements, or the choice doesn't really make any difference in my capabilities.  The city level-up choices are neat, but they don't really mean anything.  They don't require or even help specialize cities.  They make little difference in the short-term and no difference in the long-term.  For resource requirements, games need to take a Darwinian approach to force strategic choices.  Resources should effectively limit, not your options, but the number of options you can choose.  I should be forced to choose one thing at the expense of something else.  Currently in FE, worst-case scenario, I have to wait a couple of extra turns before I can have my cake and eat it, too.

QFT

Well, count me as among those who still play - and enjoy - MoM. One of the problems with WoM (and FE to a lesser extent) is that SD has chosen a bland, ugly, uninteresting world as the backdrop - which renders 20 years of graphics improvements less impressive than should be the case. FE has at least filled (overfilled possibly) that bland ugly world with monsters. MoM was a brilliant, if flawed game. So far WoM and FE only share that latter trait. There is a great amount of discussion on Heros and MoM did this better. Some of my FE heros have like 15 traits but overall these are 'invisible' to me. I am sure my guys are much better fighters for that but where is pathfinder, wind mage etc that literally changed the way you played the game when you got one of these guys. Brax, the most vanilla of tanks, plus High Elves gave you a pathfinding imbued stack early in the game when it really mattered (especially for roadless HEs).

Units are the same: each race in MoM had units with unique/powerful/interesting traits. FE allows me to give units traits - which convert units from vanilla all the way to french vanilla. MoM units go from vanilla to rocky road (or whatever): first strike, magic immunity, etc. MoM gave you a chess set to play with; WoM and FE give you a set of pawns with graded capabilities to play with. But MoM gave the other wizards chess sets as well (which they didn't necessarily do well with, this was an AI limit) but also there was such a variety of enemies in the ruins, nodes, etc. From the bland to the still brutally tough at the end game (great wyrms, shadow demons, sky drakes, etc). Nothing like going into a battle with your A Stack and finding that there are air elementals in there that you can't see, let alone target. Come back after you've researched true sight. FE has a much more limited set of monsters and a hugely lower tactical combat challenge with them. Sure many of them are beyond your capabilities until well into the game, but once you get there, they are just bigger pawns.

FE remains hugely inferior to MoM in magic spells: tactical combat, unit/hero buffing, terrain, global, etc. No idea what the OP is talking about wrt all opposing wizards being the same. Get one of the death or chaos guys against you and their global spells wreak true havok on your empire. Same for magic items (although FE has moved a long way in the right direction from WoM) and, especially, magic item creation.

FE does have quests, perilously few until the later game, but even one would be more than MoM, so WoM/FE get a big tick for this one.

Don't know if anyone has played BotF (Birth of the Federation) another Microprose game with a great tactical combat engine but pretty limited in some ways. Well some fans have cracked the code and have developed an editor tool which allows you to make some changes and identified key bits of the code so you can use a hex editor to custom the game to your own preferences. I'd kill (or pay money) for such a tool for MoM. There are save game editors which do some of that, but not as much as I would like. So Microprose, in a short but glorious existence, developed Civ, MOO, MoM, BotF, all of which I am either still playing the originals or descendants of. Nothing would make me happier than posting in some forum in 20 years about why FE was such a great game and how I am still playing it.

Now that is a cool story Jonathan

EviliroN: I've also been playing it with the last patch Micropose put out (although I wouldn't mind trying out this 1.4 patch).

I'm not really sure what your beef is when it comes to wizard customization. There are always going to be stronger options to take in similar circumstances. That doesn't mean having those other options is bad, or necessarily mean bad game design. I would rather have too many options, including ones I would never personally choose, because they are weaker or don't cater to my playstyle.

I will give you the fact that the AI is bad at using spells, although that is a pretty common issue in any game of this type. Spell balance is also pretty weak in some areas (crack's call was the worst) There are also a lot of unique spells, several types (global enchantments, unit enchantments, summons, tactical only spells)

Game mechanics wise I would say the following are strong:

Magic system (nodes, mana/magic producing buildings, faction bonuses, magic power allocation into mana, research and skill)

Factions/Races (Lots of different units types, faction attributes that affected several areas of gameplay: city growth, magic production, unrest levels, unit abilities like flight, water walking, buildings that were available)

Unit/Hero Abilities (Level Scaling abilities like Might, Agility, Constitution, Blademaster, life stealing, first-strike, healer, magic immunity, pathfinding etc, illusion, wind walking, poison, firebreathing, thrown weapons, luck to name a chunk. Also, a large part of the heroes have randomly occurring attributes meaning they have much different power potentials each game)

Randomized Map (I believe MOM was the first game to have fully randomized maps. There are always very different configurations, although sometimes that didn't work out so great. This also includes the randomized lair, etc encounters.)

City/Resource System (Decent variety in building types and resource types. Neutral cities provide a good level of early game challenge, although sometimes there weren't very many and lacked in race variety.)

This is not exhaustive, but I'm running out of steam at the moment.

As for strategy, you can prioritize spell research/mana/skill with your magic powerbase and spell research choices, races give you several play options (burn Klackons with fire!), wizard customization, randomization of spells available, prioritizing building order, city founding based on surveyor, securing access points between the different planes and choke points, securing cities with specific races.

Also not exhaustive, but I think demonstrates some significant strategy options.

Thanx, Anglophile. So true. 

And when you got a power like True Sight, you actually gained freakin' TRUE SIGHT!  Nowadays it would be something like "Keen Sight: add + 3% to ranged attacks". More Spreadsheet Blandness. 

And thanx to JonathanEngr for reminding us all the actual computational power that was available at the time. It boggles the mind that concepts like those that were introduced in MoM are apparently impossible to reproduce today. It really makes you wonder WHAT happened. 

I really, really hope our talented Modders are reading this thread. So many brilliant insights.