Master of Magic is a great game made by Microprose in the early nineties. It was the first computer game I really got absorbed in, and I still love the thing. It's one of the few abandonware games I actually have the diskettes for, somewhere.
MOM is sort of a cross between Civ and...er...an rpg of some kind. Anyways, to start, we have to pick out a kind of wizard for me to be.
Anyways, there are five kinds of magic a wizard can use. Life, Death, Chaos, Nature and Sorcery. You can choose up to 11 books out of any category, including a mix. Life and Death cannot be had together.
Life gives positive buffs, healing, and city enchantments that, for example, quell all rebels in a city, or increase the growth rate.
Death gives you a handfull of offensive spells, lots of different minions, and some nasty things. There's also a city enchantment "Dark rituals" that lets you sacrifice some of your population growth for mana.
Chaos gives you fire spells. There are a handfull of summonable minions, most of which are pretty decent fighters. There are also terrain altering spells that turn the lush and verdant landscape into a charred hellscape of volcanos and pollution. But then Captain planet might kick our arse. We can always summon a dragon to eat him if he gets uppity, if we have enough points in this category.
Nature gives us a bunch of pissy weak summonables, a bunch of weird combat spells, we can place down city walls with a spell, and we can reveal HUGE portions of the map. I don't really like nature, but you guys might, y'know?
Sorcery is the neat kind of magic that lets you summon some weird stuff, enchant units to fly or be resistant to projectiles. It also gives you a little island transport that's a summonable thingy. And a dragon, if you've got enough points spent on it.
There are also a bunch of traits. These give bonuses that aren't just spells and better spells, but they cost points, too. For now, we're only going to choose one out of four.
Alchemy: 1 pick. Allows me to turn gold into mana and mana to gold in a 1 for 1 ratio rather than 2 for 1. Sort of usefull, but we're usually rolling in money and mana anyways.
Warlord: 2 picks. Ordinary units can advance one rank further in experience. This is not to be scoffed at, because the difference is pretty potent. There's also a life spell that does this, and the spells stack so you can get uber-soldiers as a life-specialized warlord.
Artificer: 1 pick. We start with both item creation spells and it costs half as much to make magic items for our heroes. However, I usually don't go in for heroes because they're cheap. On the other hand, A high-level hero with all his equiptment as custom made artifacts kills people, really, really fast. They can clear entire battlefields.
Conjuror: 1 pick. Summoning spells take 25% less time to research, and cost to cast. Upkeep is 25% less on magical creatures, too. This is okay. If we go in for legions of demons or undead skellies and stuff, this is the way to go.
Now go ahead and tell me what you'd like me to pick.