Master Of Magic was and is such a masterpiece (and MoO 2 as well). Some of the older games, while often heavily unbalanced with clunky user interfaces, have so much better atmosphere and setting than many of the newer games. Maybe it's that it used to be much more about craftsmanship and telling a story, than just trying to make as much as money as possible.

My all time favourite game is Alpha Centauri and I would have loved to be around to see how they designed the tech tree among other things. It still feels like an excellent sci-fi novel wrapped as a game. Wish newer games could attempt something like that. Although I have to say many times an RPG game attempts something like that, the quality of their story leaves a lot to hope for.

Darkest Dungeon is one of the newer games that has successfully created great atmosphere, similar to those older games. Yet sadly I at least got very quickly tired playing it, with dull grinding of the characters who would keep dying by random crits.

I guess also because multiplayer has become so prevalent that it's not even necessary to create great storylines anymore. People will be satisfied by the interactions they have playing other humans and its never-ending challenge by the changing metagame and such.

The attention span of players today is much smaller than it used to be and there is a lot of money to be made in this industry, so I believe that these facts changed what mainstream games are supposed to be. But we have the indies :)

You might like this podcast episode where Brian Reynolds talks about the creation of Alpha Centauri:

https://www.idlethumbs.net/3ma/episodes/the-alpha-centauri-s...

You may also want to check out Magic: the Gathering. On a high level, Master of Magic is a quite derivative game, being a clone of Civilization and ripping off MtG's spell system, especially the color wheel. But it stumbled into accidental brilliance. Tech tree in games like Civilization is notoriously bland and padded with insignificant techs. Because the whole research in MoM was made out of discrete spells, every single research step gives you something tangible! It's amazing. Another bit of accidental brilliance came from low RAM of contemporary computers. It caused the world to be split into magic planes - Arcanus and Myrror. They just couldn't manage to fit the whole world into RAM at the time!

Another single player game which can give you a lot of fun is Shandalar. It takes place in MtG setting and is an RPG game.

> They just couldn't manage to fit the whole world into RAM at the time!

I had no idea they did it for this reason. But now that you mention it, of course it make sense.

From a contstraint... One of the best features of Master of Magic. The two worlds (connected with a few towers) added a lot of strategic depth.

I still play moo2 when I want to make four hours disappear. I probably need to branch out a bit, it's been two decades already.

I suggest Endless Space 2 or Stellaris.

If you want to find more about the MoO and MoM development, I would talk with Ken Burd. He was a large part of that development and design effort and a great guy to boot.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/kenneth-burd-626ab45a