YMMV / Master of Magic

• Fight Scene Failure: The combat animations frequently involve no contact between opposing forces at all. War Bears, for example, damage their foes by nodding at them.
• Game-Breaker:
  • The infamous Wraith: or Shadow Demon rush, as well as some of the high end spells, especially Armageddon, that provides a nigh-infinite supply of mana. Or paladin rush. Or a fleet of catapult-armed ships under Flight, Eldritch Weapon (optionally) and Spell Lock (dispel is hindered even more with Archmage, Runemaster and/or Sorcery Mastery). Or the self-maintaining time stop. That is, once you get resources to pull such tricks...
  • In the original version, a stack of two or three paladins could easily defeat pretty much anything the enemy would throw at you. They were later nerfed.
  • The combination of Runemaster and Artificer can lead to some outright game-destroying strategies by bypassing the standard mana-generation methods. Artificer starts a mage with Enchant Item and Create Artifact and reduces the costs by 50%. Runemaster reduces the cost of all Arcane spells, including Enchant Item and Create Artifact, by 25%. These bonuses are additive, allowing for any item to be crafted at 25% of its cost. However, crafted items can be broken for 50% of their cost, meaning you can break an item for twice the mana you spent to make it. This effectively allows you to earn mana equal to your Spellcasting Skill every turn by creating and breaking items, and gets even more broken with a high Sorcery investment due to being able to enchant incredibly powerful items for Heroes with abilities like no-maintenance non-dispellable Flight, Invisibility, and Magic Immunity. If a Sorcery mage gets lucky they might also pick up Time Stop. Time Stop is incredibly powerful, letting you be the only mage to take turns and removing all upkeep costs except for itself, but has a massive Upkeep of 200 mana per turn that is not reduced by anything. It also disables all mana and gold production as to not be maintained indefinitely, but this method still works - If you have a Spellcasting Skill of over 200 you can maintain Time Stop forever.
  • Black Channels. Elite War Trolls. Your trolls are stronger, cost basically no upkeep, and unlike most Black Channeled units, still heal because trolls regenerate. They don't gain any experience, but that's why you do this on those you've already gotten up to Elite or Ultra-Elite...
  • Life magic has a spell that doubles the income of a city (Prosperity) and another spell that makes citizens euphoric (Inspirations), thereby canceling all rebellion within a city. Combining these two spells on all your cities and jacking up taxes to three gold per turn will essentially give you an unlimited amount of gold, to the point where you can build a city or massive army from the ground up in just a few turns. Then again, gold is rarely in short supply late game^note Late game? You can begin the game with Stream of Life, and get it cast on your first city. Taxes through the roof, and you can burn gold for mana to maintain your enchantment, with interest, and your population is booming. Rinse and repeat as you build or capture cities. It's a completely degenerate strategy, worth playing once just for the lulz, and food is more of a limiting factor on armies^note Big cities can make you lots of food anyway than money, which is where Nature magic comes in ...
  • Many Game-Breaker strategies are based on investing all starting picks in one spell school, which allows picking some high-level spells from the start. While it takes a lot of time^note though, in perspective, it's a lot less time than it would take to get a supply of Pikemen or Longbowmen on-line, let alone Paladins to actually cast this high level spell, once it's done you get unstoppable warrior (or some other overpowered thing).
  • Alchemy allows you to convert gold to mana; in the original game, it was at a one-to-one ratio, though it was nerfed in a patch unless you have the Alchemy retort. Generally, it is much, much easier to get gold than mana, especially in the late game; and there are many Life and Nature spells that raise gold income in a city — creating a feedback loop where you spend small amounts of mana to get huge boosts to your gold income, then turn the gold into mana and repeat the cycle... Even post-nerf, Alchemy is overwhelmingly powerful.
  • Flying Invisible Warships are also an infamous game-breaker. Unlike every other ranged unit in the game, warships have infinite ammo. Flight allows them to move on land and means non-flying units can't attack them. Invisibility means that as long as they keep their distance, only units who can see through illusions will attack them; and AI enemies don't automatically approach invisible units. There are almost no flying units that can see through illusions, so a flying invisible warship can simply pelt the enemy with ranged attacks until they die, with most units having absolutely no way to fight back. Even against the few units that can fight back, a warship is an extremely powerful unit, usually limited only by its inability to leave the sea... which flight negates.
• Goddamned Bats: Sprites, a low-level nature summon that has no melee ability to speak of but has both flight and unlimited-range magic attacks, making them extremely hard to kill early on and capable of sniping more fragile units like caster Heroes or your own ranged units from across the battlefield. They're extremely common in lairs and Nature nodes and can appear in swarms large enough to cripple armies.
• Good Bad Bug: Occasionally Galley units would gain numerous properties and powers, becoming more powerful than any hero.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Tlaloc is an anagram of Lolcat.
  • I can haz Spell of Masturi?

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