Master of Magic

I'm talking about the 1994 Video Game, not the 1985 game by the same name nor the 2022 game. 

My kids introduced me to this single-player, fantasy turn-based 4X strategy game and told me "It's just like your favorite: SimCity!" and then helped me figure out how to play it as a city-building game. 

I don't currently have a copy of it. My kids always had to set it up for me because it's an older game that requires an adapter called DOSbox to play it.

There are two linked worlds, Arcanus and Myrror. There are portals connecting the two which are all blocked at the start of the game. 

There are 14 Wizards to choose from. If you pick the portrait of Sss'ra and set it to easy or normal difficulty, you will be alone in Myrror with no enemies and you can do a custom build with whatever magic books and such you want. Or you can just pick Sss'ra and accept whatever spell books etc. come with him and still be initially alone so you can focus on city building stuff.

There are spells that impact your cities or attack enemy cities. Some races, like Dwarves, can build magic roads that allow you to rapidly move normal troops to wherever the road leads.

I like choosing all Death spell books so I can start the game with the spell for summoning Shadow Demons. They are a fairly powerful unit but they only move one space per turn.

However, if you pair them with a basic Magic Spirit (there's also a Guardian Spirit which Death magic doesn't have), which is a cheap, low level unit that moves two spaces, you can move two spaces and also pop back and forth at will between the two worlds to clear the fog of war (meaning the map is black until a unit looks at it) from both worlds and also grab up any undefended or lightly defended loot in ruins or grab up lightly defended towns.

(Figuring out how to pair stuff up like that is my favorite part of the game.)

Then save scum to learn the game as painlessly as possible. 

This means save a copy of the game before popping into ruins or towns. That way if it's defended by something powerful and you promptly die, you just reload your last saved file.

My recollection is there are 8 save slots. I usually assigned at least two and up to four slots per game. I would save immediately after creating my newest game, have a slot for saving before every possible battle and often a slot for saving at some important point where I wanted to make a decision and play for a while and have the opportunity to go back to that decision point and try a different choice. 

It takes a little while to learn the relative strengths of different units and also which tactics work, so initially you die a lot. 

I like the game as a planning and development game in part because I'm a former military wife and I'm very aware of how war and risk of war and military bases etc etc shape cities in the real world.

This is largely absent from the SimCity series. I typically keep Disasters turned on in SimCity because it's the closest thing to this real world factor that "Shit happens!" which can destroy years of work in short order.

I burned a LOT of cities to the ground in SimCity before realizing there was a connection between underfunding my fire stations to save money and my cities burning down regularly. 

In the real world, "Shit happens!"

But a talented and experienced planner can reduce the impact that's likely to have. To me, that's a primary function of planning, so I like having that be part of some of my gaming experience. 

Footnote 

The game has a Fandom.