Beat SNES version with final stats: 53 people, 65 plant, 50 earth, 51 air, 75 fire, 47 water. This was a very tedious game to get through that took multiple breaks playing other games. I can only imagine how much more tedious the PC version was with 1000 levels, but I am sure it was easier to control with better performance. The early game was easy until level 21, when I had to look up a let's play to find out how to win. It turned out that I was sprogging incorrectly. I thought it was lowering the corner on a large settlement to reduce it to a house, making a walker come out, but it was actually clicking on the middle to make a guy come out without changing terrain. The former way came in handy during the final 3 levels when sprogging was disabled. That let's play also taught me how to use gale correctly, which was needed to win. After the first several levels I started keeping a backup save state at the power allocation screen so that I could see what powers were available in the next mission, then go back and spend points and adjust my speciality to best suit that level. I fundamentally disliked the progression system and level design because of the wildly inconsistent and arbitrary difficulty from taking away powers. The most difficult levels were those where most powers were disabled and I had to get by with crap. The game should have started you out with nothing, then permanently unlocked powers at certain point thresholds so you could plan a build.

My overall strategy was to focus on flattening land using the auto flat button, which I figured out at level 21 even though the guy in the video did not seem to know about it. It made enough flat land for a castle, then I would have to make sure there was a little land on all sides to expand. Sink mountains, try to get to the map edges to protect vs water disasters, and expand towards the enemy. Fix enemy disasters of course. Early on it was enough to throw the occasional disaster at the enemy to outgrow them until I had enough mana for armageddon. Later I had to conserve my mana to counter their heroes and leaders. I often set up traps to kill their people who were trying to get to their leader. Sometimes this was in their lands when the AI was not really on the ball with fixing disasters. Other times I had to wait for the leader to attack my territory. I was very impressed at how often the AI managed to break my seemingly unfixable traps, and how they would eventually just stop sending people to pointless deaths. They were difficult to cheese. Levels without armageddon were tedious because I had to manually kill every enemy through a combination of disasters, heroes and directed war. Levels which disabled raising or lowering land were awful because of how frequently I messed up while making flat land. The auto flattening did not work and it was exceedingly difficult to fix disasters. As mentioned previously, the difficulty was not at all linear. It depended on what dumb restrictions were put on me vs how on the ball the AI was plus what good disasters it had. There seemed to be very little coherent themes for the gods. For example, I expected Poseidon to have maxed out water and to throw around tidal waves, but all he did was use the water hero and some non water disasters. The final 3 levels vs Zeus were among the easiest in the game. The 1st against him I won in like 2 minutes because my people started off on both of his islands. All I did was turn on war and pause while I moved to each island to auto flatten for castles. Zeus also seemed to deliberately sabotage his land, which was something I learned to do to manipulate where the AI used its trap breaking powers. The game was very anticlimactic. It was cool how his levels were in the sky with the ocean replaced by clouds. Though maybe all of the heaven levels should have been that?

Now to discuss the powers.

Plant: The best overall school because of how powerful swamp was. The other powers were not so good

Swamp; randomly made tiles lethal. This was a great way to kill heroes and leaders, set up traps around their leader or leader icon, and just to disrupt their settlements. The AI was usually not good at fixing them. The occasional times that they were I just put them in neutral land or my territory. Low cost and highly effective.

Fungus; cost more than swamp while only appearing on the tile it was used on. It was a decent way to plug a gap in other disasters or put death only along a specific path but took several seconds to activate. It could also be made to explode in patterns by putting down specific patterns of fungus, like 3 or 5 in a row. But this was way more complicated and costly than using other disasters. The 1 time that fungus was the only offensive power the AI was super on the ball about fixing their land, so fungus was entirely useless.

Flowers; randomly changed tiles into usable land. Raising and lowering land was a much better way to fix disasters but there were 3 situations where flowers were useful. The first was for fixing volcano rock, which could not be fixed any other way. The second was in enemy territory when changing enemy land was disabled. It could be useful to get rid of baptismal founts to prevent converted guys from going right back into being enemies, or to remove hazards in preparation for invasion. The last situation was when raising or lowering was disabled and flowers were the only good way to fix disasters.

Trees; randomly put trees on the screen. A couple guides mentioned that trees might improve mana generation but I have no idea if that was true. It could also be synergized with fire to burn down large areas. I only used that tactic a couple times and it seemed like it would be most useful with high plant and low fire points build.

People: the basic school which has staple game mechanics and the best power in the game.

Armageddon; the best thing in the game because once I got the nearly full mana it required, the level was won as long as my population was higher. Any level without this was obnoxiously tedious.

Plague; infected an enemy which would slowly spread through their population. Plagued settlements generated less mana and did not count towards armageddon, so this was a great long term play to prepare for armageddon. If armageddon was disabled then plague was not really worth using because plagued enemies still had to be killed. When the enemy plagued me I lowered land to drown the infected. A few times it had already spread too far so I ignored it. The best thing to do with a heavily plagued population was to focus on war and heroes.

Leader icon; a basic mechanic that did not cost mana. It only worked if a leader was available and was useful in conjunction with the go to leader command to power up an army and direct war. The basic war mode had my people both settling vacant land and trying to attack enemy settlements, but it was very slow, weak and uncoordinated. The real way to wage war was to power up the leader to the point where they could easily defeat settlements, and manually direct where to go. I found the best way was to conquer a perimeter around the enemy so my reinforcements would attack stuff on the way to the leader. It was also a good idea to regularly turn the leader into a hero to have more than 1 offensive unit. It was a waste to focus too much power into a single army, which left it vulnerable to disasters. Many times I alternated between go to leader and regular war modes so my guys would settle land that was wrecked by disasters.

Raise and lower land; the most basic mechanic in the game. Really far too much of the gameplay was focused on this, which was boring. Other than being used to create larger settlements, new land to settle, and fix disasters, it could be used offensively if the rules allowed. The best case would be directly drowning enemies but in practice all I could get away with was disrupting larger settlements for a short while.

Earth: a very useful school for killing heroes and setting up leader traps.

Quake; one of the best disasters in the game because it created a lethal tile where you clicked, making it excellent for targeting heroes and leaders. It then traveled in the chosen direction randomly. I did not like the way the icon auto rotated for choosing direction. Should have been a button to press to cycle it. An advantage of the chasms was that they could not be fixed until the quake finished. It could also break walls but the AI rarely used it on my leader traps.

Walls; very limited in how they could be built because the entire wall had to be attached to a previous piece. I think they stopped regular enemies from passing but not leaders or heroes, but I did not test this nor see much of a point in creating that kind of wall. Rather I exploited its feature of preventing nearby land from being raised or lowered to trap the enemy leader icon with some kind of lethal tile.

Road; the only use I found for this was to put down leading into my leader icon traps to prevent either enemies or my guys from settling. There did not seem to be any increase to movement speed or any kind of preference for walking on them. They disrupted settlements but I could not build them in already settled enemy land. Maybe could be used in combo with something that damaged land but roads were just as easy to fix.

Mountain; at my low to mid earth points all this did was create a mountain or raise a single tile, both of which was mostly useless. The AI did not know how to sink mountains so it could be used to permanently disrupt their large settlements. The tiny raise might be useful when raising was disabled but it would need a lot of save scumming. The AI with lots of earth points could create a massive entire screen of raised land with numerous mountains, which was a huge pain to fix. Not only that but this easily destroyed walls and broke my leader icon traps.

Fire: less powers than the other schools but the ones present were among the most devastating in the game.

Volcano; best disaster in the game because it permanently ruined an entire screen of AI land and they never used flowers to fix it. Between the lava flow, fires and water moat trapping enemies, this also pretty much killed everything on the screen. The lava flow even spread away and functioned like a quake chasm, only it eventually dried up. I found this to be the second best use of mana to reduce the enemies population. The only problem was when the enemy also had it and the game devolved into a tit for tat nuke fest. Not saying the AI deliberately retaliated with volcanos after being hit with volcanos, but it sure seemed like it. They were the worst disaster to fix, and the AI was shockingly competent at placing them perfectly to destroy my leader traps while leaving their icons right at the safe edge. This led to me save state scumming to try and manipulate where the AI put this disaster. I was able to prevent them from destroying my trap by sabotaging the land around it by not fixing ruined tiles and making the land uneven, while creating new juicy castles further away.

Fire column; crested a fire that moved around randomly, scorching land, destroying settlements, and killing people, leaders and heroes. It was cheap to use and lasted for a decent time, but the unpredictability was annoying. If I had nothing else to kill heroes and leaders, I used this and save state scummed until it actually hit them. It was good for disrupting settlements but difficult to actually exterminate populations. When they were used on me I could prevent a lot of damage by sinking the fire into water.

Rain of fire; even with my 75 points in fire at the end this was only destroying about 3 to 10 tiles per use, a far cry from the screen clearing nuke that I think the AI was using. To compete against volcano this needed to be screen clearing at low points. Might as well use multiple fire columns.

Air: similar to fire but better at destroying settlements while being less effective at killing.

Gale; blew everything on the map from a line towards the direction chosen. This disrupted settlements and even moved walls and leader icons, which the AI did use to break my traps on occasion. By itself gale could be used to free up enemy land for settlement, or at least delay an attack. Even better when combined with a lethal hazard to blow enemies into, like swamps or quake.

Lightning bolt: started off imprecise but was very accurate after pumping up air a bit. It was wonderful for destroying settlements and damaging the land, but I could not get it to kill leaders or heroes. Killing regular walkers was doable.

Storm; this made multiple lightning strikes on a screen over a fairly long period of time. I preferred individual lightning bolts but occasionally used this on the enemy leader to try and mess him up. The AI loved using this and they would easily destroy an entire screen. The long duration meant there was no point to fix it until the storm went away.

Whirlwind; never used this once. Seemed like it just picked up an enemy or 2 and blew them around for a while. Could potentially be used for delaying a leader or hero and setting up their death.

Water; had some of the most powerful abilities but they were doubled edged swords that could easily backfire.

Tidal wave; this could potentially destroy all land on the map but was somewhat easy to fix as long as water was not lethal. From the point of origin, the waves spread out in 4 directions, only stopped by rock barriers and ,seemingly, higher land that was behind lower land. It took a lot of prep work to protect myself from my own waves but the enemy was slow at recovering their land. I had to watch for them raising my barriers because they no longer functioned when turned into land. Whenever the AI used it on me, which was very rare, I loaded state and they did not bother again. The main thing was to build to the map edges to avoid having water sources for the AI to use, at least without hurting themselves too.

Barrier; created a line that protected against tidal waves and whirlpools. Could also be used as a bridge. It was made of the same rock as volcanos, so it could not be settled or affected by any disaster unless fixed with flowers. I rarely bothered to use this unless I was planning to use tidal wave as it was better to spread out as much as possible for higher population.

Baptismal founts; very similar to swamp only they converted people to the opposite faction. Unfortunately the spell often put down so many so close together that converted enemies went straight back into being enemies. This was why I used flowers if I put them in enemy land. In my own land I manually fixed them, and used a lot of save state scumming to ensure I got the desired outcome, which was usually converting the enemy leader or hero; a very powerful disaster! I could even permanently disable the enemy leader, which seemed to bug out the enemy and make them confused, like sending their people to random places to be easily killed. I think it happened when the enemy leader converted to my team without dropping the leader icon, so I ended up with 2 icons. Not sure exactly what happened. I just put them down around the leader and save state scummed until it happened. I did it to Zeus in the final level and he somehow made a hero without any leader.

Whirlpool; this was more of a nuisance than a threat, so I did not bother to use it. The AI certainly liked them, but it was easy enough to fix the land that was lost. Would be devastating in a map with raise land disabled though.

Heroes: Each element had their own heroes but I could not tell them apart, other than the water girl. The others functioned the same, going around killing and burning down settlements until they were eventually killed. Unfortunately their fire could kill friendly people, so it was important to keep the leader at a safe distance by not targeting the same enemies. They were supposedly immune to death from their own disasters but I never seen that. They had some stat differences but the only major effect I noticed was the plant hero splitting after each victory which made each weaker and thus overall made him easier to kill and fed mana to the opponent. The water hero was completely different. She could be converted by the founts and made enemies follow her around to slowly die instead of outright killing. She was effective at minimal strength while the other heroes needed the leader to be powered up enough for then to survive long enough to do significant damage. Overall, the water hero was the single best use of mana, while the other heroes were good for levels without armageddon to clean up the enemies. They were not the best way to simply disrupt the enemy while I was still settling. In fact I avoided using heroes at all until the very late game.

I loved the concept of being a God and nurturing my followers while ravaging the enemy with natural disasters. Unfortunately, this game did not achieve that fantasy very well and was more tedious than fun. There was way too much emphasis on flattening land, sprogging (such a dumb concept), and fixing disasters; far too much mindless busywork instead of making actual strategic and tactical decisions. This game was just not that fun. And the progression was completely out of whack, with absurdly restrictive rules, inconsistent difficulty, and lack of building your own god to focus on the powers you want. Not much point being a specialist fire god if the next level completely disables fire spells!

6.0/10