Each player gets one planet from which to expand their empire. Instead of exanding to other planets and such each player must aquire astroids from which to gather the necessary minerals to construct ships, build planetary buildings and mine astroids. Each planet is one among about 24 per a galaxy, which all must work together to survive. This is a tick based game, so actions require a specific amount of time to be accomplished and planning is required. For example it takes a few hours to send a raiding party to another opponent's planet to steal astroids or engage their fleets in battle, and then another few hours for those ships to return.
For this reason one must be online quite often in order to do decently well in this game. It is that or share one's username and password with one's galaxy mates, not a recmmended tactic unless they are extremely trustworthy. As can be imagined coordination of so many individuals is difficulty, but Planetarion has a way around such problems with the introducton of IRC channels. These are instant message channels where galaxy mates can convers and strategies, as well as coordinate defenses from outside attackers. This beyond anything else is what makes the game enjoyable, the personal interaction with other players. They aren't simply faceless beings one has not contact with beyond impresonal telegrams.
Along with each galaxy having many coordinated players, each Round has several alliances of even larger groups of people. These players are spread out throughout the entire Universe and coordinate with each other, protecting each other's planets, fighting the same eneimes and trading information to give each other an edge. As one can imagine, it's gets very complicated very quickly.
Overall the gameplay itself is very simplistic and easy to learn. One can pick it up in the first few weeks of the Round and afterwards it is simply the fleet coordination and constant warefare that each player must worry about.
The game itself was quite a bit of fun, however it does have it's downsides as well. First one must be onilne quite a bit to make this work, and also in IRC as well. Therefore the time commitment for this game is rather large and that itself turns away many people. Secondly, the tactics that can be employed by one's fleets can be very effective, but will be useless in the face of overwhelming numbers. By this I mean that an alliance of 100 players could be tactically smarter than an alliance of 200 members, but the larger alliance will win everytime. At least that is what I found. Round 5 was dominated by two such alliances that were allied to each other and therefore no one else could challenge them. As a result players in these two alliances flourished while basically everyone else became their food supply. Smaller alliances such as the one I was in had no chance once these major alliances took an interest in us. This, more than anything else, is why I don't play the game anymore. I could possible spend the amount to time required to do well in the game, but the unbalanced nature of the alliance system negates and fun one might have after a while.
Granted Planetarion has altered the alliance structure quite a bit recently, therefore the above negative may no longer be applicable. So one must take what I say with a grain of salt and in the end only personal experience will tell you the game's worth.
Resources themselves are gained from mines (think Planetarion astroids) that players can aquire by a few different means. With the resources generated from these mines the players will build a fleet to do battle with their neighbors. When I was Beta testing, battles were not implementd yet so all one could do was build ships and create mines.
However the general idea of the game is massive guilds doing battle with each other over resources, as location means very little in this type of game. Communicaton between players consisted of telegrams and usage of instant messagers, as Alliance Wars didn't have anything setup for this yet (as it wasn't needed when I played). The game itself could be quite fun, however I was not interested in another tick based game where one must be online continuously, coordinateing with others to play. It was impossible to do anything alone, everything had to be done with the rest of the alliance, or one would be decimatd easily. Therefore there was little freedom of thought or individual action allowed in Alliance Wars. That more than anything else turned me away from the game. I could be alot of fun if one devoted enough time to it and had active alliance mates. However if one's alliance mates were inactive this could seriously hamper ones fun factor.
I would suggest using IRC as a means of communication. It is already popular to most people will already have heard of it and beyond the initial download one has nothing else to download to play this game.
The basic idea of Archmage is that you are a reincarnated wizard (mage) that rules a small plot of land with a few subjects. From there one must research spells, explore the surrounding land and build up an army to protect and steal land. The more land one has the more troops one can support and the bigger one gets. As the ruling mage you can decide what percentages of buildings you should have, how much to set to research, farmland, towns and so forth. The lifeblood of this game is twofold, one part is the turns you accumulate and the other is the magical power you have. Almost all actions require turns to perform, and some will also reqjuire magical power points (such as casting spells and summoning mystical warriors).
The basics of the game are quite easy to pick up, such are researching and what buildings perform what function. The one part of the game that requires great thought is the type of army that one amasses. Soldiers can be non-magical, such as archers and knights, or summoned creaturs, such as dragons and skeletons. Then it must be decided how many of each type of warrior one must have. The composition and numbers of the army is called a Stack in gameplay. This is the part of the game that makes each player unique, in that there are almost endless options for the makeup of the army that it is very hard to have two identical individuals out there, unless it is on purpose. One can have up to ten different types of warriors and they are ordered in the Stack according to overall power. Some fly, some are purely melee, others are long range fighters. Each is different in its own way and some work together well, others not. In Stacks is where all of the strategy of Archmage is done, for the most part. If one has a poorly designed army one will not survive very long.
However even with an average Stack is it possible to get decent rank, I was able to get into the top 100 without knowing very much at all. However once there I could not beat anyone to steal land so advancing past that point required some research I did not do. As Stacks are important some players have developed websites that help with the creation process. The best one I found was made by a player named Funk and can be found here. It is rather self explainatory and very easy to use. It will should how your current Stack setup is regarded and the power of each set of units in the army.
In Archmage there are several servers that allow for a variety of gameplay. There are differences in the amount of turns one can accumulate, how fast they are gathered and if guild play is allowed or not. This way one can play independently if one wishes and doens't have to join a guild to survive. However guilds are a part of Archmage and can be used very well to teach newbies the rules of the games and the basics of Stacks. I myself never tried to join one as I knew I wasn't going to be able to hang around enough to make it worth the other's time. Perhaps if I try Archmage again I will join one so someone can explain Stack 101 to me.
That's Archmage in a nutshell without going into too much depth. Personally it was a fun game, one just needs a popup blocker to make it playable. But overall a very decent game, I hope they bring it back.