I'm probably sitting at 1.5 right now. It's less fun for me than MOM, but modding brings it up half a point. 

around 1.5 for me too.  FE as is won't hold my attention as long as MoM did -- last played in in Jan 2012.

It's 1. I just keep quitting FE for whatever excuse I can find. The world itself doesn't pull me in, I feel disconnected and annoyed.

Another area where Fe needs work is hero-differentiation.  In MoM, Zaldon was very different that Gunthor and both were different from / inferior to Roland or Warrax.  In FE you can level anybody into anything you want (same weakness as AoW:SM).  With enough use of the paragon spell, you can level everybody into everything you want.

Right now FE is too buggy and "rigid" for me to enjoy, and the thing I Crave from Master of Magic is  the vast magical accessory to the game. and not just alot of spells, but different ones with all kind of weird effects (and side effects for some).

What I miss when playing MoM is... Graphics and User Interface. that is why I wish for FE to have a more solid User Interface, because that really does alot in the long run. (and changes the first impression too )

Right now I would rather play Master of Magic due to the low amount of bugs, and quirks in a "well improved" game, but would play FE to help squash a bug or 3, and give more fodder for ideas of improvement.

Final score is: 1

Sincerely
~ Kongdej

I'm a 3.  FE Beta 3 is more fun than MoM.

This isn't about which game is "better", in which context one really need remove glasses of nostalgia. Obviously, FE has higher production values and its graphics are far from painfully bad. You are right. (While I don't think the AI is much worse than FE's.) But that doesn't mean that MoM can be as much or more fun (for some people). This is supposed to be purely subjective. There's no need to remove any glasses because we are not judging which is "better", this shouldn't be mistaken for some kind of very short "review".

I think FE is a great game on its own, and its difficult to compare with MOM. I like both games, but they are from different eras. I also have high hopes for FE to become a real classic that other games will be compared to in the future. If they only include Umber it will be perfect

0 - a lot less fun than MoM

I constantly quit games only a few turns in. There are always some Escaped Juggernauts or other high level creatures nearby. Eventually they will start to go on a rampage and there is nothing that can stop those guys early game. The deal high 3-figure, sometimes 4-figures worth of damage which seems way of. I thought about cheating and create a sovereign with a couple of thousand HP for balance but there would be no fun in that either.

I think I liked the very fist beta of WoM better than anything that came after it. So far FE might share the same fate. Although I still hope that it will turn out fine....

Right where I sit.

Though, with beta 4 I can see FE jumping to a solid 2.

I'm amazed so many here remember MoM enough to make a comparison!  Heh, my memory must be terrible, because I only have the vague impression of having fun and getting lost in the strategy/puzzles/exploring combo for hours; on top of that, I'm much changed as a gamer (and person) since then.  I can only compare FE to recent releases (Civ4 and later), and most importantly, I compare it to the ideal of what FE can be.  The balancing and variety of viable play is top on my list of what to look forward to in future versions.

1.  No, I don't have nostalgia colored glasses.  I understand the AI and the graphics are dated, and I freely cede those points for MOM.  However, on the plus side, I see a simple, intuitive system for city building in MoM that gives me a clear production/food/mana choice in the city, and how to improve those things.  Yes, at the end game, all my cities built out pretty much in one of two ways: troop production or gold/mana.  But in the end, how I got there felt much different, depending on who I played; faction differentiation is still far superior in MOM than in FE.  Troop differentiation, and how you used them, was better in MOM; I would use a troll mammoth rider very differently than a dark elf spear, and I don't feel that I would use a Ironeer foot any differently than I would use a wraith foot.  Maybe I don't understand the subtle differentiation between the two, but if that's the case, then I don't shoulder all of the blame for that lack of understanding; FE is harder to intuit the right thing to do from the unit itself, and to understand its unique benefits.  The combat statistics were easier to understand in MOM; I think, as part of trying to givem themselves shades of gray to define subtleties between units, they've made the gradations too fine.  In FE, there are 50 shades of grey; it's hard to tell if I'm looking at shade 36 or 37.  In MOM, there were 5 shades of grey, it was easier to tell what did what.  Magic was better in MOM, in my opinion.  I could pick what I wanted to do for spellbooks, and understand what I'd be able to do after researching the spells.  Somehow, the current FE system to me seems lacking, either in spell choice or spell application.

So, city development and uniqueness, faction differentiation, magic systems, unit differentation all have a way to go before FE matches MOM.  Much better graphics and AI, though.

I like MoM better not because it is balanced (balance is worse in MoM than FE). But the one thing about MoM that still makes it more fun is that it feels more like playing in a Fantasy world. The constrained maps of FE just feel like "level design" and have the artificiality of "game level design" schools. The AI needs to have more personality and act it out. FE needs more meaningful choices in terms of strategies.

Don't get me wrong. FE is closer to MoM than it is to WoM. But even Master of Magic isn't a totally high bar to hit. The list of complaints one could seriously levy against Master of Magic are manifold. It is just one of the best in the limited genre of Fantasy TBS games. Stardock needs to make FE a game where each game is an epic story of its own.