Could it have been eschalon 1 or 2:

http://basiliskgames.com/eschalon-book-ii

Haven't tried it but it looks pretty good and from what I've read, it has pretty good depth.

Doug

I'm kind of curious about what you are thinking about too now. My first thoughts were that it's a roguelike game like TOME or Dungeon Crawl, but those are free. Maybe something from spiderweb? There was also Knights of The Chalice that I learned about from here.

Good games there..  but this one was not put out by a major publisher.  From what I remember it was one guy heading up the project, or at least he was the main programmer. 

I love these guessing threads

Come on, a bit more info please. Is it in the theme of Master of Magic with building and research or more of a pure wargame like Battle for Wesnoth?

which one is it, mauxe?  wesnoth or dominions III? 

edit - ah dominions III.

Here's a link to the demo (90meg or so):  http://www.shrapnelgames.com/Demos/DD_DOM3_win.html

The game guessing game is a good one..  I'll put a new one up that I remember playing but I cannot recall the name..

I'm talking old-school here (not old-old-school yet:  I have some very old games to throw out here as well).

This is a game where you purchased different robots to send off to attack your enemies base.  They were Battletech sized from light to heavy and you could take control of any of them that you wanted.

The goal was essentially to destroy the enemy base.  I forget how you earned money (credits?) but that was a component. 
The best strategy as I recall was to run behind the base and attack it from behind.

I was playing this game somewhere around 1990, maybe 1988 even.  It was on a Lazer 286 with a Turbo button that jumped me from 8MHz to 12MHz (when I needed that extra kick!)

For a bonus and/or a clue:  this is not the same game as a very awesome console game from around the same era.  Can you name that one and the system?  I remember the currency structure for that game but won't divulge unless nobody guesses it.

Hmmmm...   that sounds familiar.  Quite possibly true.

Hmm

I don't even remember my Coleco vision games.  We had no computer in the home then.

In fact, the first computer I had was an HP that I purchased when I moved out and got married at 26.

Two years later I kept the computer but dumped the girl as she was buggy as hell.

Cyber Empires

http://www.abandonia.com/en/games/206/Cyber+Empires.html

Dominions III is a game that is always on my hard-drive. It can be micromanagement hell but its so fun to kit out thugs and spam spells.

A little of MP, I enjoyed it and could see that you learn much more because the AI isn't as crafty as a human player. I still enjoy SP after a long period of owning it because Dominions is fantastic imagination juice.

Well, I blew through the tutorial which was fairly informative. 
You print off about 15 pages and just follow along the text.

I thought I was done at that point but then I realized that you can actually play a small map with limited kingdom/race selection.
So I jumped int othat last night and got my @ss handed to me. 

I think I know where I went wrong - mostly revolving around trying to rush to take over neighboring Independent territories.
What I plan on doing is biding my time a little longer and making sure I have a larger, more diverse force when I next attack.

Also - you can play MP games with the demo.  lmk if you get into it pacov.
Or anyone else that has the game and wants to play some MP..  I plan on picking it up this week.

Nice!  I found myself thinking over the different possibilities for a pretender today and realized that I did not know enough about them.

I went on and read a teensy bit on the wiki which helped immensely.  I see the benefit from choosing something other than an awake state initially (if not the overall strategy).  I hadn't realized the overall creation process and left points to be spent, thinking they had some use later.  Also didn't realize that magic level is a set stat and had to be decided at the start.

I must admit that although I enjoyed the tutorial I still could not see the overall scope of the game.  This will sound odd to those who play this game but I felt like things looked fairly basic...  like playing a glorified Defender of the Crown with worse graphics   I was having a bit of trouble justifying $55 for a game from 2006.  The more I read, especially AAR's and the wiki, the more I see the layers.  Having my commanders bottoms handed back to me three times in a row made me realize quickly that I needed to look at this game on a deeper level.  Actually read and process the numbers up on the screen.*

I just got home and placed my order.  Going to download in a little bit and get started

btw: thanks for the pretender ideas.  Going to mess around with that a bit.
(although I also want to mess around with the Elemental tile editor as well.  Heavenfall's recent post has me intrigued)

*EWOM slowed me down a bit as well - actually processing the data I mean.  I guess I've gotten used to RTS games where I can get by with the basics and still have a solid game.  Or FPS where I only need to focus on one thing.  I'm looking forward to more games where I need to think

Make sure you go to the official forums (http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/forumdisplay.php?f=138) and check out the strategy guides, but don't read too deeply, play the game some and learn how it runs.

A good first nation to try vs the AI is early era Abysia. Don't worry about the blood magic at all, as a beginner its better to learn the other aspects of how the game plays before doing the Blood Economy thing. You have 100% fire resistant troops and mages capable of spamming the spell Falling Fires, so mass battlefield damage and no friendly fire casualties. Your basic troops are very tough but cost a lot of resources so make sure to go Productivity 3, this is offset by having Heat 3. At this very basic level EA Abysia is a one trick pony but it does that trick really well, especially against the AI.