Warlords II: Summary and Rating

 

      

Warlords II

Australia

Strategic Studies Group (developer and publisher)

Released 1993 for DOS, 1994 for Macintosh
Date Started: 4 February 2023

Date Ended: 14 February 2023

Total Hours: 16 (2 campaigns won, 2 abandoned, 2 lost)

Difficulty: Moderate (3.0/5)

Final Rating: 36

Ranking at Time of Posting: 390/508 (77%)

     

As I wrote last time, I noticed something about my approach to strategy games while playing Warlords II: I wasn't willing to work for it the way I'm willing to work for most RPGs. I had won a couple of times on moderate difficulty levels, but in the process making lots of mistakes, developing my armies inefficiently, and using the equivalent of blunt force to defeat most opponents. What if I tried harder? What if I analyzed all the variables? What if I were forced to do these things to compete?

 

I thus decided to try the Isladia Campaign on maximum difficulty. The game features eight factions: Cloud Knights, Light Elves, Stone Giants, Mercanians, Dark Dwarves, Thanoi, Blood Ogres, and Zhoraghians. (I noticed for the first time that you can rename the factions.) By random roll, I played the Mercanians. I set all other factions to "Warlord" difficulty. I set the overall difficulty to "Advanced," made neutral cities "Active," turned on the hidden map (enabling the "fog of war"), turned off the ability to view enemies and their production, turned off the military advisor, and--this was the hardest--turned on "random turns." The setup screen made it seem that turning quests off would make the game more difficult, but I think it's an important part of what makes the game a quasi-RPG, so I decided to keep it.

      

Setting a punishing difficulty level.

       

I thought with "View Enemies" turned off, it would make the rounds go faster, but alas you still have to wait while the AI churns through its options. Still, since there was nothing to see anyway, I had no compunction about warping the emulator when it was someone else's turn, at least until we got later in the game.

      

A new game with "fog of war" turned on.

     

I really did try, during the first few rounds, to consider all the statistics carefully and maximize the efficient and effective conquering of the map. I resisted the urge to park units on my already-conquered cities, since all factions start the game at peace and they don't usually start declaring war until most of the neutral cities are conquered. I did well for a while, with single units of pikemen defeating many neutral cities, until they started producing more units (when you set neutral cities to "active," they increase their forces as the game goes on). But after about half a dozen rounds, I started settling into old habits. Once you have a bunch of cities in your kingdom, you reach a point of diminishing returns when it comes to micromanaging production. I just don't have the patience to consider optimal army makeup and best terrain for my attack, even though I know they're important variables.

  

Still, I felt I was doing well. Early reports showed my faction winning. I invested in production of bats in one city and sent half a dozen of them out to scout the land. I set sensible vectoring locations near major roads and ports and started to build my armies for greater conquest.

     

Early reports made me unreasonably confident.

   

Some things I didn't notice or cover last time:

   

• My first quest in this campaign was to conquer a specific city. I thought this would be almost impossible with "fog of war" active, but the quest report tells you the location of the city releative to the hero. I don't think the game ever gives you a quest to conquer a city held by a friendly faction, but that doesn't mean the city won't have changed hands by the time you reach it. I'm not going to start a war to solve a quest.

         

The directions continually update based on your position.

      

• While the quest rewards are very good--often three or four powerful allies--I'm not sure the time spent pursuing them wouldn't be better spent having the hero acting as a general at the head of his armies. The need for the hero to move all over the map to conquests and ruins precludes sending a large number of units with him, which in turn limits the impact of his leadership abilities.

• Although each unit has a standard set of statistics, they vary considerably based on the city producing them. You learn to look for "bargains," like the city that will produce a unit of giants in just one turn or heavy cavalry in only two turns, or whose archers mysteriously get 4 strength instead of only 2. Pikemen usually have a movement of 8, but in my starting city, Goldport, they had a movement of 12. Since you never know where you're going to have to send your armies, I suspect the best optimization is in taking advantage of these city-based bonuses.

       

A 5-strength, 16-movement unit in 1 turn?! Hell, yeah!

      

• I don't quite understand the purpose of heavy infantry. They take as long to produce as cavalry but have less strength and movement. In some cities, their statistics are no better than light infantry at double the production time and a third less movement. I didn't have a single city in which they seemed like the best choice.

• The game has a fun description for each city in the hand-designed campaigns. I never really looked at these before.

       

The descriptions give the game a little extra character.

    

• If you resign, you have the choice to resign "graciously" or "ungraciously." Either way, the game's version of "resigning" is that you raze your own cities. 

     

The game does not accept a "gracious" surrender.

     

• Turn order randomization is horrible. I'll never do it again. The times that you get two turns in a row (because you go late in one turn and early the next) are not worth the times that you have to sit there for two full turns and watch enemies destroy your kingdom. It was hard not to ragequit.

• Nothing is more unnerving than when armies from "friendly" factions come poking around your cities.

      

What are y'all up to?

      

• The game really does play fair. Enemies in "fog of war" maps don't have any more information than you do. Just like you, they have to send scouts all over the map to reveal it. I was trying to figure out, conceptually, how you would program an AI that doesn't know to consider certain variables because it hadn't uncovered them yet.

• For the player, killing the occasional enemy scout was fun, but I decided the bats had a kind of mutual understanding and left each other alone. 

     

We're all friends here, right?

    

• The best exploration pattern for scouts is probably to either a) explore in an expanding circle around the origin point of your empire, or b) explore along main roads. I did not always explore in optimal ways.

• A city can receive vectored units from a maximum of four other cities. I believe in Warlords III, there's no such limit. The limit does require you to engage in more tactics, but it also makes it difficult to build any serious strength in key cities. If each city "sending" units takes 3 turns to produce them, plus 3 turns to produce a unit in the "receiving" city, it takes 6 turns to get a full army of 8 units ready to leave the city.
  

             

Like I say, I felt that I started strong, but the "fog of war" made me overconfident. I had no idea what the other factions were doing in the blackness. The Mercanians unfortunately began this particular campaign in the center, which essentially put them in conflict with everybody else as they expanded outward. The Thanoi declared war on me in Turn 7 by attacking one of my cities. I laughed as my single unit of pikemen killed their hero.

       

I was no longer laughing in Turn 25, by which time six of the nine factions had declared war on me and were harrying me on all fronts. I felt particularly betrayed when the Cloud Knights attacked from the southeast. The faction with the white cross crest is the default human player, and I had come to think of them as the good guys. They penetrated deep into my territory and conquered several of my central cities with large armies that proved nearly impossible to oust. I wondered how they managed to produce such large armies until my bats uncovered the full extent of their territory; they had an astonishing number of cities. 

     

Things start to turn. The Cloud Knights took this city and garrisoned it so well that I could essentially never retake it.

      

The situation was hardly irrecoverable, though, particularly since I had three hero units by now, and I'd given up doing quests and exploring ruins and was bringing them to bear on the front lines. Then I made a stupid mistake. To avoid tempting myself to reload, I had been playing without saving. I took a break to balance my bank account, and when I opened Quicken, it wanted to update, which made it do that thing in Windows 11 where it takes over the entire screen to get administrative privileges to do the update. DOSBox never recovers from this, the same way it never recovers from closing the laptop lid or going to the lock screen or plugging an external monitor into the HDMI port. Does anyone know why, and what I can do to fix this?

    

In any event, I lost my game, which I probably was going to lose anyway. It was a bit of a godsend, frankly. It was already 01:00 in the morning, on a school night, and I doubt I would have gone to bed until the game was finished.

     

The next day, I started a new campaign. Same settings, this time playing the Dark Dwarves so I'd have a better geographic position (far northeast corner). I got to Turn 10 before I realized it wasn't a good use of my time to play multiple sessions of a strategy game on an RPG blog, particularly given how busy I am this week. I resigned, decided to write this GIMLET, and be done with it.

  

The next day, I started a new campaign.

    

I shouldn't have named the hero after Irene.

    

This last one, I well and truly lost. I played the Hadesha campaign, all of the difficult settings again, this time playing the default Dream Knights. I was happy to see that the starting city was nestled on the north edge of the map, in between a couple of mountains, with clear roads heading south. I was even more pleased to see that my hero started with a pegasus. I sent them south to the first city, and the pegasus died conquering it. Neutral cities set to "active" aren't to be trifled with. Then my starting hero died trying to conquer the second city. So with only two cities to my name, I had to try to build enough units to have a shot at the rest of the neutral cities in the area. I felt that the cities were less generous with their production options in this campaign than in previous ones, and production focused almost exclusively on light infantry.

   

I had just about gotten there when the Lord of Fire declared war on me in Round 7. I have no idea why. I guess I must have looked like an easy target. But two rounds after that, the Nightmare faction declared war on the Lord of Fire and by Round 12, all of his cities had been conquered and he was off the map. From Round 12 to Round 32, no faction was hostile to me, so I made slow progress conquering neutral cities. I bought the ability to produce bats and started scouting the map. 

     

This grid is what I like to see: each lord at war with someone, but none at war with me.

     

I finally got a new hero in Round 28, but by then all the ruins in my area had been explored. I loaded him up with some armies and sent him a-conquering. He was on the road when Nightmare decided to end the detente and attacked him. Nightmare had one hero and one griffon, but they managed to wipe out my hero and all his armies. By this point, the game was over. I had only eight cities, and almost all of them were close to Nightmare territory. My bats had uncovered enough of the map to show that Nightmare had a score of cities.

I fought bitterly until the end. My last city to fall was in the far northwest, and for a while, Nightmare seemed content to leave it alone. I kept producing enough armies to go and re-conquer the city just to the east, but Nightmare kept taking it back again before I could really establish a foothold. Finally, in Turn 59, they put me out of my misery. Lesson learned: I am not good enough to play Warlords II on the highest difficulty settings. 

        

I suppose there's something poetic about the Dream Knights being conquered by Nightmare.

   

The game lets you watch the computer duke it out after all the human players are dead, and the interesting thing is that once you're no longer active, you can see each turn from the other factions' perspectives, including what parts of the maps they've scouted. I was actually surprised at the patterns they used. I encountered so many bats on the edges and in the corners that I figured they must scout from the outside in, but that's not what the revealed maps showed. 

       

At least Nightmare won. I was defeated, but I was defeated by the best.

      

So it was a dissatisfying way to end the game, but I resisted the urge to start a new campaign on a lower difficulty setting just to end on a high note. A good strategy game should be challenging, but I'll never get over how much of a waste of time it feels to play for four hours and lose. I never got inoculated to that by playing competitive games as a kid, and 50 is too old to be building character.

      

A GIMLET doesn't make a lot of sense for a title like this, but I'll offer one anyway:

        

• 3 points for the game worlds. The backstory is somewhat silly, but I like that every campaign has its own histories, and the descriptions attached to each city are fun.

• 2 points for character creation and development. It's a basic leveling system, but you have several choices in how you obtain experience.

• 1 point for NPC interaction, only for a couple of NPCs that you can find and enlist at ruins. If I gave half points, this would be a half-point.

        

I have never dreamed of any of those places.

      

• 3 points for encounters and foes. The monsters are varied, but since you can't really target individual creatures in combat, they feel more like physical manifestations of numbers than in classic RPGs. The non-combat encounters are fun but not worth a lot.

• 4 points for magic and combat. No magic, and combat isn't really "tactical," but for a game like this, I'm willing to give the points I would normally give to tactics to strategy instead. 

      

The RPG addict in me wishes there were more to do on this screen.

    

• 5 points for the economy. There are several ways to earn money and a couple to spend it. The ability to buy new production is a nice addition. If you get too rich, you get more offers from heroes, so money never becomes superfluous.

• 2 points for equipment, for the statistics-boosting items you can find at ruins and pass between heroes.

• 4 points for quests, including a main quest given by the scenario, side quests given by temples, and a couple of options in between (such as whether to accept enemy offers of surrender).

     

This was a pretty good reward.

    

• 4 points for graphics, sound, and interface. The original version has minimal sound effects, but the graphics are functional enough and the interface works well, with redundant keyboard commands, menu commands, and buttons.

• 8 points for gameplay. You have relative nonlinearity in how you explore each map, completely customizable difficulty levels, and a lot of replayability. The default campaigns could stand to be a smidge shorter, but only a smidge.

         

That gives us a final score of 36, eight points higher than I rated Warlords. Of course, this is a strategy game with RPG elements being ranked on an RPG scale. The hybrid approach exemplified in SSI's Sword of Aragon (1989) makes for a better RPG experience, but Warlords II is arguably a better game overall. RPG or not, it's enormously addictive, and I look forward to the next installment--just on a slightly easier difficulty setting.