Game 420: Warlords (1990)

 

The title screen guy doesn't make me think "warlord."

     

Warlords

Australia

Strategic Studies Group (developer and publisher)

Released in 1990 for DOS and Amiga, 1992 for Macintosh

Date Started: 7 July 2021

Date Ended: 10 July 2021
Total Hours: 11
Difficulty: User-definable
Final Rating: 28
Ranking at Time of Posting: 230/428 (54%)

       

[This entry is a special bonus posting suggested by one of my Patreon subscribers. I found myself with some spare time and asked my subscribers how they would like to see me spend it. You'll continue to see these in between regular entries throughout the summer and early fall. I had originally skipped Warlords in 1990 because I thought it didn't meet my definition of an RPG, but as discussed here, it technically does.]

Warlords was one of several games I copied off my university's Macintosh in early 1993. I had my own Mac (it was a very brief phase), and I was poor but desperate for games. I remember that the others were Spaceward Ho! and Darkwood. None of them delivered what I really wanted, which of course was an RPG, but Warlords came close. I remember exploring its ruins with my hero character and wishing that it would transition to a first-person dungeon like Ultima. 

   

Warlords was my first exposure to what would be called "4X" strategy games: explore, expand, exploit, exterminate. I remember that I enjoyed it, but I got bored swiftly with the single map. I had a lot more fun with Warlords II and III, which had more RPG elements and RPG-like campaigns. But as I discovered replaying the original, not all of the RPG elements were saved for the sequels. From a certain perspective, Warlords is an RPG.

        

Setting up the factions. The easiest option would be to set them all as "human" and then have seven of them do nothing.

   

The game takes place on a large map representing the Kingdom of Illuria. It is home to eight factions, all of whom participate in each game: The Sirians, the Storm Giants, the Gray Dwarves, the Orcs of Kor, Elvallie, the Selentines, the Horse Lords, and Lord Bane. At the outset of gameplay, you can assign any of the factions to human control or computer control. Computer control comes in four levels: knight, baron, lord, warlord. As the game begins, each faction has one city, one hero, and a couple of default units.

    

A hero emerges!

      

There are 80 cities on the map, most "neutral" at the outset. The factions fan out, sending their heroes and armies to take over neutral cities and eventually the cities of other factions. You win when you eliminate all other factions or when you get so powerful that it's clear that will happen eventually, and the rest of them surrender.

     

"Do you want to win now or play another 8 hours just for the satisfaction of seeing your faction's symbol on all of the cities?"

     

Each city is capable of producing between one and four unit types. Oddly, these are dependent not on who controls the city but where it is geographically. If you start out playing the Sirians (the default), your capital city and those around it are capable of producing only light and heavy infantry, cavalry, and pegasus units. But take over some cities in Orcs of Kor territory and you can produce wolfriders. Capture some Storm Giant cities, and you can produce giant warriors. Each unit costs money and a certain number of rounds to produce. You get income from the cities that you control, but every active unit has an "upkeep" charge; you naturally want to make sure your income exceeds your expenses. If you can make enough money, additional heroes offer to join your faction.

      

This city can make either light or heavy infantry in two turns or griffons in six turns.

     

Combat is resolved partly through intrinsic statistics, partly through luck. There are a lot of variables, including unit strength, terrain, flight modifiers, and defense bonuses for cities. But dice also come into play. While your army with a combined might of 40 will usually beat an army with a combined might of 20, the outcome is by no means certain. Sometimes weak unit stacks pull off incredibly lucky victories. 

     

Attacking some archers with my hero and two dragons. It is unlikely but not impossible that one of them will kill a dragon.

     

As an early game in the genre, Warlords lacks a lot of the complexities of later strategy games. There are no resources to manage, for instance, or anything to build other than each city's defenses and towers of dubious value. You can't form alliances; all you can do is forestall open war. There are no choices in combat. There's no morale system. Still, despite its simplicity, the game requires a lot of tactical and strategic decision-making. Do I quickly build fast units or take the time to build more powerful ones? Which units should I put in a stack to maximize movement across the terrain? What cities serve as the best vector points (thankfully, you can automatically send unit production to distant cities)? I see a powerful enemy army coming--should I try to defend the city or raze it? Do I risk my hero and the items he carries against this enemy?

   

It's the "hero" units that make Warlords technically an RPG by my definitions. Heroes can't level up like they can in later Warlords games, but they can amass inventories and improve their strength. The landscape is dotted with ruins that both you and enemy heroes (except on the lowest difficulty setting) can search. In them, you might find various artifacts that improve the strength of the hero or the units he commands, special allies like dragons and wizards, or special encounters, such as priests who provide blessings and thrones that raise your strength. How best to use the hero--and how much to risk him--is another major strategic consideration. Should he be conquering cities or searching ruins?

       

My hero finds an artifact in the ruins.

      

The developers deserve a lot of credit for what they accomplished, but Warlords is nearly unplayable after you've experienced the far-more-polished sequels. Movement through some terrain is punishingly slow; there's no good way to see all your production and vectoring routes, or to easily change vectoring from one city to another, or even to cycle through your cities so that you can systematically review what's being produced and where it's going. Later games in the series would let you specify a destination for each unit stack and then automatically move in that direction each turn; here, you have to manually move them every turn.

      

I assemble armies at a port to send them to distant islands. It's going to take a long time to get there.

        

These interface deficiencies contribute to an exceptionally long length for the original game. Playing with the other factions on relatively easy difficulty (mostly knights, with a couple of barons), it took me about eight hours to force a surrender. If I'd insisted on dominating the map, it would have taken at least that much time more. There is some replayability in choosing to control different factions, but in general I can't imagine why you'd replay Warlords once Warlords II was available.

      

Could I have rejected the surrender without being so brutal?

     

While Warlords may technically meet my definition of an RPG, the difference between a strategy game (or, at least, a 4X strategy game) and an RPG should perhaps be stated explicitly: you can lose a strategy game. Some RPGs can put you in a situation where you can't win, but that's not quite the same thing as losing (i.e., someone else winning). The prospect of losing most strategy games shouldn't bother players any more than the prospect of losing a game of chess or gin rummy; indeed, such games aren't very much fun if you always win. You're looking for a challenge. If you always win against the computer, you've set the challenge too low. If you always win against a human opponent, you're playing in the wrong class.

   

But one's tolerance for loss decreases with the amount of time invested, and eight hours is a long time. I actually have a theory about this. It needs a name. The theory is that there are two types of games that you can lose. The first type involves a lot of luck, which can cause fortunes to turn around quickly. Gin rummy is such a game. No matter how far behind you are, you can always get a lucky series of hands. Most sports are of the first type. No matter how far ahead one team is, there's always a chance that the other team will mount a roaring comeback in the final quarter or inning or whatever. That's what makes the best stories.

     

Attacking a city.

       

The second type of game starts the players in stasis, but very early there's a tipping point in which it's clear that one player is ahead. Once one player is ahead, it's virtually impossible for the opponent to turn things around. Arm-wrestling is that sort of game; the further you force your opponent's arm towards the table, the better leverage you have and the more difficult it becomes for him to ever get back to the stasis point. Anyway, my theory is that players will tolerate very long games of the first type (e.g., Uno, baseball, Trivial Pursuit) because there's always hope. They'll tolerate short games of the second type (e.g., arm-wrestling, chess) because they don't last long. But they get extremely frustrated with long games of the second type because they spend most of the time playing them under a cloud of despair. You don't just "lose" such games; you spend most of the time playing them "losing." This is why people get so frustrated with Monopoly and why they invent so many crazy house rules. Only by allowing players who land on "Free Parking" to collect a sudden windfall can you provide any hope during the last three-quarters of the game.

   

I think the makers of Warlords understood this, and the ruins are the equivalent of that "Free Parking" space. No matter how badly you seem to be doing with your armies and cities, there's always a chance  that your hero will enlist four dragons or find an artifact that makes him exponentially more powerful. This only helps, however, to the extent that your opponent doesn't have access to the same ruins. They also made some of them a bit too far out-of-the-way, so that even with a flying mount, the hero has to spend so many turns getting there that he can easily lose the kingdom in the meantime.

       

To enhance your stress, the game offers a frank assessment of who's winning and by how much.

      

I must say that those allies you can collect from ruins--dragons, ghosts, demons, wizards--are a bit overpowered. When an enemy has one in his castle, I often have to sacrifice entire armies with the maximum of eight units just to kill one of his units. Obviously, you mind much less when such overpowered allies are on your side. I remember that back in the 1990s, I would sometimes play Warlords like an RPG by assembling a "party" of such powerful allies, along with my hero, and not focus on any other unit production--or maybe just enough for garrisons for my few cities. I'd just take that one, ultra-powerful party across the map, conquering and razing. There was a lot of risk to such an approach, but in some ways it made for a faster game. 

      

Here, I've risked an entire stack of cavalry and infantry hoping to kill just one of the enemy's devils.

      

The sequels to Warlords would increase the RPG elements, offering hero characters of different classes and abilities (including spells), experience points and leveling for those characters, a wider variety of inventory items, and side quests to complete for additional rewards. They also offered "main quests" in the form of various campaign scenarios that take the player across multiple maps, all of which are smaller than the Warlords map, or at least faster. Such campaigns take the sting off the prospect of losing, as you generally don't lose the entire campaign, just the current map. It's hard not to regard those campaigns as proper RPGs, much like SSI's Sword of Aragon (1989) or the Synergistic "World Builder" titles like War in Middle Earth (1988) or the Excalibur series.

   

I suppose my question for those of you who know strategy games better than I do is this: If I allow my definition of "RPG" to encompass strategy games with hero units that gain levels, am I adding a huge number of games to my list? If we're only talking about a dozen or so, I'm inclined to play one every once in a while, and I'll look forward to Warlords II while I'm in 1993. Otherwise, I can add a simple fourth element to exclude them if the number gets out of hand.

    

Fortunately, Bane surrendered before I had to take this citadel of his. He was pretty entrenched.

    

Getting back to Warlords: As I played, I was surprised at how much imagination it calls into play. It helps that the game takes itself seriously. It doesn't offer a lot of background on Illuria, but some characteristics are ascribed to the various factions. Sirians are classic lawful-good knights; Orcs of Kor are barely civilized; Selentines are an oppressive human empire; Storm Giants are what they sound like. Lord Bane is basically Sauron, and the Horse Lords are the Rohirrim, but the authors differ a bit from Tolkien when it comes to elves and dwarves, neither of which are as powerful here as in Middle Earth, and both of which have a desire for conquest and extermination of humans not seen in Tolkien. The armies that each faction commands make thematic sense, and their cities have evocative names: Argenthorn, Gildenhome, Deephallow, Derridon, Dhar-Khosis. While waiting for Warlords II, you could make up a history for your own "campaign," inventing rivalries and alliances and histories for your heroes.

    

In a GIMLET--which I again emphasize was designed around traditional RPGs--the game earns:

   

• 2 points for the game world. It holds together quite well thematically, but it could have used a little more detail.

       

Factions "declare war" when another encroaches on their territory.

      

• 1 point for character creation and development, both still quite nascent in this game. All you can do with your hero is name him, and the only development is when a special encounter at a ruin causes his strength to go up.

• 1 point for NPC interaction. I'll allow that for the allies you can enlist and the inhabitants of ruins who occasionally give you clues.

• 4 points for encounters and foes. The types of enemies you face are derivative, and they don't so much have strengths and weaknesses as power levels. Ruin "encounters" are rewarding but don't allow any input. I'm giving a couple of points for the strong AI, however. Computer-controlled enemies make intelligent, often unpredictable choices. I don't have the history or background to discuss strategy game AI in detail, but I didn't see any obvious, repetitive mistakes that I could exploit.

        

And then she married him!

         

• 4 points for magic and combat. There's no magic in this one. The literal mechanics of combat have only two variables--strength and a die roll--and no choices, but there's a lot of strategy that goes into building armies and prioritizing targets.

• 2 points for equipment. You can find a bunch of weapons, armor, and other items at ruins, but they're not really a standard RPG "inventory," particularly since one hero can apparently wield multiple items. I don't know; maybe the idea is that he passes them around to the rest of the army.

• 4 points for economy. Money is important for maintaining units and building defenses, and if you amass enough, more heroes offer to join your side, sometimes bringing powerful allies. Later games in the series will offer more earning and spending options.

• 2 points for a main quest to conquer the world.

    

Which I have done!

    

• 2 points for graphics, sound, and interface. The graphics aren't lovely, but they depict things clearly. There are some scattered sound effects. The interface really needed more work. It requires far too much from the mouse. There are keyboard commands for a lot of actions, but most of them require you to take to the mouse eventually (for instance, to acknowledge an action by clicking "yes"), which eliminates the benefit of having a keyboard shortcut in the first place. I covered above how some operations, including vectoring and movement, are just cumbersome.

• 6 points for gameplay. There's a lot to like here. It's hard to complain about the challenge when it's all user-defined. The various factions and various directions you could take with each faction impart both nonlinearity and replayability. I think the game is too big and too long, mostly because of the interface issues, but at least enemies surrender when it's clear they've lost.

     

That gives a final score of 28, which I would consider not bad for a strategy game being rated on an RPG scale. Computer Gaming World and Dragon magazine both absolutely gushed about it, mentioning virtually no flaws. CGW named it "wargame of the year" in 1991. Reviewers with more of a wargaming background tended to rate it a bit lower, complaining about the simplicity of combat, the length, and the lack of logistics, all of which the developers would fix (or at least mitigate) in the sequels.

     

     

I was surprised to learn that the series comes from an Australian developer. The mastermind behind the series is Steve Fawkner, who started his career with a lost adventure game called Quest for the Holy Grail in 1983. He was 22 when he finished Warlords, inspired by the strategy game Empire (1983) and a TSR tabletop game called Dragons of Glory (1985). Sydney-based Strategic Studies Group (SSG) was like an Australian SSI, specializing in war games, but they agreed to publish Warlords, and it was a hit. On the strength of its sales, Fawkner got a full-time job with the company and oversaw sequels all the way through 2004, when he left SSG to form Infinite Interactive and create the Puzzle Quest series. In some distant day, I'm going to have to decide if I really consider puzzle/RPG hybrids "RPGs" the same way I'm doing with strategy games here. [Ed. A frequent commenter, Laszlo, alerted me to an excellent article he wrote about Fawkner and the Warlords series. Here is a link to a Google translated version from the original Hungarian. I'll discuss Laszlo's material more when I cover Warlords II.]

      

I want to say thanks to the patron who suggested this. Replaying Warlords has given me both an appetite for its sequel and a better basis of comparison. Hopefully, I'll get to Warlords II soon.