Warlords IV

List Price: $19.99 Discount Price: $6.79

Features:

• Experience a unique blend of role-playing and turn-based strategy gaming
• Detailed Tactical Combat system for field and siege battles
• Players grow and develop heroes from battle to battle
• Detailed Warlord and Leader unit development
• Expanded experience-based magic system with strategic and tactical spells

Accessories:
PC Gamer (1-year)	Games for Windows: The Official Magazine

Customer Reviews:

Disciples II is better [Posted on 2004-11-24]
My bottom line is that if you want a more engaging and more appealing turn-based fantasy strategy game, go for Disciples II. The only draw-back of Disciples is that there are only five races (human, undead, demon, dwarves, and elves). Warlords have more.

My biggest gripe about Warlords IV is the animation and the graphic; it's really bad. I suggest you download both demo of Warlords and Disciples and compare the artwork and gameplay. Another problem is that there are no real resource management... no gold to mine and no mana to collect. Also, each race has only 6 units! The human race has the swordman, bowman, knight, siege engine, archon, and a hero. In comparison, the human race in Disciples has almost 20 different battle units, ranging from assassins to white wizards.

Some of the drawbacks of turn-based strategy are evident in Warlords, but the negatives outlined above didn't impress me. If the price is low, I guess then it isn't a big concern.

Really Crappy Game [Posted on 2006-01-10]
This game went wrong in a lot of ways. Warlords III: Reign of Heroes and Dark Lords Rising were awesome games, nearly perfect in their execution. Warlords: Battlecry II was also in itself an incredible game.

Along comes Warlords IV, which tries to mix the two games, and fails miserably. Most of the cool features from Warlords III are gone, apparently in the name of "simplification". While a lot of the animations and sound effects from Battlecry II are ripped off the original game and presented here in a very stripped-down way.

I wanted to like this game, but it is just such a departure (in a bad way) from the two games that it is based off of. I have no problem with gaming innovation, but this isn't innovation. This is just plain bad programming.

As another reviewer stated, it really seems like the developers of this game ran into some budget problems and just "threw it out there", so to speak. The new warlord system just really stinks. And the heroes, which were so cool and played such an important part in both WL3 and Battlecry 2, are conspicuously weak in this game. They are all wimps! I don't know why they are even included in the game, because the moment you put them in a battle they are guaranteed to die right off the bat.

And the vectoring system which was so useful in WL3 is now absent. The units actually have to travel ON SCREEN from where they are produced. This is more realistic, perhaps, but it certainly calls for some micromanagement to make sure your units out wandering alone don't get slaughtered while you aren't looking.

The only good thing I could say about this game is that the graphics are somewhat improved from WL3. Even so, most of the animations are still just ripped directly off of Battlecry II, so we're not seeing anything innovative here. In fact, the graphics in Battlecry II beat this mish-mashed hodgepodge of a game by a long shot.

Besides, graphics alone does not a good game make. Warlords 3, while having graphics that are now showing their age, is a FAR superior game to this one. (And I STILL highly recommend it for turn-based strategy game lovers! WL3 is an excellent game indeed.)

This game was really disappointing. It shows a lot of potential with the ideas used, but the execution was horrible to say the least. Unfortunately, I cannot recommend it.

Warlords the Magnificent [Posted on 2006-03-16]
Excellent game play. It seems that every aspect has been considered in the creation. Lots of fun!

Not as bad as people say, but not great [Posted on 2006-06-15]
This game isn't as bad as some of the other reviews say (especially once you get the patch), but I would agree that it's not great. The main problem is that they removed some of the nicest features from previous versions of the game:

1. No more "King of the Hill" feature. To win, you have to capture every other enemy capital. That gets pretty boring once you've established an invincible supply chain. At least you don't have to conquer every city; you just have to capture every enemy capital.

2. No more unit vectoring! Removing this was a big mistake. The new "production waypoints" system, as people have said, is a step backwards and can be a MAJOR hassle to tinker with once you've built a large empire.

3. I agree that magic items have become kind of wimpy now (though I don't agree with whoever said that heroes have become expendable--you won't feel that way when you see what a very high level hero can do). Exploring ruins usually isn't a good gamble unless you have a very strong stack. Otherwise, you'll lose units in the battle, and the reward is rarely worth it.

4. The AI is still very predictable. Basically, the computer will always choose the fastest route to its target, meaning that if you can take control of the obvious transit routes, the AI will have a hard time positioning its troops to attack you. So I don't agree with the reviewer who said that strong flying troops negate the effect of terrain. In practice, it doesn't work that way, because the AI (stupidly) always tries to use roads if it can. You almost never have to protect your flank.

On the plus side:

1. Magic, though still too weak, has been seriously upgraded. There was virtually no reason to fool around with magic in previous versions of the game; at least now the spells are stronger and the magic system is more complex.

2. The graphics are a lot better. But no one has ever played the Warlords series for the graphics.

3. Combat is more balanced. Plan on losing more units than in the past. You also have to think more carefully about how to put a stack together. Hint: having an archon and a unicorn in the same stack can be VERY useful, because they bless and heal your troops (respectively).

4. The game is stable and loads surprisingly quickly.

A mixed bag with a fatal flaw (for me) [Posted on 2006-07-26]
I am a serious fan of the Warlords series and have owned all the turned based games and all of the BattleCry games. The first three Warlords (TB) games were seriously addictive. In fact, I still find myself playing way past the point when I should have gone to bed. I even have an old DOS system where I keep my old games and there you can find Warlords I and II (as well as x-com's, Betrayla at Krondor, Master of Magic, etc.).

In other words, I'm a fan.

Warlords IV is a beautiful game with a visually rich world like those found in BattleCry. Cities are well-rendered and interesting. Units are varied and have tactical advantages and disadvantages that are consistent with the opposing units you will fight. The combat system allows you to choose which unit you will use to fight - and it allows you to change your fight order in mid-battle (something the earlier games would not allow). The city interface is a little confusing at first, but quickly becomes easy to use. Production cues are added so that you can plan out the tactical advantages of combined unit types in advance.

The game is very challenging, but the greatest challenge occurs only in combat with cities, because those walls are always shooting at you.

Now for that flaw. I like to play large maps with lots of cities and eight sides. In this mode, the game took FOREVER to play. I would make a couple of moves, square up my cities and hit the 'end turn' button. Then I would sleep for a few hours and go out for dinner, then come back and wait for the computer to move through the AI players. (Okay, that's an exaggeration). But really, as the games progressed the turns lasted at least 5 minutes. Once, I got up and prepared a bowl of cereal as a snack - AND ATE IT - before the time was up (no lie). I play on a speedy laptop with lots of ram and I set all the game options to the fastest possible.

By the end of my first (post-tutorial) game, I would hit the 'end turn' button and set the computer aside so I could watch the news as the game moved through players. That can't be good. However, I was determined to send a powerful army to an opponent's capital to try and take it. It took a long time to create the army, 45 minutes just to get there and I still lost 7 of my 8 units. But really, I didn't care anymore. I just wanted to try. It was so boring that I didn't want to do any more, so I quit.

Now, I may try one more time, but I probably won't. I will probably just keep playing War3 and shelf this one next to the disappointing end of the x-com series.

Oh, well.

p.s. - If you are a Warlords fan, by all means get this if you can get it cheap. You might tolerate the mind numbing waits better than I did and thus enjoy the other great aspects of the game.

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