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[Warlock] or, that other new Master of Magic-Alike
captaink
TexasRegistered User regular
TexasRegistered User regular
So the demo for this dropped on Steam today, and it comes out in a little over a week.
Here's some copy-paste from the official site: http://www.paradoxplaza.com/games/warlock-master-of-the-arcane
Warlock: Master of the Arcane is a new turned-based strategy game set in the fantastical world of Ardania, popularized in Majesty franchise. Warlock: Master of the Arcane invites players to take on the role of the Great Mage and build a powerful magical empire, giving mightly mages the ability to control armies and wield magic to wage war against another, as they compete with other wizards for the title of Warlock.
Features
-Research and master dozens of spells, conjure strong enchantments and find out powerful spell combinations
-Use the forces of three races, along with summons and wild creatures
-Innovating city management system with less routine actions
-Epic battles with large armies marching across the landscape
For me, playing the demo, it was the first MoM-alike that has really clicked. If you look at a screenshot, it looks A LOT like Civ V:
And it plays like it too. Hex-based, no stacking. Archers can fire over 2 squares. The big difference is cities and magic. There's no tech tree, you just have your choice of 5 spells to research at any one time. As you research a spell, it gets replaced in your pentagram with a new choice. Cities sort of have a building tree. Different buildings unlock different units, and also increase your food/gold/mana/spell research production. Each city has its own race, which determines the buildings and units you can build. I started as a human in the demo, but quickly captured a goblin city, so I could build goblin spearmen and such. I know people lamented that that was missing from Elemental.
The demo is a limited number of turns 100 or 200, and you can't customize your Mage or civilization. It looks like the full game gives you plenty of options for both, as well as a lot of map customization:
No multiplayer, unfortunately, but it is only $20! Pre-order gets you some kind of DLC, no idea if it's any good.
Oh and apparently it takes place in Ardania, setting of the Majesty games. So if you just can't get enough Ardania, there's more here. But as far as I can tell, it's generic fantasy all the way.
Here's some video, narrated by a guy that wants to be Sean Connery really badly:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V5T1Wz-LEv4Steam store page: http://store.steampowered.com/app/203630/
captaink on
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It does play a lot like Civilization, though instead of technology you research spells which you cast from your god's perspective. Buildings are placed on the hexes themselves, and you can only build one per city growth level. Game and map options are limited - certainly not as robust as Galactic Civilizations 2 or War of Magic: Fallen Enchantress - but you can choose from various map sizes, the number of other worlds that you can transport to via portals, and mages (customized or pre-generated).
The only thing that worries me is that there appears to be no downside to creating new cities other than the 2 turns it takes to create the settler. Which means that the map quickly becomes nothing but cities from one edge to the other.
Anyone interested in a game that is like Elemental but actually finished and (from what I could tell) bug-free should give this a shot.
Also will have to pick this up, my favorite way to play civ is to be stuck in roughly the middle ages, so this should be a blast.
"If you play on a cylindrical world a unit that goes far enough east will eventually appear in the west"
edit: Which means their might be spherical maps and other such coolness
I'm thinking it means instead of a flat world. Which you could have in this game because MAGIC.
Civ maps are also cylindrical since you ca circumnavigate East-West but not North-South.
If you do that, though, your cities won't have room to develop, as your buildings have to be placed on the hexes themselves. And some of the more advanced units and buildings have prerequisites that must be built first.
You can't ever really place enough stuff that you're going to be able to run out of space for your cities to develop and you're not going to have enough food/cash/mana to properly ramp into the game unless you're cramming down as many cities as you can so you can build gold/food generating cities while you build spaces for upgrades and advanced units
That being said, proper placement of cities is then important so you don't accidentally lock yourself out of a resource you want for a long time until your city gets big
Advanced units cost 500-1000 gold. And take 5 turns to build. [on the other hand they're baller] and then once you do that you're going to want to spend another 200+ or so to upgrade them until they're not going to get killed by higher level weak creatures [or just randomly by random monsters] and you wont ever have the income to fight a war unless you really focus on having a lot of gold and food income to keep everything running. [or mana income for summoned units]
Basically this means that if you want to have one city constantly generating wizards/healers/old trolls/Priests/dragons you're going to need 100-200 gold/turn income. And you can't get that without rapid and consistent expansion and building of cities devoted entirely to food/gold
Early on, the game and UI is really good at navigating through what you need to do, but later when you've got a long going it becomes burdensome in dealing with all your cities. You might as well just build an army and stop bothering. At least i lost patience with dealing with my empire relatively early and the AI in the demo didn't put up much of a fight. Maybe its better with human players since humans are more apt to fight rather than wait and this should limit expansion as fighting occurs.
I haven't tried Elemental, but from what I've seen it looks better in that regard
It looked kinda weak from what I saw. It is not hard and probably not against TOS [though i am not sure] to get the game to extend past 50 turns [not that you can save] and diplomacy didn't seem like it was that important. I think the only "win" condition is to beat all the other rulers.
Must just be a demo thing, the store page says:
Edit: there are 4 victory conditions that I remember, you can kill all the other great mages, you can have all of the holy sites in the game under your control, you can research the ultimate spell Unity and use it, or you can ingratiate one god so much, their rival sends their avatar to the world to kill you, if you kill the avatar you win.
Here's Total Biscuits WTF is, he does show some of the customization stuff off
Or did you mean Fallen Enchantress has superior customization more than in Warlock?
The no penalty thing for building settlers thing sounds a bit worrying, but I spent most of my build turns to churn out armies and capture neutrals / other mages.
For some reason I play this way more agressive than Civ.
You can build and train at the same time, I'm pretty sure.
But yeah, in that video, he has a lot of cities.
I probably was not totally clear there...just meant I built armies over settlers
Oh I see, yeah. In the demo I just couldn't really get room for more cities, I was shut down by vampires in one direction, and stiff enemy opposition in the other.
At around my third playthrough of the demo, I decided to put together my own tech trees to give me a better view of the factions than the disorganized build lists offered. They're just ugly little MS Paint documents, but I guess I'll post them here in case anyone else has been curious about how cities differ between the races:
Humans:
Monsters:
Undead:
I don't have any documents for unit or upgrade stats, partially because it's too much of a pain to tech to anything respectable in the 50 turns the demo gives you, but I think I've seen every basic unit except the Dracolich at least once if anyone is curious about something in particular. I'm also pretty sure that different factions have different options for building on certain resources, but I don't have any data on that at all (except for that the Undead can build a Laboratorium on silver (+7 mana, -2 gold) instead of the Silver Armory that humans get).
Basically, it looks like the main overall differences are that Humans have a gold-centric economy and specialize in ranged units, Monsters have a food-centric economy and specialize in big scary melee guys who regenerate, and the Undead have a mana-centric economy and specialize in being really hard to kill along with being the only side with native flying units. Their unit upkeeps follow that pattern too (i.e. monster units tend to cost more food and less gold than human units).
Honestly, now that I've looked at them laid out like this, I have trouble seeing how the Undead aren't going to be way overpowered. Not only are they able to run a more focused economy than the others due to the low food requirements, but their basic infantry is practically immune to missile attacks while the vampires and fliers are practically impossible to kill with anything EXCEPT missile attacks. Oh, and the vampires are heavily elemental-resistant, in case you thought you could just use mages instead of archers (not that that would have helped the Monsters anyway). I guess it's hard to tell for sure without being able to really play them, though.
they're available you just don't last long enough to get them. There are generally four tiers.
Basic
Advanced
Elite
Super
Elite are things like upgraded wizards and trolls. Super are things like archer of helios, dragons, berzerkers, etc.
There are also a couple special monsters running around[saw an avatar of some God. Was a three headed dragon, didn't look that intimidating in stats though]
Problem is is that its easy to build more mana regen. So you get your primary army upkeep tool an your primary spellcasting tool in one. The downside is expansion ability i think, but not sure.
Also, Elven Archers are really good. They have a spell that heals themselves and increases their movement rate, as well as being badass archers.
I've only played 2 games so far but it seems like when an AI runs out of room to expand it will start making ridiculous demands on anyone who has borders nearby. When the AI wasn't next to me we usually got along fine, with one of them asking to form an alliance in my 2nd game.
Ah, this makes sense! I'm bordering basically everyone due to my central location and very rapid expansion.
I'm also getting diplomatic penalties for being "merciless". I guess they don't like it when you capture cities after they declare war on your and ignore peace proposals.
Tales of defeat are more entertaining than tales of glorious victory. Tell us how you're losing, maybe we can help :P
As for growing your cities, they will automatically increase in size over time so long as you have sufficient food to feed them. It's good to have specialized cities, and note that each race has a specialty (humans are the best at gold production, monsters at food, undead at mana). There's also some spells you can cast to speed up their growth, I think.
Steam: MightyPotatoKing