Warlock: Master of the Arcane

The Game Room
1

Downloaded the demo for this from Steam; the full game will be available (for 20 bucks) next week.

It’s basically a Master of Magic update, following the original’s formula: take the current version of Civ, change the skins a bit, change tech research to spell research, shift the emphasis more towards combat, and there you go. It’s got the Civ V hex-based movement, one-unit-per-hex, and a roughly similar city-building system; diplomacy seems relatively limited. There isn’t a tech tree, but you need to build basic buildings in order to later build more advanced ones, and the buildings you have determine what troops you can recruit. Unique resources let you build special buildings; since this is a fantasy game, there’s stuff like “ancient ruins” and “magic fields” in addition to minerals, livestock, and agricultural products. Also, if you take over a city of another race, you can get access to troops of that race. There doesn’t seem to be an unhappiness mechanic; troops cost gold and food (and mana for summoned troops) upkeep, but if you can pay that you can churn out armies to your heart’s content.

The world is a fairly hostile place; there are tons of monster lairs out there that every so often generate a monster that roams the land and terrorizes the citizenry. Fortunately, your cities have pretty tough defenses, so you can send your troops out in an expedition to wipe out the monster lairs (you get a gold bonus for every lair you wipe out; one time (out of about ten lairs) I also got a free researched spell) and rely on your city defenses to kill anything that comes too close. At least in the demo, I ended up not even trying to mess with my neighboring wizard and instead concentrated on taking over neutral towns and wiping out monster lairs.

There are also portals to another world, which are guarded by fairly tough elementals. I did not try exploring the other world, so I can’t report on whether the gameplay on that side is interesting.

There are quests that pop up every so often, but during the time I played they were pretty boring; build a farm, build a new city, kill this one monster. Apparently you can get quests that will give you improved standing with various deities, but nothing like that came up in the 20-30 turns of the demo that I played.

The demo is on a small map, and starts you out as a human. You can apparently choose a different starting race and probably otherwise adjust your starting stats; one of the enemy wizards has goblins as his base race, while the other is undead (I think). The demo doesn’t give any sense of how these choices might affect gameplay. I burned at least 3 or 4 hours playing it, and could have kept going for a while longer.

In terms of stuff not brought in from Master of Magic, there aren’t any heroes (as far as I can tell) and I’m not sure if there is a Spell of Mastery mechanic or not.

Seems worth the $20, though I probably won’t shell out immediately what with Diablo III right around the corner.

2

I haven’t played a 4X game since Civ 4, and never played Master of Magic. That being said, I loved playing through the demo fo this game, and had those delightful little “One More Turn!” junky twinges when the demo cut me off from finishing the conquest of one of my rivals. I did get a deity quest, which was just another quest in the vein of the normal ones assigned. The quests just seem to be a mechanic to add regular bursts of cash into your economy, which seems like it makes the game just a tad too simple. I’m eager to see if they actually add any depth in the complete game.

3

Just wanted to say that “one more turn” is pretty strong in this one, despite its relative simplicity. I’d write more but the game ate all my pre-work time - gotta go!

4

I downloaded the demo, but it wouldn’t work on my computer for some reason. Anyone else have problems?

5

Got the game last night. My initial reaction – “Oh crap. The sun is coming up.”

I strongly prefer turn-based to real-time and also prefer fireballs to swords, so this game suits me fine so far. Hope it has more long term playability than Civ 5.

6

While it’s a pretty good game the sad truth is it is still far inferior to master of magic in everything but the graphics department. How hard is it to copy MoM and give it HD graphics.

7

I’m curious about this game so I’ll ask - in what ways specifically is it inferior to MOM? The issues I had with MOM were the spells could sometimes be over balanced, and building mega army stacks was too easy. Each race had its own unbeatable unit (humans - paladins, night elves - death knights etc), build enough of them, romp around the map and you’re done.

Is Warlock better or worse in this respect? Because it sounds different at least.

8

Three races. Small number of spells and no spell trees. No heroes, no equipment. Battles take place in the overland map instead of their own maps. Less customization options for your mage. Pretty much every facet of the game is like mom, but less so. The only area where it does better is on unit leveling, which allows you to customize your armies a lot more than mom did.

Honestly i don’t know yet. The AI seems to hold its own better than it did in mom, but i might just not be that good yet.

9

Another thing i forgot, there is no unrest in cities and the terrain in cities makes no difference at all except for specials, and settlers are very cheap and don’t lower your population in cities where you make them. Basically there is zero drawback to just spamming settlers and laying down cities everywhere. The game is fun, but the best i can say about it is “almost as good as a nearly 20 year old game”. I might just go back to mom soon.

10

I’m pretty far into a game (which I put on easy mode to let me explore the options at some leisure) and the upkeep costs for armies seem to be pretty well-balanced. I recently had to spam out a bunch of soldiers to defend an unexpected extra front, and will shortly have to either disband a bunch of them or raze a bunch of buildings to avoid losing all my money to upkeep costs.

The religion system is pretty interesting - you get much better spells if you are committed to a certain god, but then the opposing god hates you and sends random monsters to attack you every so often.

11

That mechanic, by the way, seems to be crucial to getting the ‘Champion of the God’ ending: killing the elite Enemy God units pushes you further along the love-hate path, and you have to get all the way to -100/100 before you get the chance to kill an Avatar.

Conquest victories are relatively easy even on the harder difficulties because you only have to conquer a single city in order to wipe out any given enemy. More powerful neighbor decides to start a rumble? Just send a strike force at his capital city, summon a few units to buffer your troops from his reinforcements, and then watch as a formerly powerful foe’s empire turns into a bunch of neutral cities that you can conquer at your leisure and cause your other foes trouble.

All of the complaints in this thread seem to be fairly accurate: there’s a germ of a good game in here, but the lack of strategic depth seems to be a limiting factor. The only spaces on the map that matter at all are the special resource tiles, and for the most part, you don’t need more than one of each in your entire empire. Building a bunch of cities anywhere can get you enough food or gold or mana without worrying about fighting over ‘prime real estate’ like you did in Civilization.

I’m really shocked to have a complaint about depth from a game made by Paradox. Happily, Paradox has never shown any sort of hesitation about supporting their games with updates, and always has strong mod communities (hosted on the company website!) to further improve their games. I’m a little dissatisfied overall, but I’m fairly confident that I won’t be when I check back into it in six months.

12

It IS bizarre that lava fields are just as good for growing farms on as fertile plains.

13

Ugh. I hate the looks of lava fields. But yeah, someone needs to patch in some terrain effects, like farms can’t be put on desert, lava, and give +1 food if on grassy plains, things like that.

14

Hey, ash is good fertilizer! And serfs whine too much about “bursting into flames” this and “my thatched roof hut burned down again” that. I don’t not pay you to stand around and whine, so give convection the finger and plant your damn tomatoes!

15

Man, it’s like Cave Johnson as a medieval lord.

16

Anyone still playing this? I just started this week.