Path: menudo.uh.edu!barrett From: osiddi1@gl.umbc.edu (Omar Siddique) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.reviews Subject: REVIEW: Warlords 1, enhanced Followup-To: comp.sys.amiga.games Date: 27 Mar 1994 23:11:48 GMT Organization: The Amiga Online Review Column - ed. Daniel Barrett Lines: 238 Sender: amiga-reviews@math.uh.edu (comp.sys.amiga.reviews moderator) Distribution: world Message-ID: <2n53rk$sbt@menudo.uh.edu> Reply-To: osiddi1@gl.umbc.edu (Omar Siddique) NNTP-Posting-Host: karazm.math.uh.edu Keywords: game, war, fantasy, multi-player, commercial Originator: barrett@karazm.math.uh.edu PRODUCT NAME Warlords 1 enhanced, version 2.04. BRIEF DESCRIPTION Warlords is a 8-player fantasy war game with a mouse-based user interface. The players can be human or computer. AUTHOR/COMPANY INFORMATION IN THE USA/CANADA: Name: Strategic Studies Group Inc. Address: 1747 Orleans Ct. Walnut Creek, CA 84598 USA Telephone: 415-932-3019 FAX: 415-933-4327 ANYWHERE ELSE: Name: Strategic Studies Group P/L. Address: P.O. Box 261 Drummoyne, NSW.2047 Australia Telephone: 02-819-7199 FAX: 02-819-7737 LIST PRICE I am unaware of the list price. I bought Warlords from Software Support for $34.99 (US). SPECIAL HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS HARDWARE One megabyte of RAM required. Warlords installs on a hard drive, and requires 1.5 megabytes of free drive space. Warlords works fine with a 68030. SOFTWARE No special requirements. Warlords worked fine on an Amiga 3000 running Workbench 2.1 and Kickstart 2.04. It is reported to run properly under 1.3, as well. COPY PROTECTION None. The two floppy disks are not copy-protected. Warlords installed on my hard drive without any difficulty. MACHINE USED FOR TESTING Amiga 3000/25, 4 MB Fast RAM, 1 MB Chip RAM. 1 internal 880K floppy, 1 external 880K floppy. Maxtor 120MB internal hard drive. Quantum 1.2GB external hard drive (Warlords was installed here). NEC 3FGx multisync monitor. Workbench 2.1, Kickstart 2.04. INSTALLATION Warlords installed easily on my hard drive. A program to perform this installation is included, although no mention of it is made in the technical supplement. Warlords installs in any location you wish, and I had no trouble saving and loading games from the hard drive. REVIEW In the kingdom of Illuria, a long and shaky peace has come to an end with the death of the archmage that enforced it. You play the part of the leader of one of eight empires within the kingdom. Your goal is to destroy your opponents utterly and unite the land under your rule. The leaders of the eight empires can be played by either the computer or by humans. There are four levels of computer control: knight, baron, lord, and warlord. Knight-level players are indecisive, often forgetting who they were planning on attacking, etc. Warlord-level players are at the opposite end of the spectrum. According to the manual, the most difficult game would be one involving seven computer warlords against the human player. The game begins with each player's controlling a single city; the other 72 cities are all neutral at this point. After the mad rush is over to capture as many neutral cities as possible, and the players begin eyeing each others' cities, the real fun begins. The sort of fun only found in absolutely demolishing one's enemies. For this purpose, you have various types of armed forces. Each city produces at least one, usually several, types of units, varying from Navies to Pegasi. Additionally, along the course of the game you may acquire heroes (all players start with one) and supernatural allies such as demons and dragons. Up to eight units can be "stacked" together for attacks (I liked this, games like Empire (Interstel) that don't allow stacking absolutely drive me crazy), and as many as 32 units can defend a city. Units are rated by strength and movement points. Certain units are granted bonuses that apply not only to themselves, but to any other units in the same stack. These include a leadership bonus for heroes, and a flying army bonus for winged armies. There are other facets to the game as well. Simple economics play a significant role in the conquest of Illuria. Each city produces a certain amount of tax revenue, while each unit costs a certain amount to produce, and half that amount to maintain. A successful warlord with vast armies has to keep an eye on his/her treasury. Additionally, there are ruins that can be explored by heroes; they often contain treasures or supernatural allies. Libraries and temples also await exploration. Then there is the matter of what the other (computer) players want to do to *you*. The game rates, based on historical animosities and your current actions, what each computer player thinks of you. This can range from apathy to outright loathing. The computer player's actions are based on this rating -- if someone loathes you, you can bet that player will be coming after you with everything they've got! And that brings up the matter of the game's artificial intelligence (AI). SSG is known for the quality of its AI, and this game is no exception. The computer players make intelligent moves, sending concentrated forces to take target cities. The game will even intelligently move a unit to the destination you chose by the quickest (least expensive in movement points) route. The game screen is divided into four sections. The largest is a tactical map covering the left side of the screen where the player issues most of his/her orders. Taking up the right side of the screen is the world map, showing all of Illuria. At various times, markers are displayed indicating who owns which city, which ruins have been explored, which city is producing what units, etc. Between the two maps is a vertical strip of icons that perform the most commonly used operations, such as switching between production and movement. The bottom of the screen is used to display text messages. The user interface is a delight to use. It's simple to use, and well thought out. Moving the tactical view is accomplished with the cursor keys, or by clicking on the world map. Clicking on a unit selects it, and double-clicking selects the entire stack. Production is as simple as entering production mode (via one of the icons in the central icon strip), clicking on the unit to be built, and clicking on "produce". The menu options all have keyboard shortcuts. DOCUMENTATION The documentation consists of a technical supplement and a relatively short manual. The supplement describes saving, loading, installing, and the differences between the original Warlords and Warlords Enhanced. The manual amazed me. I'm used to seeing fairly complex, detailed documentation for strategy games (such as SSI's war games). Instead, the manual for Warlords is incredibly simple. It took me maybe five minutes to read it from cover to cover. And it described everything I needed to know in those pages! (Although I did have to come back to occasionally check the reference section.) LIKES AND DISLIKES LIKES I liked the playability. I liked the variety of unit types, and the strategy involved in manipulating them. I liked the implementation of the user interface. I liked that the game was easy to install and play. Basically, I liked everything about the game. DISLIKES I didn't really dislike anything about the game, but there are a few things I wouldn't mind having added. I'd like different world maps, rather than having to play on the same one all the time. I'd like these different worlds to be unexplored (i.e., the player would be able to see only the part of the world map that had already been explored). I'd like a greater variety of units, especially naval units (which currently act really only as troop transports). Different methods of attacking would be nice, as well, since there are better strategies than frontal assault when dealing with superior enemy forces. The only other thing that I thought the game lacked was a more spectacular ending when a human player was killed. "So-and-So is no longer a threat" just didn't seem like a very powerful death message. Most of these improvements were added in Warlords 2, which is unfortunately not available for the Amiga. COMPARISON TO OTHER SIMILAR PRODUCTS There really isn't another product quite like Warlords available for the Amiga, but I will compare it to Sword of Aragon (SSI), and Civilization (Microprose). Sword of Aragon is similar to Warlords in that it's a strategy game set in a fantasy world, with the player beginning with a single city and having to conquer the rest of the "world". The similarities stop there, with Sword of Aragon following a story line, and Warlords (like most war games) simply letting the player conquer and pillage as they see fit. I think players who enjoyed Sword of Aragon should like Warlords. Civilization fans may find Warlords to be a nice "quick and easy" diversion, since Warlords is the same genre of game as Civilization, but not as heavy in detail. BUGS I did not observe any bugs. CONCLUSIONS This is the way I like my games! Warlords is fun, easy to learn, easy to play, and requires a fair amount of thought. It also has decent AI, is multiplayer, runs on any model of Amiga, and is hard drive installable. If you like strategy games of any sort, you really *have* to get this game. Now if only I could get Warlords 2... COPYRIGHT NOTICE Copyright 1994 Omar Siddique. All rights reserved. --- Daniel Barrett, Moderator, comp.sys.amiga.reviews Send reviews to: amiga-reviews-submissions@math.uh.edu Request information: amiga-reviews-requests@math.uh.edu Moderator mail: amiga-reviews@math.uh.edu Anonymous ftp site: math.uh.edu, in /pub/Amiga/comp.sys.amiga.reviews