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Wizards and Warlords - indie turn-based strategy game in randomly generated fantasy world

Van-d-all

Erudite
Joined
Jan 18, 2017
Messages
1,557
Location
Standin' pretty. In this dust that was a city.
Alright, played a bit through the weekend on v1.0.15 & .16. While the overall game is very promising, and the serious level of complexity is enjoyable even, quite frankly the game is severely underbaked. Influences of Master Of Magic are quite obvious, and with very little explained in the tutorial (focusing mostly on banal stuff yet not explaining some major concepts) a certain degree of familiarity with similar games is simply a must.

All in all, after few hours gameplay becomes hampered by 4 major issues.

Firstly the UI is a major mess. I'm really not someone to be picky about graphics or interface, but this one simply seems like it's not been thought out, but cobbled together ad hoc, and like the late DLC features in CK2 some stuff is being buried in a labyrinthine web of windows. What's even worse, doing some actions often requires going through the very same windows several times in a row, especially as some actions simply need to be done very often (like merging damaged units one by one after every battle). Various windows doing the very same things can have completely different designs, needlessly requiring learning their functionality for a second time (eg. managing workers and buildings in Wizard Tower works completely different than for cities, keeps and hex upgrades). However, most annoying of all, some things just don't work for no apparent reason, and there's pretty much no feedback why - it's just that some options are suddenly grayed out, the other time clicking them just does nothing or spells just drain mana without any effect...

Secondly various things are just not there, and most of the time, it's learnt the hard way. It might be a magic mastery that simply does nothing, a basic functionality that doesn't exist or a game mechanic turning out to have minimal impact. On top of that, such dummy features are usually thrown in with their fully working counterparts, making some aspects a serious metagaming minefield. This is best illustrated by magic masteries. There's a hefty lot of them and all can be studied up several levels to offer spells, enchantments, units, special projects and even have synergies between them. However, the only thing clearly described at the start are the spells, but their number per mastery is REALLY low (even less than in AoWs) and it's near impossible to know if the mechanical bonuses of other masteries (mostly described just by their quantity) are even worth it. Or the fact that building roads can only be done through a spell from an otherwise lackluster mastery. There's plethora of trade resources yet most of them serve little purpose...

Thirdly, somewhat because of the latter, the balancing is almost non existent. Regular units are trained from recruitment pools, which is a nice Vic2 kind of touch but the training times, costs and upkeeps for various units often don't match their performance in combat. While obviously it's a very arbitrary thing to measure, since battles take lots of variables into consideration, it does seem rather weird early game, when a basic regiment requires twice the gold of a tower upgrade and even marauder factions can field 5x100 man armies. On the other end of the scale, masteries capable of summoning units or raising undead swing the balance in a completely opposite direction, since it doesn't require recruiting population pools, isn't limited by a per turn capacity, often even the cost and upkeep is significantly lower and paid in otherwise almost useless mana. No fog of war makes some hilarious things possible (like raising undead on someone's doorstep, or generally constant stream of new units from all over the map). No (or maybe just very lax?) spell restrictions make the game really vulnerable to early zerg.

Lastly - bugs. While the game is rather stable, and only crashed once while I selected a different number of AIs on the first and second window of scenario generation, it does have it's share of bugs. The most jarring one is the high cost terrain pathfinding, where going hex to hex when terrain cost exceeds unit movement (marshes, hills etc.) it decides for some roundabout path instead of just going 1 hex/turn to the neighboring hex (or multiple turns until the cost accumulates, like some games). The few spells there are, have their effects inconsistent - eg. restoring zombies from corpses in battle doesn't deplete the after battle corpse pool. Ancient battlefields can be raised countless times. Living units turned undead still consume food. Stuff like that.

At this point I think it's only fair to compare this game to Shadow Empire, and while both games show incredible amount of depth and flavor for a one dev title, the odd mix of bugs and missing features in W&W, in just 3 or 4 restarts, made it play out more like glitching and abusing it's mechanics than a regular, enjoyable strategy challenge. So many different things can suddenly result in utter domination in this game, that more often than anything it made me wonder if what I did had an intended effect. With the "death by 1000 clicks" UI on top of that the game just feels more like beta testing than playing. I'll give it another try in some time, because it looks like something that could be ironed out eventually, but for now, it's an easy win for Shadow Empire.
 
Last edited:

Aemar

Arcane
Joined
Aug 18, 2018
Messages
6,055
Thanks for reviewing this game, Van-d-all. Was looking forward to buying it but I think I'll wait a bit more. 1.0.1.73 Beta build was announced last week, so at least the game is still getting updates.
 

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