IMO the only crappy race are the monsters. Playing Humans is all about finding silver asap and then spamming Hunters (abuse these woods!) with some Rogues (or Warriors vs Undead) to tie down melee units.
All you need is one food city, 1-2 producing tier2 units near silver/iron/minotaurs/dwarfs and a ton of gold focused cities, spam settlers like you’re playing Civ3.
A couple turns after you hit tier2 units the Human economy just starts snowballing, from then on you can afford to build Rogues parallely in all these gold cities and to upgrade them all to tier2. Rangers become pretty lethal too with a couple levels and maybe 200 gold in upgrades.
Undead with favor of Lunord/Fervus, whatever gives you Shield of Chaos and Moon Walk, are insanely strong too. The only race that can take out capitals early game with just a bunch of buffed tier 2 units.
You don’t even need to abuse that bear spell, Skeleton Veterans/Snipers will crush anything if you focus on getting them out quickly and make use of all that mana and casting time…
Monsters just have some decent late game units that take a lot of city growth to get to (ie you could have had temple units/Black Minotaurs/Dwarfs/Halberdiers instead 20 turns ago) and the vulnerability to ranged attacks many of their units have make favor of Lunord a must, they don’t get any Lunord temple unit though.
Being the best at producing the most useless resource is not that great either, in the end it’s just a tiny bit of gold per turn for the food surplus.
The more I play this game the more I like it. I especially like that its easy to just pick up and play.
Games like Civ and Total War are great once you get absorbed in them, but theres a barrier to entry. Often I’ll load up Civ look around the map, and then think, “I’m tired, this is too hard to think about I’ll just play a shooter instead”. The simpler economy of Warlock encourages me to just start clicking and see what happens and pretty soon I’m absorbed in the flow of the game.
I like the game in general, but man does it bog down in the end game. I find this to be the case for several major reasons:
general lack of haste/teleport/speed type spells or abilities. Movement in the late game from the factories to the front takes way too long; this helps to tone down stacks of doom, but they over did it;
high-level capitals are a bitch to take for the payoff, even if undefended by units, combines with issue # 1 to slow things down big time;
high level spells don’t give enough oomph for the cost in terms of casting time and counter chance; I find myself with a glut of mana in the late game.
Stuff like the other planes and gods not being worth the effort also contribute. Overall, you get to the point you know that victory is nigh inevitable, yet the slog is horendous.
Have you tried playing on the smaller maps? Some 4x gamers think that bigger=better when it comes to maps. Many 4x games (eg Master of Orion) were at their best with smaller maps, but some gamers never found that out because they never tried anything smaller than “large”.
How the heck do I get the favor of the various gods? I get a quest/mission asking me to build a temple to a particular god, but apparently I don’t have a high enough favor to do so and I’ve yet to come across any “holy ground” that I’ve seen referenced in wiki’s. This, of course, winds up with me failing the quest and creating disfavor.
What am I doing wrong?
I still have yet to get a firm handle on city growth. I understand the basics and that city growth depends upon your food (or mana for the undead), but does it depend upon food in that particular city (uneven population growth), or food production across your empire? (thus making population growth even across the board)
You can’t build a temple unless you find some holy ground and you can only build a temple on that spot with the gods that you are currently in positive favor with(viewable on the diplomacy screen. use mouse over to see if you’re positive)
Failing a quest with one god will certainly make the opposite god happy so don’t worry about it.
Economy is based on food/mana as you said and it’s global. If you start to run low on food all your food cities will slow down their growth rate or if you are really low on food the cities can shrink. All the information you need is on the screens just use a mouse over to look at the information.
Well, perhaps I’ve been looking at the wrong screens and mouseovers - I would go and check out a city which told me it was making negative food, yet it still had a growth bar which threw me for a loop. Glad to know I’m not making those citizens starve, lol.
Yes. While that reduces the slog, it shortens the game too much to enjoy the power curve- i.e., highest tiered units, spells, and zones (e.g., the planes and temples). You spit out a few knights/werewolve types and then win before you see even the mid-level spells, much less the high level ones. Basically, “explore” is bleah in view of making “exterminate” less boring on medium maps.
Warlock needs tweaking to balance the parts of the 4X formula.
Food is a universal resource. A city can be at -50 food itself, but as long as your total food is positive, your cities will keep growing at full speed.
Basically what I tend to do is create specialty cities. Settle an area with a couple of bonus food areas (pigs and pumpkins, for example) and then head down the line to the +100% food buildings. That one city can feed the majority of my other cities, letting me turn them into mana-centric, gold-centric, or military complexes.
I like the early game struggle on big maps but once I’ll meet the AI they’ll have maybe 5 cities while I have 10-20. The game is already won because every city adds production, research, mana, food and gold and having more is just always better.
Warlock really could use some mechanic that limits city scaling, even if it’s just settlers using up population and unit upkeep not just growing linearly so you don’t end up with 5000 gold and mana per turn.
Sadly the only way to have a somewhat challenging game is to play on medium or smaller maps without large bodies of water and to gimp yourself by not clearing out other worlds with tier2 units.
Yeah, once you get a significant advantage in numbers the game is essentially won unless you’re a bonehead. I would like to see an optional mechanism (turn it on at game creation, for example) that would let the opponents ally and become one empire to contest with me once I reach a predetermined material advantage.
I also don’t think the empires are unique enough to make grinding through the endgame interesting. I may get a few different spells and units but 90% of the way the endgame plays out is the same. It’s just beating down the AI one city at a time or working towards getting the unity spell.
Anyway, I’m up for more DLC and patches. The game will only get better.
This is soooo true. I just started doing smaller maps when Civ V came out and then I still felt like I was losing strategy gamer’s cred. However, I started on Medium with Warlock and have stuck with it.
I tend to focus on getting up flying turtles to gobble those cities. I wish they could do something different with the alternate worlds. If you’re strong enough to settle there, you’re strong enough to kill your opponents anyway.
Yeah, I haven’t seen much upside to conquering them. The units I need to clear the other planes could instead be out kicking ass against the AI opponents.
Now if the AI was going in and settling there and getting benefits it would be a different story.
It’s silly. And it doesn’t help the random is made so that you might not find a portal until you’re 200 turns in, so the otherworld spawn points have basically spawned a monster for every single tile in the otherworlds.
What I’d like to see:[ul]
[li]1 plane per race, all players of the same race start on the same plane.
[/li][li]A plane’s natives do the same damage type as the race that inhabits the plane; life for humans, death for undeads, etc.
[/li][li]Each race has different really-fucking-great upgrades, based on resources only found on the race’s non-native planes.
[/li][*]Planar native strength rebalances so they’re reasonably cake-walk’y for natives and hard as nails for aliens.[/ul]
