I for one have been impressed by this game. It doesn't have quite the grand scope I would like to see, in terms of races and beasts and varied magic, and for a game based on the setting of Majesty, it's alarmingly devoid of proper hero units. Despite its shortcomings in mastering the magic of the genre, the "one unit per tile" CIV5 convention plays well here, especially with priest and mage units added, and there are flashes of innovation and brilliance in the design:
1. Buildings living on the main map, one building per pop point, no construction costs. This is "simplified" in some sense, given that you don't build as many buildings per city, but it's also brilliant -- where in most games, it's only what order you build buildings in to make your mega-metropolis, in Warlock cities actually can't and shouldn't try to do everything. You won't even want your basic unit production buildings in every city. Buildings on tiles is what Elemental tried to achieve and failed, but it succeeds here. Unlike in Elemental, units move through cities as another terrain type. One of the level up perks even gives a bonus when fighting in cities (not just attacking and defending city centers, but any city tile). Roads are not an entity in themselves, built by a special unit or automatically strung between nearby cities, but a side-effect of placing buildings -- tiles with buildings on them act as roads for units of the same faction.
2. Resources are used by building special buildings on them, with different factions getting different buildings, sometimes multiple options. Use gems to make magic amulets for your troops, or sell them for massive income? Use donkeys for trade, or create a knightly order of donkey riders? That is by far the more interesting and awesome system I have ever seen for special resources, in any strategy game. It easily beats both Civilization and Master of Magic. Unit buffs you unlock are applied for free to units built in that city, but you can also pay a heavy extra cost to upgrade any unit in the empire with the buff. Nicely done.
Oh, apparently there's a terrain feature called "holy ground" where you can build temples to gods that increase your relationship and give you more quests from them. I just haven't seen it yet. I feel like this game could benefit from a civilopedia-type thing, but maybe that's just because I'm used to my Civ games having one.
Yes, I've built on one when playing as
Rjakh, and constructed a temple to Lunord. It improves your faction standing with the deity you build a temple to, and grants you access to that god's unique priest unit. Adepts of Lunord are fast, powerful fighters, and are intrinsically invisible to units further than one tile away.
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Topic: Warlock: Master of the Arcane [Paradox] (Read 34558 times)