Warlords Battlecry 3: An underrated timeless classic
This game mixes classic role-playing elements with real-time strategy genre. It is an underrated classic fantasy RTS, let's see why it is worth playing!
The first game, which was released in July 2000, was pretty dull with bare minimum of strategy gameplay, the races the world and system were basic. It was unsuccessful. The second game started the complex hero building, the magic system, the unique races and a customizable skirmish mode that helps hero training.
When you install the game, create your hero. You can be lost because of the amount of customization options.
You have 16 different races and 28 varying hero classes to choose from. Your races gives you different abilities which can be raised by leveling the hero. Let’s look at a basic game. I recommend doing some skirmish matches against the CPU before you go to the Campaign, it will be helpful. In Skirmish, you can set a terrain (snow, jungle, desert, caverns, highland…etc), quest buildings built randomly on the map (some spawns monsters who protect an artfact, magical item which can be used by your hero), and the amount of animals and mines. You can choose from 16 unique races to play. Steve Fawkner (Australian programmer in the game business) came up with incredible ideas. You can lead daemons (flying creatures who can summon their lessen versions in battle), dark dwarves (who are like evil dwarves producing golems and want to destroy forests), fey (little faeries, spriggans, leprichauns who have some interesting experience upgrades).
You can find all the elven stereotypes too in the game and orcs as well. This is what I love about this game. You never know which opponents you get and you can leave your race setting random which makes things exciting. You can choose how strong the AI opponents shall be. It is good to set it up for your hero’s level.
You can level easily until you set Prince opponent (the AI levels are presented by ranks like Squire and Prince). You can set some unique traits to the map like random weather (weather affects different creatures), tough starting towers (your basic towers are hard to bring down). It is really diverse. One more important option. Army points. It represents how many units you can choose from the start of the game. Here you can bring your mercenary retinue into the gameplay. Those are units who gained enough experience points in a battle to get a reputation to be chosen. You can hire the almighty minotaur king or a summoner mage who can summon daemons.
If you are into the game, you can see how basic the graphics is. It is charming enough to make you want to see more. Birds flying in grasslands, the AI’s evil minions discover the map, it began raining. Anything can happen. The music is really good. Warlords games all have fascinating tunes.
First thing to do with your hero is to convert mines under your flag. The four basic resources are gold, ore, metal and crystal. Nothing interesting, but I think I love that. It is not as unique as in the Heroes of Might and Magic. Mines produce resources for you after a successful conversion. You can put your worker units (except elven races because they are as much of nature lovers as in other games) to increase production. In the first few battles, I recommend to put your hero into the towers to defend your city.
The city building is not complex. You upgrade your HQ until level 5, you get more buildings and developments and skills in each level. You have unit-producing buildings, buildings for researches and defensive structures. The way of expanding your city is special for each race.
If you go out with your hero, support him with melee units. Your hero unit can attack only melee. He/She can use magic and abilities. Beware of units who has assassination skill which can kill your hero instantly (Gnolls and Dark Elven Assassins). You expand your city, convert more mines, and destroy enemy heroes and cities. You get experience points, you can level up in-game and after a successful victory. Then you upgrade your main stats (the game explains which is what for) and upgrade one of your abilities (damage bonus versus dwarves for example) or develop new spells (the game has a lot of magic types).
On level 5, you can build your „Titan” unit which is a deity like creature with insane amount of damage output and health. You can raze an opponent with a units like this. The game has an interesting „AI support” feature. You can give commands to your units like „guard an object”, „exploration of the map”. My favourite is rampant. If you set it to your unit, it will go rampaging on the map. It is useful if you can’t find your last enemies on the map. The computer likes to hide his last units and also likes to build towers in obscure places. AI support can be set in the unit production window. So units produced in that building will learn what you want them to do. You can be defensive by staying in your base or you can harass your enemies by mass producing flying units and basic hack’n slash units. Units have different damage types. Some are sensitive to magic damage for example. Always look at your enemies before you move your army.
After you are trained more in the skirmish mode, you can try campaign mode which is an adventure-like game mode. You can visit places, travel the seas, getting ambushed by goblin in transit and get more powerful items, mercenaries and other goodies in your hero’s backpack. This game has a tons of gameplay time. You can pop this game in every day to gain a level, finish a quest or you just entertain yourself with this fantastic game. Battlecry 3 needs a HD remaster because it is so great. Fans are waiting. Hopefully, one day will get something from the creator, Steve Fawkner. Until then battle with hero. Up to a new adventure, every day!
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