Warlords 3: Reign of Heroes and it's stand alone expansion, this game Darklords Rising were favorites of my childhood. Finally going back and playing after years of not being able to has been a real treat, not to mention introducing friends to it that never played it. A lot of strategy games of recent memory have gameplay DNA that comes from games like Age of Empires, Command & Conqueror, or Blizzard's RTS games; Warlords does not come from that strain of strategy. For one thing it's turn based, and for another it has a lot of RNG, because Warlords 3 is a game with roots in table-top war gaming. If you play it with that in mind it can be a lot of fun, but if you're expecting a lot of direct control beyond moving armies, building fortress improvements, and leveling your hero units expect to be disappointed. But if you can get beyond that, there's a lot of fun and grand strategy. For example. Vectoring is a crucial part of this game, which is where you make a unit in a fortress but transport it to another fortress that you control. Depending on the distance it might take 1-2 turns after the normal production time. This allow you and your enemies to keep your frontier fortresses well garrisoned. Sometimes, particularly in larger maps with lots of rough terrain deciding to keep or raze fortresses can be critical to denying an enemy another front to attack you from. You can also, if you're patient, move a force in from an unexpected area (say if you have flying units) and decimate an enemy's starting fortresses which are typically where a lot of their production and vectoring are done. The music is fantastic, and the art quite good for it's time and still holds up, for the most part. There are stories to the campaigns, but it's basically like a Wikipedia page about a war. One annoyance for me, but probably not for others, Darklords Rising released without the cheesy FMV videos that the original game had where Lord Bane would heckle you, and I kind of miss that.
