I've spent thousands of hours in the 3 games of the series. I love them all and I think the perfect Warlords game would have features of all 3 of them. This review will be like a comparison for those who may have played 3 before this one. Here, the RTS battle is at its best. Warriors are more powerful; you don't have to rely on your retinue, spellcasters are more interesting and still very fun to play: plentiful of mana without the need to invest every single point to intelligence. Annoying random criticals of 3 are not a thing* I also liked the class development system much more than in 3. Raising Training to 13/19/25 and 41** may at first seem like a grind, delaying your development, but it gives you some kind of purpose. In every level, you feel like you can actually improve your character in something (and not just 1 point for 1 spell and call it a level). There are 4 less races here, for which I don't care much about. The disadvantages of this game is that there is no depth in its campaign: no matter who owns an area, you'll fight the original map (if you are lucky, otherwise a random one, still nothing to do with its owner), and a race who owns more maps (besides you, getting bonuses) doesn't seem to get more powerful due to that. No trading, no resources, no alliances, not anything. There are senseless race/class restrictions (a trend of the time that plagued many games, like BGs), and to my PC (with dxwnd for a decent resolution) it crashes frequently, so save often. For any other game, I wouldn't tolerate that. Still the best. * armor here does what it's supposed to do, % damage reduction. It's not a bad thing alone that they changed it in 3, the bad thing is that they left every other aspect of the battle as is (including critical chances), so it destroyed the balance. ** to get the bonus points each level. Fighters and Archmages can get to 41 relatively easily, runemasters, shamen, runemasters and DKs with much more effort, the rest can stop to 25.
