Warning: Long post
I am a huge fan of Master of Magic and I have been analyzing this game for more than 12 years. I am still trying to adapt it as a board game to be able to play the game in a shorter amount of time without a computer. I played a lot of games that tried to replace it like Age of Wonders and Elemental. So when I heard about Warlock, I was pleased to have another game to play. Now that I finished my first game, I thought that I should write a review about it. I'll divide it in 3 sections, the "good", the "could be good" and "bad" comments.
--- What is good about Warlock ---
Simple City management: This is the first 4X game where city management does not consume 80% of the player's time. In warlock, there is no worker placement and the player can build up to 1 building per 100 population. So you cannot build everything and that is OK.
Fixed construction time: The production time for units an buildings is fixed. I find it much more convenient than dividing cost by production. It avoid the syndrome that a unit takes 60 turns to build and then adding population reduce it to 20 turns. It makes it easier for players to plan ahead their production.
Double production queue: I always thought that having a queue for buildings and units was very logical. I hate it when I have to paralyze my whole city development because I am in war and need to build units.
Double Resources usage: I like the idea that I can use a resource in different ways. For example, use silver ore for money or for silver weaponry. It gives more choice to the player's city development.
Water Mobility: Allowing all units to move on water is simply AWESOME! It prevents many AI problems, simplify the army management, the user interface and reduce deployment time.
Fusion of world and tactical map: Having the tactical map on the world has numerous advantages. I know it was already implemented in Civ 5, but Warlock is the first place where I could experiment it. It first simplifies the game interface since each hex can only have 1 unit, so there is no need to select a unit within a stack, or to do stack management. Second, it makes it much more mult iplayer friendly because you do not have to "pause" the game to resolve battles. The battles evolves as the game progress. Finally, it makes the game feel more like a board game.
Hex Map: Hmmmm! ... Hex maps!
--- What could have been good ---
Gods: Adding gods to the game was a great idea but there is little interaction with the gods and their impact on the game is minimal. Players should have the option to choose a god to support in other ways than making quest and temples. They should also be able to have diplomacy with their gods. You could make the player dependent on the gods, like a primary source of mana is given by gods. The god you believe in could also fix the political situation of the world. Like you are more likely to ally with players of the same god. Then when a player has enough power, he could rebel against his god and stay on their own but get attacked by other players on random god events. I still think there is too many gods. I would have used between 3-5 gods, not 8.
Tasks: This is another idea that could have been interesting, but it ends up be very boring. I think it could be a good way to link gods with task. The tasks should always be requested by gods and they should be something more interesting than build building X, or defeat enemy Y. The request could be related to diplomatic relations between the gods and the players. If a god does not like a player, he could require that you capture a city or kill some of his units.
Land gives no basic income: Well this is not necessarily a bug, it's just easier to have buildings gives % bonus when you have a basic income because 1000% of 0 = 0; In other Civ game, the terrain where the city is built generate basic income. I like this idea because it allows player to find the best place for their city.
Warlock gives fixed income from other buildings instead. So more income requires more buildings. I find this solution less logical because it's like if for example, you population did not have any economy if you did not have the building to generate gold. It also force you to have buildings that gives income and then building that multiplies income. Making it more complicated to know which solution will benefit you more. Personally, if you want to keep the game simple by not making each piece of territory give food and gold output, why not make the population level give basic food and gold output and make buildings modify the output. For example, each population gives 1 food and 1 gold. So larger cities will give more resources and buildings would multiply the income.
Shared buildings which are not shared: The engine seem to support the idea of sharing their effect between cities by marking buildings with a check mark. Right now the only sharing available is to be able to pay 50 gold to get an upgrade for any unit on the board. Personally, I would like building abilities to be shared between cities if at least the cities touch each other. This means that if a city allow master work equipment, than all connected cities also get the master work improvement. This feature would apply to all buildings with a check mark. So that will also affect unit production buildings. If you can build a unit in a city, all connected cities can do it. I would add a restriction that the cities must be of the same race.
This also prevent another problem where a large chain of dependencies is required to produce high level units. So a city needs to build a large amount of building before unlocking higher level units. So what happens is that each city can only build 1 branch of unit because it's too expensive in space to diversify in multiple branches. I don't ask for dependencies to be shared between cities, only that other cities could build other cities units.
--- What is bad about warlock ---
Weak Repetitive Magic: This is a problem with almost all video games that involve wizards: Game designers are scared of wizards. They always think that wizards are too powerful and will unbalance the game. This is why in D&D, you must learn your spells in advance and have specific ingredients to cat, this is why in Dragon Age, all mages are locked up into a tower. So I am not surprised to see that in warlock, magic sucks too. In fact, there is 2 video game that I know where magic kick ass: D&D Shadow over Mystara (Ironically a D&D franchise) and of course the one and only Master of magic. In all other games, or almost, magic is extremely weak (age of wonders, heroes of might and magic, elemental, etc).
The second aspect specific to warlock is that most spells are made of the same 10 effects that are repeated over and over with different parameters. Like a damage spell, with various elemental properties, range of damage, area of effects, etc. This just create a large list of spells which are all the same. Oh! Another unit resistance spell, healing spell, attack spell, etc. Some spells are truly repetitive since for example: lightning bolt and fire ball does both element damage, so they are the same type.
So not only magic should be enhanced, but there should be a much wider variety of effects, rather than having fireball lvl 1, 2, and 3. In case of making different spells, why not make 1 spell where you can pump in additional mana. There should for example have more city enchantment, they should add global enchantments, land enchantments, etc.
No Magic school:It is much more easier to add variety if there could be schools of magic to choose where to get your spells from. I also does not give to all players access to the same spell, so it creates some sort of rock-paper-scissor relationship between the players. What made master of magic very interesting regarding variety is that various combinations of race and magic school created various kind of game play results. If you give all the same spell to all the players, it prevent players from planning combos during their race selection.
Excessive maintenance cost for buildings and unit: The maintenance cost is simply annoying. I think you should use the CiV rev solution which is, remove almost all negative modifiers. Maintenance cost for units is OK, you want to limit the size of a player's army. But maintenance cost for buildings is ridiculous because the number of buildings you can build is already limit. So even with 0 maintenance cost, no abuse would be possible. The restriction for buildings is actually: try to optimize the management of your space. You do not need a double restriction.
As for units, can somebody explain me why Higher level unit consume more food than basic units. They eat more! I think that food maintenance should be always 1 for all units except when it's obvious that there is an higher food consumption. For example: cavalry need food for the horse and the horseman. Trolls probably eat more than a regular humanoid. More gold maintenance is OK since more experienced unit would require higher wages, but not food.
Planes only have 1 access: I think what makes the Myrror plane interesting in master of magic is the interaction between both planes. It works a bit like an electronic circuit board where the paths are different on the top and the bottom of the board, but the connection are at the same location. But all that dynamic is lost with the current plane system.
Water is useless to cities: Unfortunately, nothing can get build on water and that is a huge problem because if you have a city which is surrounded a lot by water, you end up not being able to make any buildings which could mean having no income. Of course, you can choose where to build your cities, but what if it's your starting city. This is why I suggest that there should be a few kind of buildings that goes on water. Probably they will not do anything special and only give food or gold. But at least, you can do something.
Unit Upgrades are too expensive: Unit upgrades after they are built is simply too expensive. Most upgrades cost 50 gold even if you could build the same unit for 25 gold and get the upgrade for free. I think that upgrades like "Master work", "drilled" and "fine armor" should cost around 5-10 gold and nothing more. Or use a proportional value, like 10% or 20% of the unit price. So that a 25 gold unit would cost 2.5 or 5 gold to upgrade.
No multiple path to city config: In my point of view, each city should be allowed to use different configuration and be able to change these configurations during game play according to the player's needs. The problem is that buildings has so many requisites and you can build so few that you can only allow cities to focus in 1 branch and stay there for the rest of the game. Maybe reducing requisite, or having generic requisites (like you need X military buildings in your city to build building Y, instead of you need building X to build building Y) could help increasing the flexibility of city management.
Too many buildings does the same thing: For example, the there are at least 4 gold bonus buildings that respectively gives +50%, +75%, +100%, +100% plus another 2-3 buildings that gives basic gold income. This is way too much buildings considering the building limit for a city. Maybe 2 buildings would have been enough one at +50% and one at +100%.
Hard to get high level buildings: Because there is so many dependencies, it's hard to be able to build higher level buildings. You need to know the tech tree by hard and focus intensively on a path to be able to build high level buildings. Be removing requisites or using more flexible restriction, it could make higher level buildings more accessible.
Struggling for resources: I always seem to be short in resources, it partly related to many of the points listed above like maintenance, upgrade cost, buildings and income source. Fixing those things above could make it easier to be able to run your empire with positive income.
Little Mana: You have so little mana that it makes magic worthless to use. I think there should be more magic nodes like in Master of magic that should give and output of 2-4 times the amount of gold of a large city. If people have more mana, they are more likely to be willing to pay to enchant units. Else 1 mana per unit is way too expensive.
Low Research: In my game, I kept the same research level for the first half of the game. Probably because it took a lot of time before being able to place buildings that allows to research spell. In MOM, mana can be converted as research. Warlock has the opposite feature, research can be converted as mana, but not otherwise. If players have more mana by placing more nodes, like explained above, it would give them more mana that could be spent on research. You could make player set a minimum nb of mana not to convert as research and then convert the rest when researching a spell.
Unit enchantment expensive: Like previously mentioned, unit enchantment is expensive because the mana generated is so low and because the enchantments are so weak, so they are not worth their share of the maintenance cost.
Little Diplomatic Options: There is so little diplomatic options. It's almost peace and war and nothing else. Adding trading between players could be good, but adding trade and research treaties like in Master of Orion 2 would be a minimum. I would even exchange access to units and upgrades your empire have. Like exchanging 3 "Masterwork equipment" pack for X gold and get 3 free upgrades. Exchanging services is another idea: kill that greater elemental and I'll cast a spell on your city.
If you want to keep things simple, instead of making individual transaction, make exchange treaties a la Master of Orion, that simply gives income and advantages on both sides while the treaty is active. This way, you will only need to have a bunch of treaties to design with various bonus, and you'll only need to negotiate which treaty you want. You could have upgrade exchange treaty, trade treaties that could boost gold, food, mana, research ot any other stats. You could have training treaties that share exp between empires. Many options are possible and it should not be so hard to implement.
In diplomacy, the player is always the loser: Sorry, but when I control half of the map, can I have some negotiating power? I hate when the player is always disadvantaged in negotiation and must always pay a supplement to get things done. I played at the lowest difficulty and could never get a fair trade, imagine at hard. Could it be possible to have fair trade at normal diplomacy and maybe have more factor that influence diplomacy.
Lack of building queue: You cannot place in queue more than 1 building, but you can queue multiple units. Adding a building queue should be easy to do, if a building in queue cannot be built for any reason, then simply give a warning message to the user.
No production buildings: There is no buildings that boost production. I can somewhat understand this because there is no production to accumulate since the production time is fixed. I have 2 solutions to get buildings that would boost production. A) make some buildings reduce the cost of units B) make all requirements depend on these production buildings. For example, You could have production buildings of level 1,2,3. If a building is of level 2, then you need to production building level 2 to unlock all level 2 building. This way, all your dependencies are attached to 1 path of buildings.
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This is all I can think of so far. I know that many people will object to many points I am proposing. Still, if a few of theses suggestions could actually reach the design of the game, I would be pretty happy.
Enjoy!
I am a huge fan of Master of Magic and I have been analyzing this game for more than 12 years. I am still trying to adapt it as a board game to be able to play the game in a shorter amount of time without a computer. I played a lot of games that tried to replace it like Age of Wonders and Elemental. So when I heard about Warlock, I was pleased to have another game to play. Now that I finished my first game, I thought that I should write a review about it. I'll divide it in 3 sections, the "good", the "could be good" and "bad" comments.
--- What is good about Warlock ---
Simple City management: This is the first 4X game where city management does not consume 80% of the player's time. In warlock, there is no worker placement and the player can build up to 1 building per 100 population. So you cannot build everything and that is OK.
Fixed construction time: The production time for units an buildings is fixed. I find it much more convenient than dividing cost by production. It avoid the syndrome that a unit takes 60 turns to build and then adding population reduce it to 20 turns. It makes it easier for players to plan ahead their production.
Double production queue: I always thought that having a queue for buildings and units was very logical. I hate it when I have to paralyze my whole city development because I am in war and need to build units.
Double Resources usage: I like the idea that I can use a resource in different ways. For example, use silver ore for money or for silver weaponry. It gives more choice to the player's city development.
Water Mobility: Allowing all units to move on water is simply AWESOME! It prevents many AI problems, simplify the army management, the user interface and reduce deployment time.
Fusion of world and tactical map: Having the tactical map on the world has numerous advantages. I know it was already implemented in Civ 5, but Warlock is the first place where I could experiment it. It first simplifies the game interface since each hex can only have 1 unit, so there is no need to select a unit within a stack, or to do stack management. Second, it makes it much more mult iplayer friendly because you do not have to "pause" the game to resolve battles. The battles evolves as the game progress. Finally, it makes the game feel more like a board game.
Hex Map: Hmmmm! ... Hex maps!
--- What could have been good ---
Gods: Adding gods to the game was a great idea but there is little interaction with the gods and their impact on the game is minimal. Players should have the option to choose a god to support in other ways than making quest and temples. They should also be able to have diplomacy with their gods. You could make the player dependent on the gods, like a primary source of mana is given by gods. The god you believe in could also fix the political situation of the world. Like you are more likely to ally with players of the same god. Then when a player has enough power, he could rebel against his god and stay on their own but get attacked by other players on random god events. I still think there is too many gods. I would have used between 3-5 gods, not 8.
Tasks: This is another idea that could have been interesting, but it ends up be very boring. I think it could be a good way to link gods with task. The tasks should always be requested by gods and they should be something more interesting than build building X, or defeat enemy Y. The request could be related to diplomatic relations between the gods and the players. If a god does not like a player, he could require that you capture a city or kill some of his units.
Land gives no basic income: Well this is not necessarily a bug, it's just easier to have buildings gives % bonus when you have a basic income because 1000% of 0 = 0; In other Civ game, the terrain where the city is built generate basic income. I like this idea because it allows player to find the best place for their city.
Warlock gives fixed income from other buildings instead. So more income requires more buildings. I find this solution less logical because it's like if for example, you population did not have any economy if you did not have the building to generate gold. It also force you to have buildings that gives income and then building that multiplies income. Making it more complicated to know which solution will benefit you more. Personally, if you want to keep the game simple by not making each piece of territory give food and gold output, why not make the population level give basic food and gold output and make buildings modify the output. For example, each population gives 1 food and 1 gold. So larger cities will give more resources and buildings would multiply the income.
Shared buildings which are not shared: The engine seem to support the idea of sharing their effect between cities by marking buildings with a check mark. Right now the only sharing available is to be able to pay 50 gold to get an upgrade for any unit on the board. Personally, I would like building abilities to be shared between cities if at least the cities touch each other. This means that if a city allow master work equipment, than all connected cities also get the master work improvement. This feature would apply to all buildings with a check mark. So that will also affect unit production buildings. If you can build a unit in a city, all connected cities can do it. I would add a restriction that the cities must be of the same race.
This also prevent another problem where a large chain of dependencies is required to produce high level units. So a city needs to build a large amount of building before unlocking higher level units. So what happens is that each city can only build 1 branch of unit because it's too expensive in space to diversify in multiple branches. I don't ask for dependencies to be shared between cities, only that other cities could build other cities units.
--- What is bad about warlock ---
Weak Repetitive Magic: This is a problem with almost all video games that involve wizards: Game designers are scared of wizards. They always think that wizards are too powerful and will unbalance the game. This is why in D&D, you must learn your spells in advance and have specific ingredients to cat, this is why in Dragon Age, all mages are locked up into a tower. So I am not surprised to see that in warlock, magic sucks too. In fact, there is 2 video game that I know where magic kick ass: D&D Shadow over Mystara (Ironically a D&D franchise) and of course the one and only Master of magic. In all other games, or almost, magic is extremely weak (age of wonders, heroes of might and magic, elemental, etc).
The second aspect specific to warlock is that most spells are made of the same 10 effects that are repeated over and over with different parameters. Like a damage spell, with various elemental properties, range of damage, area of effects, etc. This just create a large list of spells which are all the same. Oh! Another unit resistance spell, healing spell, attack spell, etc. Some spells are truly repetitive since for example: lightning bolt and fire ball does both element damage, so they are the same type.
So not only magic should be enhanced, but there should be a much wider variety of effects, rather than having fireball lvl 1, 2, and 3. In case of making different spells, why not make 1 spell where you can pump in additional mana. There should for example have more city enchantment, they should add global enchantments, land enchantments, etc.
No Magic school:It is much more easier to add variety if there could be schools of magic to choose where to get your spells from. I also does not give to all players access to the same spell, so it creates some sort of rock-paper-scissor relationship between the players. What made master of magic very interesting regarding variety is that various combinations of race and magic school created various kind of game play results. If you give all the same spell to all the players, it prevent players from planning combos during their race selection.
Excessive maintenance cost for buildings and unit: The maintenance cost is simply annoying. I think you should use the CiV rev solution which is, remove almost all negative modifiers. Maintenance cost for units is OK, you want to limit the size of a player's army. But maintenance cost for buildings is ridiculous because the number of buildings you can build is already limit. So even with 0 maintenance cost, no abuse would be possible. The restriction for buildings is actually: try to optimize the management of your space. You do not need a double restriction.
As for units, can somebody explain me why Higher level unit consume more food than basic units. They eat more! I think that food maintenance should be always 1 for all units except when it's obvious that there is an higher food consumption. For example: cavalry need food for the horse and the horseman. Trolls probably eat more than a regular humanoid. More gold maintenance is OK since more experienced unit would require higher wages, but not food.
Planes only have 1 access: I think what makes the Myrror plane interesting in master of magic is the interaction between both planes. It works a bit like an electronic circuit board where the paths are different on the top and the bottom of the board, but the connection are at the same location. But all that dynamic is lost with the current plane system.
Water is useless to cities: Unfortunately, nothing can get build on water and that is a huge problem because if you have a city which is surrounded a lot by water, you end up not being able to make any buildings which could mean having no income. Of course, you can choose where to build your cities, but what if it's your starting city. This is why I suggest that there should be a few kind of buildings that goes on water. Probably they will not do anything special and only give food or gold. But at least, you can do something.
Unit Upgrades are too expensive: Unit upgrades after they are built is simply too expensive. Most upgrades cost 50 gold even if you could build the same unit for 25 gold and get the upgrade for free. I think that upgrades like "Master work", "drilled" and "fine armor" should cost around 5-10 gold and nothing more. Or use a proportional value, like 10% or 20% of the unit price. So that a 25 gold unit would cost 2.5 or 5 gold to upgrade.
No multiple path to city config: In my point of view, each city should be allowed to use different configuration and be able to change these configurations during game play according to the player's needs. The problem is that buildings has so many requisites and you can build so few that you can only allow cities to focus in 1 branch and stay there for the rest of the game. Maybe reducing requisite, or having generic requisites (like you need X military buildings in your city to build building Y, instead of you need building X to build building Y) could help increasing the flexibility of city management.
Too many buildings does the same thing: For example, the there are at least 4 gold bonus buildings that respectively gives +50%, +75%, +100%, +100% plus another 2-3 buildings that gives basic gold income. This is way too much buildings considering the building limit for a city. Maybe 2 buildings would have been enough one at +50% and one at +100%.
Hard to get high level buildings: Because there is so many dependencies, it's hard to be able to build higher level buildings. You need to know the tech tree by hard and focus intensively on a path to be able to build high level buildings. Be removing requisites or using more flexible restriction, it could make higher level buildings more accessible.
Struggling for resources: I always seem to be short in resources, it partly related to many of the points listed above like maintenance, upgrade cost, buildings and income source. Fixing those things above could make it easier to be able to run your empire with positive income.
Little Mana: You have so little mana that it makes magic worthless to use. I think there should be more magic nodes like in Master of magic that should give and output of 2-4 times the amount of gold of a large city. If people have more mana, they are more likely to be willing to pay to enchant units. Else 1 mana per unit is way too expensive.
Low Research: In my game, I kept the same research level for the first half of the game. Probably because it took a lot of time before being able to place buildings that allows to research spell. In MOM, mana can be converted as research. Warlock has the opposite feature, research can be converted as mana, but not otherwise. If players have more mana by placing more nodes, like explained above, it would give them more mana that could be spent on research. You could make player set a minimum nb of mana not to convert as research and then convert the rest when researching a spell.
Unit enchantment expensive: Like previously mentioned, unit enchantment is expensive because the mana generated is so low and because the enchantments are so weak, so they are not worth their share of the maintenance cost.
Little Diplomatic Options: There is so little diplomatic options. It's almost peace and war and nothing else. Adding trading between players could be good, but adding trade and research treaties like in Master of Orion 2 would be a minimum. I would even exchange access to units and upgrades your empire have. Like exchanging 3 "Masterwork equipment" pack for X gold and get 3 free upgrades. Exchanging services is another idea: kill that greater elemental and I'll cast a spell on your city.
If you want to keep things simple, instead of making individual transaction, make exchange treaties a la Master of Orion, that simply gives income and advantages on both sides while the treaty is active. This way, you will only need to have a bunch of treaties to design with various bonus, and you'll only need to negotiate which treaty you want. You could have upgrade exchange treaty, trade treaties that could boost gold, food, mana, research ot any other stats. You could have training treaties that share exp between empires. Many options are possible and it should not be so hard to implement.
In diplomacy, the player is always the loser: Sorry, but when I control half of the map, can I have some negotiating power? I hate when the player is always disadvantaged in negotiation and must always pay a supplement to get things done. I played at the lowest difficulty and could never get a fair trade, imagine at hard. Could it be possible to have fair trade at normal diplomacy and maybe have more factor that influence diplomacy.
Lack of building queue: You cannot place in queue more than 1 building, but you can queue multiple units. Adding a building queue should be easy to do, if a building in queue cannot be built for any reason, then simply give a warning message to the user.
No production buildings: There is no buildings that boost production. I can somewhat understand this because there is no production to accumulate since the production time is fixed. I have 2 solutions to get buildings that would boost production. A) make some buildings reduce the cost of units B) make all requirements depend on these production buildings. For example, You could have production buildings of level 1,2,3. If a building is of level 2, then you need to production building level 2 to unlock all level 2 building. This way, all your dependencies are attached to 1 path of buildings.
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This is all I can think of so far. I know that many people will object to many points I am proposing. Still, if a few of theses suggestions could actually reach the design of the game, I would be pretty happy.
Enjoy!