warlords battlecry 2 - Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community

dragon2fire · 12-24-2003, 09:58 PM

i cant belive how few people paly the best rts in the world

this game is just plain awsome

12 very different races

you have a hero that stays with you and levels up

varing ai diffuaties

truly random maps

tons of stargies

its by far the best rts out there so my question is does any one else play it

has any one else heard of it?

charlesesl · 12-25-2003, 12:50 PM

i thought about getting it.
But decided against it after seeing the screenshots.

Phaenx · 12-25-2003, 02:00 PM

I played Warlords way back in the day, when it came on floppy disk. That was a fun game, you could design your own hero's (Little 8-bit graphics). I just got Warlords 4 not long ago, it was pretty fun but turn based games lose their charm after a while.

dragon2fire · 12-25-2003, 04:42 PM

warlords battlecry 2 is not trun based phaenx

warlords is

battlecry is not

charlessel you are missing out on many good game inculding this one if graphic are the only thing your looking for

corse your probaly happy with warcarft 3

have fun with your sub par game i hope you and the graphics are happy together

a link for those looking for a review

http://www.gamespot.com/pc/strategy/...ry2/index.html

When the Warlords series of turn-based strategy games became popular in the early '90s, there was something novel about setting a fairly serious, heavily stats-driven conquest game in a world of swords and sorcery. In the decade since, there's been a profusion of strategy games that have borrowed fantasy trappings to decorate gameworlds of varying originality. The original Warlords games always focused less on story or flashy graphics than on strategic gameplay and risky combat between monstrous units. It's in this way that Warlords Battlecry II can be considered a true real-time heir to the series. It expands on the foundations of the original Warlords Battlecry with a dynamic campaign for conquest, even more playable factions than the original, a new titan unit type, and other gameplay intricacies. But the best part about this sequel is still the RPG-like hero development that so distinguished Warlords Battlecry from other real-time strategy games.

The Warlords Battlecry games' unique feature is that they let you create and control a persistent hero character who gains experience from one battle to the next, specializing in one of many classes and gaining spells and skills in the process. The hero is the essential unit in every battle, not only because of its powerful combat and magical capabilities, but also because of its ability to capture resources, build structures, and give command bonuses to nearby troops. Heroes start out weak and can progress up to level 50, so there's quite a lot of work before heroes come into their own as a major force on the battlefield. If the hero dies, it's still possible to win a scenario or skirmish, though when you create a hero, you choose one of four modes that determine the penalty for dying, ranging from no penalty at all through experience penalties and permanent death.

While developing a hero is slow going at first, Warlords Battlecry II rewards patient character building. The good news is that heroes really are persistent. You can carry a hero over from the single-player campaign into skirmishes and even into open multiplayer games. The lure of gaining levels is a good motivator for pushing through the dynamic campaign, and you have a number of options when building a hero. From the second level, heroes specialize in one of four standard classes: warrior, priest, rogue, or wizard. From there, there are subclasses, each with particular abilities, including assassination skills and eight schools of magic. As you might expect from a game in the Dungeons & Dragons tradition, the race of your hero determines which class options are available. But the overall profusion of choices means that such restrictions actually just help clear out some of the lesser possibilities.

There are plenty of units to back a hero on the battlefield. The original Warlord Battlecry had nine playable factions, and the sequel adds three more to the mix. This isn't as overwhelming as it may seem, partly because some units are on more than one faction's unit list and, though the building art is unique to each race, structures are often analogous. The three types of elves--high elves, wood elves, and dark elves--are all particularly similar, and mostly differ by just one or two units. The barbarians and minotaurs also have some similarities.

Most of the races are conventional fantasy archetypes and have a straightforward, combative style, but the game's developers were more imaginative with the evil races: undead, daemons, dark elves, and dark dwarves. For example, while the dark elves have plenty of standard elven units, their evil magic gives them units like spider queens, who lay eggs in the bodies of fallen foes that hatch into spiders. The undead and daemons have units with strong summoning skills, as the undead's necromancer raises skeletons from the dead and the daemon's summoners makes whip-wielding daemons appear. Higher-level heroes can also learn these and other summoning spells. Warlords Battlecry II has added one new unit type, the titan. Each race has one of these superunits at the top of the tech tree, and as befits their title, they're generally incredibly large and powerful. Still, though, the game's battles often involve so many units by the end that titans aren't impossible to stop.

The story-based campaign of the original Warlords Battlecry has been replaced by a dynamic campaign that details your quest to conquer the world of Etheria. Fortunately, you don't have to conquer all 67 regions in the world to win the campaign--47 will do. There isn't much strategy to the campaign level, as it mostly boils down to selecting a territory to conquer and then playing a skirmish against one or more computer opponents. These skirmishes mostly take place on prebuilt maps, but a few goal-based missions and some pitched battles that have building turned off add some variety. Also, at the start of some turns, there'll be special events, such as mercenaries who offer to join you in the next battle or enemy forces that invade one of your territories.

Success in the campaign does have its advantages, as you can use money earned from holding territories to bring veteran units into the start of a battle. All units can gain experience, which translates into faster attacks and more hit points or mana. And unlike most games with veteran systems, you can carry veteran units over from one battle to the next by adding them to your hero's retinue. But it does take "army points" to bring units into a battle, and more powerful units are balanced by a higher cost. Unlike heroes, veteran units aren't resurrected between battles if they die, so there's some real incentive not to throw these units away needlessly. Overall, the dynamic campaign is a strong reminder of the turn-based heritage of the Warlords series, but the intervening real-time battles between turns are often fairly long unless you corner and kill an opposing hero early on. For this reason, the campaign succeeds more as a framework for skirmishes and hero development than--like in Shogun: Total War--as an operational strategy complement to the game's real-time strategy core.

While there are some alternate victory conditions, most of the game's real-time battles force you to eliminate every enemy unit and building from the map. There are always a few defensive towers to help defend against a rush by an enemy hero and his or her retinue, but there's still plenty of action early in a battle over capturing the four types of resources scattered around maps. Just holding a mine slowly gives you resources, but almost all races have the option of putting builder units into mines to speed up production. Races use different resources for their major upgrades, so it's possible to target enemies' mines to deny them essential resources. The AI for the computer opponents persistently moves toward unguarded resources to capture them, but it doesn't always go after lightly guarded resources very aggressively. The AI tends to send a constant, minor stream of attackers, which makes it easier to defeat. That's a perhaps good thing, since the AI is quite good at micromanaging its forces. But after early resource skirmishes and assassination attempts on enemy heroes, the game's design really shows its preference for large massed attacks. Because of the relatively small and hard-to-click units, large battles can be fairly unmanageable. However, players can give units commands while the game is paused, and the sequel adds new attitude settings to the unit AI to make spellcasters cast spells automatically. Even so, spells cast by non-hero units often seem underpowered when those units are facing a large enemy force.

While it may innovate in terms of gameplay, Warlords Battlecry II won't impress anyone with its in-game graphics. For sure, the 2D art is colorful, crisp, and detailed, and the sequel has added 3D terrain, but the unit animations and designs are quite bland. Idle animations are few and infrequently seen, so the screen can look quite static except during battle. It's a similar story for the game's sound, as the voice acting is passable, but even key units such as heroes have only a few lines. The game's music is actually quite impressive in comparison, ranging from suitably rousing battle music to haunting vocals. Finally, the save game system could have used some polish, as there's only one in-mission save slot, and this is invalidated when your hero levels up, so one of the game's infrequent but inexplicable crashes to the desktop could leave you without whatever hard-fought territory you'd won since your last save. There also aren't any save slots for campaign progress.

Warlords Battlecry II's many playable factions, persistent heroes, and dynamic campaign are innovative elements on top of a solid real-time strategy game. The original Warlords Battlecry was the one of the very first games to effectively use the concept of heroes in a multiplayer-focused real-time strategy game, before Shattered Galaxy or Blizzard's upcoming Warcraft III. If the multiplayer component ends up being popular on the Ubi.com matching service, it should be interesting to create a hero in the service's closed, server-side mode, which allows for competitive rankings. However, while the sequel makes a number of general improvements to the formula established by its predecessor, Warlords Battlecry II doesn't take a big leap forward. The game can be best recommended to players new to the series who are intrigued by the game's hero system.

LaughingCow · 12-26-2003, 06:51 PM

I have it, but havn't played it for ages since I've been playing AOM. If I had more then 100 megs left on my hard drive I've prolly install it again though. The main reason people don't play it, online atleast is that the Ubi-online thing was pretty crappy.

I would rate it as one of my favorite games, hopefully WBC 3 will be good when it comes out.

charlesesl · 12-27-2003, 05:38 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by dragon2fire
warlords battlecry 2 is not trun based phaenx

warlords is

battlecry is not

charlessel you are missing out on many good game inculding this one if graphic are the only thing your looking for

corse your probaly happy with warcarft 3

have fun with your sub par game i hope you and the graphics are happy together

a link for those looking for a review

http://www.gamespot.com/pc/strategy/...ry2/index.html

When the Warlords series of turn-based strategy games became popular in the early '90s, there was something novel about setting a fairly serious, heavily stats-driven conquest game in a world of swords and sorcery. In the decade since, there's been a profusion of strategy games that have borrowed fantasy trappings to decorate gameworlds of varying originality. The original Warlords games always focused less on story or flashy graphics than on strategic gameplay and risky combat between monstrous units. It's in this way that Warlords Battlecry II can be considered a true real-time heir to the series. It expands on the foundations of the original Warlords Battlecry with a dynamic campaign for conquest, even more playable factions than the original, a new titan unit type, and other gameplay intricacies. But the best part about this sequel is still the RPG-like hero development that so distinguished Warlords Battlecry from other real-time strategy games.

The Warlords Battlecry games' unique feature is that they let you create and control a persistent hero character who gains experience from one battle to the next, specializing in one of many classes and gaining spells and skills in the process. The hero is the essential unit in every battle, not only because of its powerful combat and magical capabilities, but also because of its ability to capture resources, build structures, and give command bonuses to nearby troops. Heroes start out weak and can progress up to level 50, so there's quite a lot of work before heroes come into their own as a major force on the battlefield. If the hero dies, it's still possible to win a scenario or skirmish, though when you create a hero, you choose one of four modes that determine the penalty for dying, ranging from no penalty at all through experience penalties and permanent death.

While developing a hero is slow going at first, Warlords Battlecry II rewards patient character building. The good news is that heroes really are persistent. You can carry a hero over from the single-player campaign into skirmishes and even into open multiplayer games. The lure of gaining levels is a good motivator for pushing through the dynamic campaign, and you have a number of options when building a hero. From the second level, heroes specialize in one of four standard classes: warrior, priest, rogue, or wizard. From there, there are subclasses, each with particular abilities, including assassination skills and eight schools of magic. As you might expect from a game in the Dungeons & Dragons tradition, the race of your hero determines which class options are available. But the overall profusion of choices means that such restrictions actually just help clear out some of the lesser possibilities.

There are plenty of units to back a hero on the battlefield. The original Warlord Battlecry had nine playable factions, and the sequel adds three more to the mix. This isn't as overwhelming as it may seem, partly because some units are on more than one faction's unit list and, though the building art is unique to each race, structures are often analogous. The three types of elves--high elves, wood elves, and dark elves--are all particularly similar, and mostly differ by just one or two units. The barbarians and minotaurs also have some similarities.

Most of the races are conventional fantasy archetypes and have a straightforward, combative style, but the game's developers were more imaginative with the evil races: undead, daemons, dark elves, and dark dwarves. For example, while the dark elves have plenty of standard elven units, their evil magic gives them units like spider queens, who lay eggs in the bodies of fallen foes that hatch into spiders. The undead and daemons have units with strong summoning skills, as the undead's necromancer raises skeletons from the dead and the daemon's summoners makes whip-wielding daemons appear. Higher-level heroes can also learn these and other summoning spells. Warlords Battlecry II has added one new unit type, the titan. Each race has one of these superunits at the top of the tech tree, and as befits their title, they're generally incredibly large and powerful. Still, though, the game's battles often involve so many units by the end that titans aren't impossible to stop.

The story-based campaign of the original Warlords Battlecry has been replaced by a dynamic campaign that details your quest to conquer the world of Etheria. Fortunately, you don't have to conquer all 67 regions in the world to win the campaign--47 will do. There isn't much strategy to the campaign level, as it mostly boils down to selecting a territory to conquer and then playing a skirmish against one or more computer opponents. These skirmishes mostly take place on prebuilt maps, but a few goal-based missions and some pitched battles that have building turned off add some variety. Also, at the start of some turns, there'll be special events, such as mercenaries who offer to join you in the next battle or enemy forces that invade one of your territories.

Success in the campaign does have its advantages, as you can use money earned from holding territories to bring veteran units into the start of a battle. All units can gain experience, which translates into faster attacks and more hit points or mana. And unlike most games with veteran systems, you can carry veteran units over from one battle to the next by adding them to your hero's retinue. But it does take "army points" to bring units into a battle, and more powerful units are balanced by a higher cost. Unlike heroes, veteran units aren't resurrected between battles if they die, so there's some real incentive not to throw these units away needlessly. Overall, the dynamic campaign is a strong reminder of the turn-based heritage of the Warlords series, but the intervening real-time battles between turns are often fairly long unless you corner and kill an opposing hero early on. For this reason, the campaign succeeds more as a framework for skirmishes and hero development than--like in Shogun: Total War--as an operational strategy complement to the game's real-time strategy core.

While there are some alternate victory conditions, most of the game's real-time battles force you to eliminate every enemy unit and building from the map. There are always a few defensive towers to help defend against a rush by an enemy hero and his or her retinue, but there's still plenty of action early in a battle over capturing the four types of resources scattered around maps. Just holding a mine slowly gives you resources, but almost all races have the option of putting builder units into mines to speed up production. Races use different resources for their major upgrades, so it's possible to target enemies' mines to deny them essential resources. The AI for the computer opponents persistently moves toward unguarded resources to capture them, but it doesn't always go after lightly guarded resources very aggressively. The AI tends to send a constant, minor stream of attackers, which makes it easier to defeat. That's a perhaps good thing, since the AI is quite good at micromanaging its forces. But after early resource skirmishes and assassination attempts on enemy heroes, the game's design really shows its preference for large massed attacks. Because of the relatively small and hard-to-click units, large battles can be fairly unmanageable. However, players can give units commands while the game is paused, and the sequel adds new attitude settings to the unit AI to make spellcasters cast spells automatically. Even so, spells cast by non-hero units often seem underpowered when those units are facing a large enemy force.

While it may innovate in terms of gameplay, Warlords Battlecry II won't impress anyone with its in-game graphics. For sure, the 2D art is colorful, crisp, and detailed, and the sequel has added 3D terrain, but the unit animations and designs are quite bland. Idle animations are few and infrequently seen, so the screen can look quite static except during battle. It's a similar story for the game's sound, as the voice acting is passable, but even key units such as heroes have only a few lines. The game's music is actually quite impressive in comparison, ranging from suitably rousing battle music to haunting vocals. Finally, the save game system could have used some polish, as there's only one in-mission save slot, and this is invalidated when your hero levels up, so one of the game's infrequent but inexplicable crashes to the desktop could leave you without whatever hard-fought territory you'd won since your last save. There also aren't any save slots for campaign progress.

Warlords Battlecry II's many playable factions, persistent heroes, and dynamic campaign are innovative elements on top of a solid real-time strategy game. The original Warlords Battlecry was the one of the very first games to effectively use the concept of heroes in a multiplayer-focused real-time strategy game, before Shattered Galaxy or Blizzard's upcoming Warcraft III. If the multiplayer component ends up being popular on the Ubi.com matching service, it should be interesting to create a hero in the service's closed, server-side mode, which allows for competitive rankings. However, while the sequel makes a number of general improvements to the formula established by its predecessor, Warlords Battlecry II doesn't take a big leap forward. The game can be best recommended to players new to the series who are intrigued by the game's hero system.

wo man, easy on the insults
I am not saying its a bad game. After reading the review the gameplay seem pretty intereesting. But the graphics is a bit below my lowest acceptable limit. For a game that is released last year this is just way too ugly.
And second of all, I dont like warcraft 3, I am not big on micromanagement. But Strategic Studies could learn a thing or two from Blizzard. Starcraft was released 5-6 years ago, the game runs in 640*480 under 256 colors and its still looks several times better than Warlords Battlecry II.

NeverBorn · 12-27-2003, 09:46 PM

I wish I could get my old copy of Warlord 3: Darklords Rising to work..I loved that game

dragon2fire · 12-28-2003, 01:15 AM

the graphics can be set much better then the screen shots would suggest

it alows for low end graphics but also allows for very high res and much better graphics way better then starcraft

see they allowed for both low end and high end systems to run it

sorry about the insult but i am sick and tired of the mentaily that good graphic = good game

GakFace · 12-28-2003, 02:44 AM

first off.. the game's graphics are good enough for any RTS.. From what I've seen from Dragon2Fire's Screen (I live nearby), they do not suck.

SECONDLY.. I'm fucking pissed off at people who look at the graphics and say it doesn't cut it. I'll admit I do it sometimes, but its damn near annoying. Graphics don't make a game, they spice it up but they don't make a game.
--I don't intend to offend you charlesesl but reading the thought that the graphics didn't cut it triggered that rage, that and I've seen the game in play and the graphics weren't bad at all.--

LaughingCow · 12-28-2003, 11:12 AM

My friends are the same way about WBC 2. They all said the graphics looked crappy so therefore the game sucked, lol. I think they look good, and I'm glad WBC 3 will be using similar 2D graphics with a bit of an update to them.

I think I'm going to have to re-install it now.

charlesesl · 12-29-2003, 08:48 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by GakFace
first off.. the game's graphics are good enough for any RTS.. From what I've seen from Dragon2Fire's Screen (I live nearby), they do not suck.

SECONDLY.. I'm fucking pissed off at people who look at the graphics and say it doesn't cut it. I'll admit I do it sometimes, but its damn near annoying. Graphics don't make a game, they spice it up but they don't make a game.
--I don't intend to offend you charlesesl but reading the thought that the graphics didn't cut it triggered that rage, that and I've seen the game in play and the graphics weren't bad at all.--

None taken. I never said that good graphics equals good game, its just that any game in this day and age should have graphics decent enough to not be a pain in the eye to the players. I mean, i can live without 8xfsaa, bump mapping, cell shanding, volumetric shadows, but there is no way that i can stand 16 color with 380*250 resolution. And i think most of the players would feel the same. Good gameplay is good gameplay, but a good game should have decent graphics to accompany the good gameplay.

After reading ur reply i guess i sould give this game a try if i were ever given the chance. Maybe this game may turn out to have graphics equivilant to Kohan.

Moonduck · 12-30-2003, 11:58 AM

*shrug* I liked the turn-based version better. RTS is okay, but I really feel like I can develope a more coherent strategy when it is turn-based. I find it adds to my enjoyment and lessens the frantic pan-and-click repetitiveness of most strategy games.

Semi-Normal · 12-30-2003, 12:10 PM

I played the first Battlecry game and was totally unimpressed. Is the second one a lot better then?

dragon2fire · 01-02-2004, 07:14 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by Semi-Normal
I played the first Battlecry game and was totally unimpressed. Is the second one a lot better then?

the frist battlecry had a lot of bugs

that said what was your problem with it

if you did not like the game play then no you wont think its better since its very simlar

if you did not like the random crashing then yea its a ton better

so i guess my question is what did you dislike about the frist one

o and char this game has better graphics then kohan at least if you turn on the higher graphics in the options menu

Semi-Normal · 01-02-2004, 04:34 PM

I didn't like it because it was just another RTS (and it came out during the period where every other game released was a WC2/C&C clone) and added very little to the genre. In addition, it had even worse pathfinding AI than Warcraft 2.

dragon2fire · 01-05-2004, 05:51 AM

if you thought that the frist one was not unique then you will think this one is a gernic rts as well

i dont know what leads you to that conculsion though

no other rts has a persient heros and no other rts has a battle system quite like this

wbc2 takes a lot of elemnts form pervoius games and gives them its own unquie twist

as for the path finding yea that is one of the biggest flaws form this otherwise great game

the soultion is to play on random maps

Semi-Normal · 01-07-2004, 05:46 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by dragon2fire
no other rts has a persient heros

WC3? :P

Myth 1&2 now that I think of it, too. And 3, the pile of crappy level design that it was.

dragon2fire · 01-07-2004, 02:25 PM

wc3 the heros are not preseit

they go back to level one at the end of the map

in wbc2 they live on and get better up till level 50

i would not call the heros in myth presietnt either

presient is the key word here

Renegade · 01-08-2004, 02:25 PM

If you like the Warlords Battlecry series I highly recommend the game Spellforce! It has a similiar Role Playing Strategy hook, but with more involved RPG elements.

edit: oh it also has persistent heroes!

dragon2fire · 01-09-2004, 02:29 AM

cool renegade i will keep my eyes open for that

Astrocloud · 01-10-2004, 03:05 PM

I played warlords battlecry 2 to death. I tore it up before I had my cable modem... now nobody ever goes online anymore...

12-24-2003, 09:58 PM	#1 (permalink)
dragon2fire Junkie	warlords battlecry 2 i cant belive how few people paly the best rts in the world this game is just plain awsome 12 very different races you have a hero that stays with you and levels up varing ai diffuaties truly random maps tons of stargies its by far the best rts out there so my question is does any one else play it has any one else heard of it?

12-25-2003, 12:50 PM	#2 (permalink)
charlesesl Psycho	i thought about getting it. But decided against it after seeing the screenshots. __________________ It did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. Dr. Viktor E. Frankl

12-25-2003, 02:00 PM	#3 (permalink)
Phaenx The Northern Ward Location: Columbus, Ohio	I played Warlords way back in the day, when it came on floppy disk. That was a fun game, you could design your own hero's (Little 8-bit graphics). I just got Warlords 4 not long ago, it was pretty fun but turn based games lose their charm after a while. __________________ "I went shopping last night at like 1am. The place was empty and this old woman just making polite conversation said to me, 'where is everyone??' I replied, 'In bed, same place you and I should be!' Took me ten minutes to figure out why she gave me a dirty look." --Some guy

12-25-2003, 04:42 PM	#4 (permalink)
dragon2fire Junkie	warlords battlecry 2 is not trun based phaenx warlords is battlecry is not charlessel you are missing out on many good game inculding this one if graphic are the only thing your looking for corse your probaly happy with warcarft 3 have fun with your sub par game i hope you and the graphics are happy together a link for those looking for a review http://www.gamespot.com/pc/strategy/...ry2/index.html When the Warlords series of turn-based strategy games became popular in the early '90s, there was something novel about setting a fairly serious, heavily stats-driven conquest game in a world of swords and sorcery. In the decade since, there's been a profusion of strategy games that have borrowed fantasy trappings to decorate gameworlds of varying originality. The original Warlords games always focused less on story or flashy graphics than on strategic gameplay and risky combat between monstrous units. It's in this way that Warlords Battlecry II can be considered a true real-time heir to the series. It expands on the foundations of the original Warlords Battlecry with a dynamic campaign for conquest, even more playable factions than the original, a new titan unit type, and other gameplay intricacies. But the best part about this sequel is still the RPG-like hero development that so distinguished Warlords Battlecry from other real-time strategy games. The Warlords Battlecry games' unique feature is that they let you create and control a persistent hero character who gains experience from one battle to the next, specializing in one of many classes and gaining spells and skills in the process. The hero is the essential unit in every battle, not only because of its powerful combat and magical capabilities, but also because of its ability to capture resources, build structures, and give command bonuses to nearby troops. Heroes start out weak and can progress up to level 50, so there's quite a lot of work before heroes come into their own as a major force on the battlefield. If the hero dies, it's still possible to win a scenario or skirmish, though when you create a hero, you choose one of four modes that determine the penalty for dying, ranging from no penalty at all through experience penalties and permanent death. While developing a hero is slow going at first, Warlords Battlecry II rewards patient character building. The good news is that heroes really are persistent. You can carry a hero over from the single-player campaign into skirmishes and even into open multiplayer games. The lure of gaining levels is a good motivator for pushing through the dynamic campaign, and you have a number of options when building a hero. From the second level, heroes specialize in one of four standard classes: warrior, priest, rogue, or wizard. From there, there are subclasses, each with particular abilities, including assassination skills and eight schools of magic. As you might expect from a game in the Dungeons & Dragons tradition, the race of your hero determines which class options are available. But the overall profusion of choices means that such restrictions actually just help clear out some of the lesser possibilities. There are plenty of units to back a hero on the battlefield. The original Warlord Battlecry had nine playable factions, and the sequel adds three more to the mix. This isn't as overwhelming as it may seem, partly because some units are on more than one faction's unit list and, though the building art is unique to each race, structures are often analogous. The three types of elves--high elves, wood elves, and dark elves--are all particularly similar, and mostly differ by just one or two units. The barbarians and minotaurs also have some similarities. Most of the races are conventional fantasy archetypes and have a straightforward, combative style, but the game's developers were more imaginative with the evil races: undead, daemons, dark elves, and dark dwarves. For example, while the dark elves have plenty of standard elven units, their evil magic gives them units like spider queens, who lay eggs in the bodies of fallen foes that hatch into spiders. The undead and daemons have units with strong summoning skills, as the undead's necromancer raises skeletons from the dead and the daemon's summoners makes whip-wielding daemons appear. Higher-level heroes can also learn these and other summoning spells. Warlords Battlecry II has added one new unit type, the titan. Each race has one of these superunits at the top of the tech tree, and as befits their title, they're generally incredibly large and powerful. Still, though, the game's battles often involve so many units by the end that titans aren't impossible to stop. The story-based campaign of the original Warlords Battlecry has been replaced by a dynamic campaign that details your quest to conquer the world of Etheria. Fortunately, you don't have to conquer all 67 regions in the world to win the campaign--47 will do. There isn't much strategy to the campaign level, as it mostly boils down to selecting a territory to conquer and then playing a skirmish against one or more computer opponents. These skirmishes mostly take place on prebuilt maps, but a few goal-based missions and some pitched battles that have building turned off add some variety. Also, at the start of some turns, there'll be special events, such as mercenaries who offer to join you in the next battle or enemy forces that invade one of your territories. Success in the campaign does have its advantages, as you can use money earned from holding territories to bring veteran units into the start of a battle. All units can gain experience, which translates into faster attacks and more hit points or mana. And unlike most games with veteran systems, you can carry veteran units over from one battle to the next by adding them to your hero's retinue. But it does take "army points" to bring units into a battle, and more powerful units are balanced by a higher cost. Unlike heroes, veteran units aren't resurrected between battles if they die, so there's some real incentive not to throw these units away needlessly. Overall, the dynamic campaign is a strong reminder of the turn-based heritage of the Warlords series, but the intervening real-time battles between turns are often fairly long unless you corner and kill an opposing hero early on. For this reason, the campaign succeeds more as a framework for skirmishes and hero development than--like in Shogun: Total War--as an operational strategy complement to the game's real-time strategy core. While there are some alternate victory conditions, most of the game's real-time battles force you to eliminate every enemy unit and building from the map. There are always a few defensive towers to help defend against a rush by an enemy hero and his or her retinue, but there's still plenty of action early in a battle over capturing the four types of resources scattered around maps. Just holding a mine slowly gives you resources, but almost all races have the option of putting builder units into mines to speed up production. Races use different resources for their major upgrades, so it's possible to target enemies' mines to deny them essential resources. The AI for the computer opponents persistently moves toward unguarded resources to capture them, but it doesn't always go after lightly guarded resources very aggressively. The AI tends to send a constant, minor stream of attackers, which makes it easier to defeat. That's a perhaps good thing, since the AI is quite good at micromanaging its forces. But after early resource skirmishes and assassination attempts on enemy heroes, the game's design really shows its preference for large massed attacks. Because of the relatively small and hard-to-click units, large battles can be fairly unmanageable. However, players can give units commands while the game is paused, and the sequel adds new attitude settings to the unit AI to make spellcasters cast spells automatically. Even so, spells cast by non-hero units often seem underpowered when those units are facing a large enemy force. While it may innovate in terms of gameplay, Warlords Battlecry II won't impress anyone with its in-game graphics. For sure, the 2D art is colorful, crisp, and detailed, and the sequel has added 3D terrain, but the unit animations and designs are quite bland. Idle animations are few and infrequently seen, so the screen can look quite static except during battle. It's a similar story for the game's sound, as the voice acting is passable, but even key units such as heroes have only a few lines. The game's music is actually quite impressive in comparison, ranging from suitably rousing battle music to haunting vocals. Finally, the save game system could have used some polish, as there's only one in-mission save slot, and this is invalidated when your hero levels up, so one of the game's infrequent but inexplicable crashes to the desktop could leave you without whatever hard-fought territory you'd won since your last save. There also aren't any save slots for campaign progress. Warlords Battlecry II's many playable factions, persistent heroes, and dynamic campaign are innovative elements on top of a solid real-time strategy game. The original Warlords Battlecry was the one of the very first games to effectively use the concept of heroes in a multiplayer-focused real-time strategy game, before Shattered Galaxy or Blizzard's upcoming Warcraft III. If the multiplayer component ends up being popular on the Ubi.com matching service, it should be interesting to create a hero in the service's closed, server-side mode, which allows for competitive rankings. However, while the sequel makes a number of general improvements to the formula established by its predecessor, Warlords Battlecry II doesn't take a big leap forward. The game can be best recommended to players new to the series who are intrigued by the game's hero system. Last edited by dragon2fire; 12-25-2003 at 04:48 PM..

12-26-2003, 06:51 PM	#5 (permalink)
LaughingCow Tilted Location: Ontario, Canada	I have it, but havn't played it for ages since I've been playing AOM. If I had more then 100 megs left on my hard drive I've prolly install it again though. The main reason people don't play it, online atleast is that the Ubi-online thing was pretty crappy. I would rate it as one of my favorite games, hopefully WBC 3 will be good when it comes out. __________________ Haacha!

12-27-2003, 09:46 PM	#7 (permalink)
NeverBorn I'm a pepper bitch..	I wish I could get my old copy of Warlord 3: Darklords Rising to work..I loved that game

12-28-2003, 01:15 AM	#8 (permalink)
dragon2fire Junkie	the graphics can be set much better then the screen shots would suggest it alows for low end graphics but also allows for very high res and much better graphics way better then starcraft see they allowed for both low end and high end systems to run it sorry about the insult but i am sick and tired of the mentaily that good graphic = good game

12-28-2003, 02:44 AM	#9 (permalink)
GakFace Go Ninja, Go Ninja Go!! Location: IN, USA	first off.. the game's graphics are good enough for any RTS.. From what I've seen from Dragon2Fire's Screen (I live nearby), they do not suck. SECONDLY.. I'm fucking pissed off at people who look at the graphics and say it doesn't cut it. I'll admit I do it sometimes, but its damn near annoying. Graphics don't make a game, they spice it up but they don't make a game. --I don't intend to offend you charlesesl but reading the thought that the graphics didn't cut it triggered that rage, that and I've seen the game in play and the graphics weren't bad at all.-- __________________ RoboBlaster: Welcome to the club! Not that I'm in the club. And there really isn'a a club in the first place. But if there was a club and if I was in it, I would definitely welcome you to it.

12-28-2003, 11:12 AM	#10 (permalink)
LaughingCow Tilted Location: Ontario, Canada	My friends are the same way about WBC 2. They all said the graphics looked crappy so therefore the game sucked, lol. I think they look good, and I'm glad WBC 3 will be using similar 2D graphics with a bit of an update to them. I think I'm going to have to re-install it now. __________________ Haacha!

12-30-2003, 11:58 AM	#12 (permalink)
Moonduck Junkie Location: SE USA	shrug I liked the turn-based version better. RTS is okay, but I really feel like I can develope a more coherent strategy when it is turn-based. I find it adds to my enjoyment and lessens the frantic pan-and-click repetitiveness of most strategy games.

12-30-2003, 12:10 PM	#13 (permalink)
Semi-Normal Insane Location: Christchurch, New Zealand	I played the first Battlecry game and was totally unimpressed. Is the second one a lot better then? __________________ I'm not lazy, I'm "motivationally challenged."

01-02-2004, 04:34 PM	#15 (permalink)
Semi-Normal Insane Location: Christchurch, New Zealand	I didn't like it because it was just another RTS (and it came out during the period where every other game released was a WC2/C&C clone) and added very little to the genre. In addition, it had even worse pathfinding AI than Warcraft 2. __________________ I'm not lazy, I'm "motivationally challenged."

01-05-2004, 05:51 AM	#16 (permalink)
dragon2fire Junkie	if you thought that the frist one was not unique then you will think this one is a gernic rts as well i dont know what leads you to that conculsion though no other rts has a persient heros and no other rts has a battle system quite like this wbc2 takes a lot of elemnts form pervoius games and gives them its own unquie twist as for the path finding yea that is one of the biggest flaws form this otherwise great game the soultion is to play on random maps

01-07-2004, 02:25 PM	#18 (permalink)
dragon2fire Junkie	wc3 the heros are not preseit they go back to level one at the end of the map in wbc2 they live on and get better up till level 50 i would not call the heros in myth presietnt either presient is the key word here

01-08-2004, 02:25 PM	#19 (permalink)
Renegade Crazy Location: Midwest	If you like the Warlords Battlecry series I highly recommend the game Spellforce! It has a similiar Role Playing Strategy hook, but with more involved RPG elements. edit: oh it also has persistent heroes!

01-09-2004, 02:29 AM	#20 (permalink)
dragon2fire Junkie	cool renegade i will keep my eyes open for that

01-10-2004, 03:05 PM	#21 (permalink)
Astrocloud Apocalypse Nerd	I played warlords battlecry 2 to death. I tore it up before I had my cable modem... now nobody ever goes online anymore...