I recently wrote up Warlock from my time in Sweden with Paradox Interactive. When I got back to the office I was able to get into the game and play around with it, though it’s not in a finished state just yet. That means I won’t talk about anything technical, just general impressions on the gameplay and if it’s living up to what we expected it to be.
First off, one of the things I liked the most about the tech demo was the fact that there were multiple ways to win the game. However, in practice it feels like the real only way to win is through combat. The turn-based strategy lends itself to this more than it does to exploration because of the limited movement points of your units. I haven’t even come close to winning any other way. In my original article, I talked about worshiping one of the eight deities, except that there’s little way to do that as the quests for the gods seem few and far between. Then, when you manage to find and take control of a holy ground space, which is the only place you can build a temple, you might not even be able to build a temple to the god you’ve got the most favor with.
Also, there’s far more resource management than I first thought. You have to seriously balance your buildings in order to make sure that you have a positive flow of gold, food and mana. Every city and unit has some sort of upkeep and it can end up that you will run into the situation I did where I had amassed a sizable empire and army but was unable to build new units because I was in negative numbers on two resources and the building process to get back up to positive is long and tedious at times.
