Warlords

A long time ago, shortly after the completion of the Ice Age on Earth, not to be confused with the cartoon of the same name, board strategy games were widely popular in which players controlled soldiers (or military units) on a paper map. Each soldier had a certain combat power and other properties, but the outcome of the battle was decided by throwing one or several hexagonal dice. It's simple: an infantryman has the power of “one,” the rider has two, the knight has three, so to defeat the rider, the player controlling the infantry must roll at least three on the cube, and to defeat the knight - four". It is clear that many factors influenced the outcome of the entire war (primarily the skills of the players), but in all battles the decisive word was for the cube, so to speak. With the advent of computers, board games were transferred to them, and the main (and often the only) change was to display the map not on paper, but on the display, and change the cube to a random number generator. It was not one year before computer games became fundamentally different and various ways of handling the results of battles were created.

Warlords is one such game. Of course, it would not have become a classic of the genre if it were just an electronic copy of the board game. Compared to the original, there are a lot of innovations and improvements, but the general essence is the same: to win, you have to fight a lot, and the outcome of battles is still determined randomly. However, this is probably not a disadvantage of the game - rather, it is its peculiarity, which played a significant role in the fact that Warlords became a hit. After all, in the end, the element of chance in battles is within certain limits: not every army can succeed, and there are situations when victory is simply IMPOSSIBLE. This is where the player’s skill manifests: you need to increase the strength of your heroes, find important artifacts, form armies and maneuver them so that they are at the right time in the right place to attack the enemy. This is where strategic thinking and thinking through your actions “several moves ahead,” as chess players say, must be taken into account that in Warlords, as in many games of that era, computer opponents have a particular advantage (read: it’s not fair) which is greater, the higher the level of complexity. But they can always be defeated - in the end, the person is of decisive importance, because in his mind, cunning and resourcefulness he constantly surpasses AI. Well, scientists have simply not created yet artificial intelligence, equal to human and, moreover, superior to it, and they are unlikely to ever create ...

The game has one, alas, the only card - at one time fans of the game remembered it by heart - on which there is a confrontation of eight commanders, each of which can be controlled by a person or a computer (in this case, you can choose the level of his skill). The goal is simple - to destroy all enemies. As such, there are no nations or races: troops of different types are not united in any way. At first, each side has only one city and one hero, but then the number of the first grows as a result of conquests (everything is simple: more cities give more income), the number of the second comes from your money that you pay to hire them, and he becomes possible when you have the appropriate amount; In addition, in cities you can train troops, the maintenance of which will require money in the future. In essence, the hero is an ordinary warrior, unlike, for example, the Heroes of Might and Magic series, however, unlike other warriors, he can improve his data, use objects that increase his and / or his army’s strength, and explore the ruins, in which you can with equal probability die or find someone or something useful, - during the inspection of the ruins, everything is decided ONLY at random. But in battles, chance has a much smaller value (see below). In each army there can be from one to eight fighters, but here the concept of "army" is in principle conditional and means warriors moving and fighting together - they can unite and separate at any time. Up to thirty-two soldiers may be in the garrison of the city, so storming it will be a difficult task, and besides, the cities still provide additional protection for their troops.

In a combat between two armies or storming a city, the outcome of the battle is decided as follows: first, the extreme (literally, those listed at the end of each army list; what can you do, the extreme always falls hard) soldiers of both units fight one-on-one - this is an analogy of throwing cube in board games - then the victor fights with the next enemy warrior, and so on, until one of the parties is completely destroyed. In addition to chance, the course of the battle is influenced by the strength of each creature, certain objects of the hero who heads the troops, fortifications, and finally, a kind of fatigue — for example, a giant will almost certainly kill two or three of them when it encounters eight light infantrymen, but it will be much harder, and defeat all - almost impossible. So, as mentioned above, the proportion of randomness in the game is limited, but basically everything will be determined by the level of your skill, experience and knowledge. The graphics in the game for its time is quite beautiful, but one of the drawbacks is the lack of images of artifacts (each of them is represented only by name) - this, however, is nothing more than an annoying trifle.

Warlords can be recommended to fans of turn-based strategies, and at least everyone should be familiar with this game. Those who like it, should pay attention to the Warlords II, where everything is done even better and more diverse, with a lot of great innovations.