What's up fellas! Katana Man just checking in. After all these years, I still play DLR against the computer every other day or so. I found the best way to play without changing the combat too much is to play against 1 computer opponent with 20 castles, and I start with 1. I give them -1 production and 17 points of other bonuses. I force myself not to use the save/load game feature. The random map generator is just fantastic. I wish more games offered that today.

I had DLR working fine on Windows 10 just fine for years by doing nothing other than -wincurs. I recently formatted and with a fresh Windows 10, it got really laggy. Unplayable. So I got on the internet looking for assistance and I found Warlorders.com. It's good to see some familiar names. Brings back a lot of great memories. Did you guys ever recover the years of old forum posts?

I was lucky to run Warlords III Central during the peak of the game's popularity. I watched the web site statistics occasionally. At it's peak, I remember seeing 11,000 unique visitors per day! That still seems crazy to me.

As the popularity of Warlords III was dwindling down, I shut down Warlords III Central. I still save the last (very unpopular) post:
www.webwonderland.com/warlords/last_post1.html

And how about this for a walk down memory lane. My original Warlords III ladder is still functioning some 23 years later. www.laddergames.com/dlr/
This ladder was created before Case's Ladder. I then transferred the data over to Case's ladder (what a mess that was). Many years later, we re-purposed the Laddergames.com ladder for the purpose of tracking PBEM ranking. And there it sits. It looks to be still functioning.

Anyway. It's good to see some of you guys are still around.

-Katana Man

Katana Man,

Welcome and thanks for stopping by and registering on the Forum. You should have come by years ago when it was a lot busier!

We never did recover the old Forum posts. Apparently the big ISP's don't store your site in the manner that most of us would imagine. Instead it's split into tiny fragments across multiple server farms for redundancy/high traffic access etc. So when you stop using the site they erase it immediately (which is rather annoying) and since it's split there is no one single backup that exists, instead it's just fragments all over the place. So it was impossible to get a backup of the site no matter how much one was willing to pay.

I've looked at your last post on your site many times over the years. Most of the unpopularity was because of the sudden announcement coupled with the fact that you weren't leaving the Forum up for players to peruse/copy old post information (which contained a lot of the games internal workings). Plus of course there were many who didn't agree with your religious reasoning (probably would have been better to have left that out). I wonder how shocked they'd be to learn you still play today

Speaking of your site, VVooger and I have visited your main webpages and few times and see that you created your own MAME machine (or what appears to be one). Did you custom build or have it made for you? I used to have a semi-functioning MAME system (custom controls but not in a cabinet) in 98-02 time frame but had to get rid of it. I've reacquired the ROMs and the updated MAME (my how it's changed in 20 years) and an pondering how to build a machine / get custom controls now that I have a house with a game room to house a MAME machine.

KGB

Yeah, there were a few things I could have done better when it came to shutting down Warlords III Central. The biggest issue was I had to move to a bigger better web host and moving that forum and other scripts was going to be a real pain. Since the activity was fading, it was time to let it go. Had I known that Warlords III would still have loyal followers for years to come, I should have fought harder to keep it alive. My religious views on Warlords IV have not changed. I still play Warlords III, but Warlords IV is where I drew the line. I prefer older games where designers rely on balance and well designed gameplay instead of relying on graphics.

That's why I'm big into the old arcade classics. I modified an arcade machine but recently made a much better 4-player arcade control panel. After 20 years of thinking about it, the new design is loaded with goodies and much better than the old one.







If you ever want any assistance, let me know. I can do this arcade stuff in my sleep.

Considering the W3DLR cover art it's rather hard to grasp such a subtle distinction between 'satanic' and 'non-satanic' covers

Katana Man wrote:


W4 is much more balanced game than W3DLR, especially now after patching. It has very well designed gameplay, though quite different from W3 gameplay. And it does not relying on graphics, borrowing much of its assets from Warlords Battlecry, and is obviously visually inferior comparing to other strategy games of that time.

Katana Man,

WOW. I'm speechless. That's an amazing amazing control panel!

I SOOO want one. How hard was it to make this? I checked out the site at the links and it appears it just sells parts and not completed panels. I'm afraid I'm not an expert in wiring like you were when you made one so that's why I'm asking. Also, approximately how much did it cost for this control panel and for the arcade cabinet itself?

KGB

Thank you. Yes. It was a lot of fun to build. I assume you clicked on the image/link to see how I built it? I built it from scratch. My best friend Mark and I each had our own 4-player arcade machine. After playing them for 20 years, we thought long and hard about what we would like in a new control panel. We loaded it up with goodies. In fact, I've never seen anyone else in the arcade community load one up with electronics like this. 52 buttons and the trackball are all RGB so they can be any color you want. The joysticks can be changed from 2-way, 4-way, 8-way, 49-way or fully analog on the fly (per game)! When you select Qbert, it will change the joystick to 4 way diagonal. As you select a game, the proper buttons will light up that you need for that game. For example, when Street Fighter II Championship edition is loaded up, the 6 punch/kick buttons will change to red/white/blue to match the original arcade colors. We made some custom joystick shafts for the flight sticks which bumped the price up. There is over $2400 into each of these control panels. Although I could get that down into the $1800 range now.

There are empty kits out there to speed things up and save you money, like these:
www.monsterarcades.com/product-page/4-player-control-panel-kit
gameroomsolutions.com/shop/4-player-pedestal-cabinet/
Or completed ones like this:
ebay.us/T9qHEb

The wiring does not require any soldering. You can do it. It only looks complicated, but it's not really. If you go with single color LED's (or no LED's), it reduces the complexity considerably. But even with the full RGB lighting, it's not bad once you do one button (2 wires for the switch, and 4 wires for the RGB LED). I can assist you if you want to build one.