Hello KGB! Glad to see you too.
Even after all those years I still remember loving your crown

These days I generally think about games instead of playing them, unfortunately. Somehow never have time. I don't even remember when was the last time I bought something new.
It's nice that Warlords 4 will get the digital release.

As I only played against AI and mostly on lower levels, I liked flight, Heal and Regeneration the most. I think you kinda mocked me about the latter?

I remember DE the most out of the three, probably because they were one of the story enemies in the base campaign + one of the other two campaigns was about them. With a dwarf warlord though. Ugh. Spiders apply poison on nearly every hit when AI plays them but not when they are mine. Cavalry had Negate, a cool icon yet quite ugly model. Ballista could work as either archer or siege weapon. Harpies had Terror and flight but still felt meh to me, possibly because I wanted an actual elf instead

I remember Ogres having a flying starting unit and being generally tanky. I think their T3 unit was very strong physically, as was the hero.

Empire - they have a good starting unit, a flying Negating pegasus and weird catapult? Like, it was like a worse version of their lower tier ballista, except it had much more HP?

What about Dragons? They were the first race I played. Their units felt same-ish but fun.

Is there any race(s) you find weaker than others? Maybe more limited or requiring more effort for the same result?

Thanks!

Hi Quaranyr,

I probably did mock you on Regeneration. Heal is obviously better since it can heal any unit and Vampirism is stronger than Regeneration since it happens on every hit instead of just once after you kill a unit. So it's the worst of those 3 skills.

A Dwarf Warlord isn't ideal for DE but depending on the major/minor skill you can still make some use of the Warlord. Many races can't do much at all with such a Warlord which is why they aren't the better races.

Ogres also have the Troll as their 1 turn unit. It has that Regeneration you like to much When you have a high level Warlord with strong capital buildings you can build those Trolls with much stronger combat and life values which makes them able to be really effective units. Once they get to 10+ combat with 14+ life they can often win whole battles without dying.

Yes, the Empire had a weird 1 turn unit which I changed so that the race didn't have 2 siege units which it didn't need since you only need 1 unit with Siege skill.

Dragons are an average race. Their biggest weakness is they don't make many units since they don't get a 2 per turn unit. The dragons themselves also take 3+ turns each which makes them slow to build too. Your Warlord MUST be able to do one of 3 things. Produce units faster, summon a lot of units or increase combat skills to to create very high level units. That means either the Warlord Major skill must be Nature (growth spell), Summoning (summon unit spells), Combat (increase XP earned and build very strong units for combat).

The weakest races are the ones that are too highly specialized or have a major flaw.
1) Undead - 2nd slowest movement. Their skeletons and skeleton riders are only useful vs Men (Knights/Empire) or Good (Elves). Against those races they are very good obviously but against the other 9 they are poor.
2) Elves - They lack a siege unit and a flying unit and their units don't have much life. Pretty much have to have a Divine Warlord. Knights race are superior to these guys in pretty much every way.
3) Dwarves - The worst movement in the game and it really adds up on larger maps as they are so slow to expand. They also have no flying unit (like the Elves). One of their adjacent races is the Dragons which takes a long time to build units.

KGB

Hey KGB,

It was long enough ago that I no longer remember why I valued Regeneration that much. I did like Heal too though, I'm certain.

The pregenerated Dwarf Warlord was a pure Summoner, I believe.
The only gameplay thing about him I remember is that I like summoning pyrohydras.
I disliked him because elves led by a dwarf are just wrong to me.
And the ending of his campaign was rather nonsensical. Not in "I have no idea what happened" but like Deus ex Machina, that also explains earlier story moments by another Deus ex Machina.

My first Warlord, whom I used for the main campaign, was a Dragon with Nature + Combat. So I blindly chose a better option.

Undead - I think I liked dracoliches but found their other units lackluster. Hyperfocus on fighting two specific races certainly explains why.
...Ruins full of liches were horrible though.

Elves - so at least here my impression of them being really unimpressive was correct.

Dwarves - makes sense, I guess. Against AI spamming crossbowmen was an easy way to win. And AI doing the same was really annoying. I suppose it is different against human players. And me not remembering much about other units probably means something too. I think they had a t2 and the t3 being very similar.

Thanks for your time.

Just wanted to ask - is there any inforamtion on what "Volturnans" were supposed to be? The game's descriptions on GOG and Steam still mentions this non-existing race. From what I could find, they were supposed to be the new race that would play the role of ultimate evil but were cut when the development was restarted in 2002.

Was there anything really shown or known about them? The name makes me think about water bodies but it may be completely wrong.
I also had a thought that it could be just demons' name for their species in their own language that was just dropped for simplicity.

Unrelated - at least I learned that bats were indeed intended to be an undead unit at first. I always suspected it.

I never heard the name until just now.

A Google search suggests 'Volturans' was the name of the Demon race in Etheria. That suggests to me that the original race name for the Demons was going to be Volturans. The other races probably had better names than Ogres and Dwarves as well as they could have used names of specific Kingdoms in Etheria. My guess is they just changed it to generic names for simplicity.

Bats as an Undead unit makes total sense. Probably changed so that 2 adjacent races didn't have fliers as their 2 unit per turn unit.

KGB