I bought this game off of steam yesterday, after playing the demo for a couple of hours. Right now I am about 8 hours into it with approximately 130 turns. Here is my brief synopsis of the game, and how my experience has been.
Warlock is a fantasy RTS, which excites me as someone who enjoys fantasy and the occasional RTS. In traditional turn based city building game, think Civilization or Total War, you do not have an on screen avatar, but instead command cities and armies. The developers have simplified city management to such a degree that the game informs you each round which cities have the resources to build new buildings. This I find to be an excellent touch because eventually you do not want to be checking the status of 10+ cities each round to see if they can progress. What I do struggle with is the lack of clarity when it comes to how to get units from each building. For example, a warriors hall should get me soldiers and the possibly of veteran soldiers, however I have never found out how to get veteran soldiers. The manual is of no help to this as well.
I am playing as a human, I am unsure if you can start as different races. You fight the nations/armies of other human mages, as well as orc mages, rat kings, and the undead. When you take the town of another race, you can eventually produce army units of that type. You can also create improved units by constructing a city near a resource. For example, I have been able to create elven archers by creating a city near an elven village, as well as minotaur warriors because I have built several towns near minotaur ruins. This improved units cost more to build, but are necessary to compete. I was also able to create units of wizards and clerics from my own town. Wizards are powerful, but clerics are not the best. Clerics have the ability to heal units, but only a marginal amount, so I prefer to heal my units with my spells.
The game definitely has an addicting quality to it. I find myself constantly deciding to play ‘one more turn’ before deciding to stop. I have found that it is incredibly difficult to wage wars on two fronts. Whenever I have tried it turns into a stalemate on both fronts, and eventually I am defending my meager territorial gains and unable to defend them. This is not a criticism of the game. I am playing on the normal setting and find this to be a perfectly respectable level of difficulty.
There are a few development choices I find debatable. If you build a harbor in a city, all of your units have the ability to walk to the shoreline and jump in automatically spawning boats at any point on the map. There is no need to send ships to them. While this is useful for a quick retreat or to launch an amphibious assault, it is not realistic (granted, it is a fantasy setting). Further, your units, as well as the enemies, can take a turn to rest (assuming no enemy units are nearby) and more health back than I find reasonable. Two turns resting will bring a beleaguered unit back to full health.
An interesting twist on the game are other worlds. There are teleporters in the land which you can send your units into which will take you to another world with, supposedly, a lot of treasure. However, this barren worlds tend to have difficult monsters, so all of the units I have sent in there were wiped out within a round. Plus, while battling two or three other mages at a time, I do not have the resources to send into another world.
If I have one big criticism of the game is the God system. This system is not well explained, though from what I understand there are multiple gods. It is in your interest to make these deities happy. You can do so by completing quests for them. Quests may include killing a unit, taking a particular town, or building a temple to them at a holy site. If you anger a god, apparently they can take mortal form and attack you. This has not happened to me yet, but I believe if you kill a god it is one way to win the game. What I dislike about the quest system are two things. First, when given a quest to take a town or kill a unit, there is a button to go to the location of the unit. However, if you click this button you automatically accept the quest. Further, many times quests are to kill units or capture towns which may be near some of your other cities, but far from your armies. Therefore, unless you abandon your ware effort, you will fail the quest. You can refuse quests, which will make the deity unhappy, but less unhappy than if you fail a quest.
Overall the game is fun. The game system is set up to remind you to do everything that is possible each round (such as build something, move an idle unit, ect) which can be a bit annoying when you simply have a unit guarding a pass to an area where other nations are fighting, and each turn you are force to put them in guard mode. However, I suppose this is better than forgetting to utilize a unit or city every turn. Right hours in, I have destroyed one of 4 enemy nations and I am about to invade the next. I believe my future conquests will go more quickly since I have already built up my economy. I am having fun, but at times the game does seem to be a little repetitive. I give this game 3.5 stars.