Warlords Classic Strategy

This is an old DOS game from the 90s, updated with minor changes for the iPhone. You fight with stacks of troops, with combat modifiers for terrain, flying units, special (magical) units, and heroes. Captured cities generate income, which you spend to recruit and maintain different troops, so you have to choose the right troops, manage your money and logistics of troop movements, and plan your strategy and tactics while battling AI and/or other players. Heroes can also explore ruins to randomly get more gold, recruit magical troops, or get magic items for combat bonuses. The game auto saves as you go, which makes it a challenge, but you can undo every action since your last combat. I think it’s a great game, but there are two fixes that would really improve it. 1) In the original game, the AI would surrender if you have more than 40 cities, and they have 16 cities less than you. I’ve never had an AI surrender in this version, and it’s a bit tedious to play the game to the bitter end to get the victory, so I just quit when it’s obvious I’m going to win. So they really need the surrender feature in this version. 2) There’s no option to delete saved games. This one should be a pretty easy fix, and frankly, it’s a basic feature that any app with saved games should have.

I loved this game when I was younger. My brothers and I would sit around the old desktop playing this for hours and hours. I like that the Warlords II Deluxe maps still incorporate the fixed army options in each castle and require you make navies like in Warlords I. We actually used to play a customized version of the game a friend of my dad’s made which played almost exactly like the II deluxe version on this app. I am grateful someone took the time to make this app, my but is the AI players are fairly dumb. For example, they never create navies, ever, so on any map with much water they are incredibly easy to outmaneuver. I would give this 5 stars except that the reason I got the app was so me and my brothers could play it together again, but for the life of me and after much google research I can NOT figure out how to create a game and invite people to it. There just isn’t a way to do it, at least not one that makes any sense. That was the main draw and I can’t do it.

This game is definitely worth the 5 bucks to play, especially if you have friends that will get it with you as well. It's like a fantasy version of risk. Every match is unique due to the amount of variation the game presents. You can play against AI, other people, or both. The AI matches alone would still make this an enjoyable game, but being able to play against other players is what really sold me on this. There's a lot of strategy involved but the game is simple enough for anyone to pickup after 30 or so minutes of playing. The downsides of the game are that each match is a commitment taking on average about 5 hours of your time to complete, this isn't a huge issue as you can sit the game down and pick it back up where you left off at your leisure, and the matchmaking could greatly be improved. If you don't have anyone to invite to a PVP game then you're forced to match up with a random person. You can't just search for a match though, you click the type of game you want to play and you hit start. If there is a match already created then you join that one but if there's not then you do your turn 1 and basically just have to hope someone eventually gets matched into your game. Overall, fun yet tactically challenging with definite room for improvement when it comes to the matchmaking system. I do recommend you get this game.