14 DAY TRIAL // The start of Warlock – Master of the Arcane is familiar enough: one small city surrounded by fog of war, one player ready to discover a world, opportunities and enemies that he will need to deal with.
I created a few weak starting units, simple warriors and archers, and began exploring, driving back the packs of spiders and bets that are all around the starting area.
I captured a few cities, got the economy off the ground and created a few more units, happily spending my stockpile of food in order to get some security and more bodies to throw against the monsters.
As I was expanding East, looking for more interesting resources and learning exactly what kind of units I need to use to face the undead who are lurking around the Northern edge of my kingdom I found the Fire Elemental.
I had a look at the creature details page and I was quite impressed, although I was confident that I had enough troops to take it out as long as I bunched them up all together and then assaulted in waves, with proper support from my archers and spells introduced at the right time.
Unfortunately, I did not take into account how deadly the Fire Elemental was and I saw two full units of my warriors lose their lives throwing themselves at it before understanding that I needed tougher soldiers to damage and kill him.
If something similar happened in Civilization V (the closest proxy experience for Warlock), I would have probably restarted the game in order to get a better starting position, but I figured this was a learning game so I might as well stick with the situation, no matter how hard it seemed.
Then I remembered Warlock had the subtitle Master of the Arcane and, despite this, I had not yet fired off one single spell.