Warlock Diary – Retail Therapy

Money is essential for success in Warlock – Master of the Arcane when playing the humans. But I only understood that when I essentially ran out of the golden stuff and saw my entire empire start crumbling because I lacked the ability to quickly produce gold.

I tended to focus my city development on food in order to field larger armies, but that strategy is perfect for early game only and, as more cities are founded, a shift towards markets and mints needs to take place in order to get a steady stream of gold production going.

The most disappointing moments in my first Warlock game arrived when I created the buildings I needed to recruit vampires and Elven sharpshooters, high-level units that would have very much helped me during my current conflict, only to find that I was nowhere near the stockpile required to hire them out.

And a lack of a high-end unit is not the biggest problem when gold flow is restricted.

There are many buildings in Warlock that grant access to unit upgrades, but those are not automatically applied to every churned out unit, they need to be individually unlocked by paying gold.

This happens by clicking on the little arrow image near the unit portrait and by then starring at the array of options and wondering which one provides the best bang for buck.

I am sort of a turtle personality when it comes to strategy and that means that in Warlock my first options for upgrades are designed to increase the survivability of my units: extra health regeneration via a blessing from the gods and better armor to protect from blows.

Other types of players have options linked to attack and many of the choices need to mesh well with the various experience-based upgrades in order to create truly heroic units (the developer should have added a way of re-naming at least high-level units).