Warlords: Under Siege

by Aethyna Jan 13, 2023 | 1 Votes | 62 Played | 0 Reviews

9 rate

Genres:

Strategy , Action

Graphics:

Labels:

Real Time , Fantasy Setting , Roguelike/roguelite

Platforms:

Publishers:

Redkar Limited The goblins are coming and it’s up to you to defend your little town from being overrun! Defend your town hall against the never-ending waves of goblins by building and maintaining your defenses and army, earn enough gold to purchase new cards and upgrades, and do it all again. Maybe you'll succeed this time! Play Now Similar Games

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Summary Gameplay Graphics/ Sound Conclusion

Summary

Warlords: Under Siege offers a unique take to the typical tower defense genre by tastefully blending in elements of castle siege, real-time strategy, and roguelike. The goblins are coming and it’s up to you to defend your little town from being overrun! Defend your town hall against the never-ending waves of goblins by building and maintaining your defenses and army, earn enough gold to purchase new cards and upgrades, and do it all again!

Gameplay

To start playing, you’ll need to choose a difficulty and map/location. However, the game doesn’t really have a whole lot of maps for now – it’s an early access game, after all! – and the harder difficulty options are only unlocked once you’ve completed the prerequisites of the previous difficulty level. So, basically, you don’t get a whole lot of options at first but once you’ve progressed enough, you’ll then unlock new maps and difficulty options.

Although the game doesn’t really have a tutorial, it does gently guide you through your first game by suggesting what you could do. Personally, it’s good to stick to the advice given, at least until you are familiar enough with the game to come up with your own strategies. That being said, the game doesn’t hold your hand and you’re still expected to figure out some stuff yourself, such as the simple fact that you’ll want to protect the caravan that’s heading towards your town hall for some extra resources.

Now, true to real-time strategy fashion to some extent, the game has several types of resources that you’ll need to build your defenses and recruit an army, namely lumber, stone, iron, and gold. You can collect these resources by building their corresponding production buildings, though, being the starting resource needed for almost everything, lumber is also being produced at your town hall.

Note that the resources are automatically added to your stash and that there’s no need to have like grunts to transport the resources from the production facilities to the town hall, unlike in standard RTS games like Starcraft. There’s also no need to hire workers to do all the hard work, so that’s one less thing to worry about.

With resources on hand, you can start building your defenses. In this game, the buildings you can build, including your defenses, are restricted by the number of building slots you have. In fact, the base building aspect in this game can be rather restrictive. Unlike Age of Darkness: Final Stand where you get the freedom of building what you need and where you need them, you get very limited building slots, some of which are further restricted to only certain structures, such as walls or the iron mine.

The slots have fixed positions on the map too. You can’t, for instance, build and entire wall made of towers even if you have the resources to do so. On the plus side though, at least construction is almost instantaneous in this game. Unlike some tower defense games, destroying a building doesn’t return any resources here.

Warlords: Under Siege has a nice variety of buildings you can construct right from the start, including the swordsmen barracks where you can recruit your first battalion of swordsmen at the cost of some lumber. However, this is all due to how you build your deck, specifically your starting hand of six cards.

Yes, Warlords: Under Siege has deckbuilding elements, where you can decide which cards, mostly building cards, and hero and unit upgrades, to include in your deck. This starting hand is important since it dictates which structures you can build right from the get-go. If you, for instance, forget to add in the basic Arrow Tower card here, then you’ll be starting a run without any towers, which may make a run a lot more challenging at the beginning.

Besides your starting hand, you can also add the other cards as your Deck Cards. These cards will then be presented to you as Fate Cards once you’ve reached a certain milestone during a run. You’ll usually get to choose one card out of the six choices given. Note that you can only build structures that you’ve “unlocked” by choosing its corresponding card in this game.

It doesn’t seem like there’s a limit as to how many cards you can add to a deck here, but naturally, the more you have, the more difficult it may be for you to draw the cards you want. You can spend gold to get a fresh new selection of cards, but personally, unless you’re on a really good streak, it’s probably best to save the gold for upgrades or to resurrect your hero once the run ends.

Similar to some tower defense games – I’m looking at you, Kingdom Rush! – Warlords: Under Siege gives you a hero right from the start. You can’t choose which hero to use since I think there’s only one at the moment, but it’s possible that the devs will add more in after. The hero you get comes with no skills at first, but you can eventually pick skills for him by the way of the Fate cards. This also means that you’ll need to remember to include some hero skill cards into your deck or they won’t appear as a choice. I did notice that the cooldown time for my hero’s abilities seem a bit too long though. This would likely be addressed during the final tweaks prior to the game’s launch.

Despite not really mentioning anything about the caravans, it’ll be quite clear that one of the side-objectives of your run is to ensure that these caravans make it to your town hall in one piece. In return, you’ll get a nice reward – usually a small pile of resources. These caravans are spawned periodically on the top and bottom of the screen, and unless you have some soldiers around to intervene, the enemy will typically make a beeline for them.

In a way, this makes the real-time strategy aspect of the game important. However, from my own experience, this aspect does feel quite lackluster at the moment. For instance, there’s no way for you to add rally point so a newly recruited swordsmen won’t move automatically to the front lines. There’s also no way to set formations and controlling each battalion of your units can be quite the struggle, especially when it comes to positioning your troops. There’s even a time when the mouse cursor doesn’t turn into the attack icon so I basically send my troops to the enemy’s location hoping they would automatically engage the enemy, which thankfully, they did.

As many of their players have pointed out as well, the soldiers in this game moves awfully slow. This is especially prominent for your archers. For some weird game logic reason, archers, despite being the lighter armored unit, move a lot slower than swordsmen, making them easy targets once the walls they are standing on crumble.

It's also interesting to note that the goblins that attack your base will prioritize attacking your structures if there are any nearby. So, this makes it possible to stave off your eventual defeat by a few more minutes simply by constantly rebuilding your towers and walls, provided that you have enough resources to keep this up.

Among the resources you collect during a run, the only resource that truly matters the most is gold. You can get them by building a gold mine, having a successful caravan delivery, or via those loot sacks that sometimes drop from fallen enemies. If you’ve manage to defeat a boss, you’ll also get a treasure chest which grants you even more gold.

Gold is important in this game because it’s the currency you use to purchase new cards for your deck as well as to purchase crucial upgrades for your town hall development, which would make your subsequent runs last a bit longer.

Graphics/ Sound

The graphics in this game feature an art style that is quite similar to Warcraft. The 3D assets in the game looks somewhat cartoonish without appearing overly so. In terms of sound, the game provides a nice background music that matches well with the action that’s going on-screen. The sound effects also work well to indicate what is being clicked on or selected.

Conclusion

Warlords: Under Siege manages to nail that one-more-round formula perfectly with its unique castle siege/tower defense gameplay. Progression is fun and satisfying, allowing your town to survive longer the more and better upgrades you have, and the deckbuilding aspect adds certain strategic depth to its gameplay as well. For just 5 bucks or so, this early access title can already offer plenty of entertainment with minimal bugs and glitches. Highly recommended for fans of RTS and tower defense games!

New Game Added: Warlords: Under Siege

by Aethyna Jan 13, 2023

The goblins are coming and it’s up to you to defend your little town from being overrun! Defend your town hall against the never-ending waves of goblins by building and maintaining your defenses and army, earn enough gold to purchase new cards and upgrades, and do it all again. Maybe you'll succeed this time!