Awww. That genre has sadly few representatives. As that thing happens when they have no budget for a "proper" campaign, and so they push whatever they can with skirmish maps and AI.
Yeah, I just usually find "proper" campaign to be far more boring and limiting... and sometimes very cringeworthy (AoE 3... ahem).
I'd rather larp my way around a proper conquest campaign + story elements
If I can ask a reply, sell me Warlords Battlecry. The praise made me genuinely curious.
Well, I'll be talking about WBC 3, which is clearly the best of them all.
16 races. Each of them playing between slightly and significantly different - though there is nothing totally crazy like the Goo in Grey Goo. And I'm not talking bout largely repaints like AoE uses to. They also look vastly different. And the voice acting. Beautiful! "Be cruel to me, masterrrr!" must make the Demons builder unit one of the best.
Also, includes Faeries.
Faeries! The cute little buggers with their high-pitched voices.
Now, you might be asking, with so many races, is this game
properly balanced?
Well, fuck you! This is one of the very few RTS games that does not balance its races into oblivion by making "everything equally viable". Some races are stronger than others, and there are certain rock-paper-scissors relations in some races being better against other races, etc.
The game is balanced enough (especially with the IMO needed community patch) to have fun alone, with friends or strangers.
And the different races allow you to impose a challenge upon yourself and define how you want to play more than any other RTS out there.
29 classes (28 without the community patch). I shit you not.
The hero in general is the center of your strategy. The classes contain everything from alchemists, to bards, knights, necromancers, healers, druids, monks...
Now, there are stats and skills. 4 main stats and the selection of skills depend on the class (as well as the race chosen). Of course, there are some classes sharing skills - the necromancer is not the only one with access to death magic.
If you are in for min-maxing, you can spend days on tinkering with the optimal race/class combination. Or you might want to play something hugely awkward like a Fey Deathknight.
You can build and level your hero to boost your nation more, or make him a high-ranking mage or a melee nightmare able to clean up the map mostly alone. All up to you.
Again, the game is made for exploring the gameplay, fiddling around with combos and having fun more than balancing for a PvP minority.
And yes, there is an iron man mode, if you dig that.
There are so many little gameplay gimmicks that I won't go into spoiling them here.
Here is the relatively new wiki (certainly wasn't there when I still played the game a lot):
http://etheria.wikia.com/wiki/Warlords_Battlecry_Wiki
Downsides:
This game was not a AAA production and it shows in a few points
- The AI is really nothing very good (though it does impose a challenge on higher levels due to cheating).
- The original campaign is quite bad, especially because of far too slow leveling for your hero. I
very much recommend the custom Conquest campaign.
- Tech limitations. The game is from 2004, so... expect no miracles. Personally I like the graphics, very charming. But the budget does show.
Just one more thing to be said:
The game features something that modern RTS titles still lack and that remove some of the more annoying microing hell in RTS games.
You can select the behavior of newly produced unit at the building they are built. And some of these behaviors are incredibly helpful, like automatic (though random) scouting, where the unit will roam the map to uncover it. Or automatic casting of their abilities.
All of these are obviously less efficient at targeting than if you did it yourself, but for people like me that despise such microing, it is beautiful.
You can also set your buildings to auto-production, similar to how you could do that in the Supreme Commander games.
tl;dr :
The game is great, but its greatest achievement may be to make you dream about what could be possible if such a game was made with less of a budget limitation.