Is Warlords II a by-the-numbers sequel, the strategy-game equivalent of plain oatmeal, or a sublimely odd artifact that taught early-’90s teenagers to weaponise e-mail attachments? (Rhetorical question. Self-answer: somehow both, plus a pinch of black magic.) On paper it looks sensible, slightly sharper AI, a convenient mouse interface, a smattering of new unit art. Yet the first time my best friend and I surrendered our summer Saturdays to its hot-seat mode, it morphed into a psychological experiment about trust, sleep deprivation, and whether you could resist editing a save file before mailing it back. Warlords II rarely hogs “all-time” lists the way Civilization or Warcraft does, but underrating it is like underrating Velcro: you don’t notice its genius until everything that came after sticks to the same design fabric. Bizarre? Any video game that forces you to compress 40 KB files, inject them into clunky dial-up e-mails and pray Prodigy doesn’t corrupt them qualifies as charmingly deranged. Essential? Only if you care about the forgotten ancestors of asynchronous multiplayer, fog-of-war mind games, and the thrill of seeing neon-green dragons clash with Barbie-pink cavalry over broccoli-coloured forests.
Historical Context
Strategic Studies Group, SSG for anyone who pronounces “strategy” with three extra syllables, spent the 1980s breaking tiny personal computers with heavyweight war simulations. By 1990 they’d branched into fantasy with Warlords, an 8-colour gem that merged Risk simplicity with campaign-RPG seasoning. Aussie designer Steve Fawkner, all caffeine and curly hair, wanted a follow-up that preserved the beer-and-pretzels combat math yet sanded off the UI splinters. He ditched the fiddly keyboard shortcuts, hard-wired mouse support, and, crucially, offered proper VGA mode. “Proper,” however, came with an asterisk: Warlords II still shipped in a 16-colour palette because 256-colour artwork would have sunk the schedule harder than a catapulted Galley.
The year 1993 was a demolition derby of strategy heavyweights: Master of Orion introduced space 4X slipstreams; Sid Meier’s Colonization teased colonial micromanagement; Westwood’s Dune II had proven that real-time economies could sprint. Warlords II arrived looking conservative, broccoli trees, fuchsia plains, units so pixel-chunky they resembled Lego knights melting under a heat lamp. But beneath that thrift-store coat lurked two moves that quietly future-proofed the series: a built-in random-map generator that could sputter out new continents in seconds and a fully supported Play-by-E-Mail pipeline.
My first taste came courtesy of a Babbage’s demo rig. I asked the clerk whether the game had dragons; he replied, “Yes, but the AI’s griffins will eat them alive if you don’t level your hero first,” then shoved a disk into the 386’s drive. Five turns later I forgot Warcraft beta screenshots even existed. That disk followed me to every sleep-over, accompanied by my mother’s warning that “computer time ends when the pizza’s done,” a rule we obeyed about as faithfully as an Orc obeys a treaty.
Mechanics
Capture, Queue, Conquer
Each match begins with eight AI or human factions dotting a lumpy fantasy map of cities, ruins, and temples. Your objective sounds kindergarten-simple: paint the world your colour. City economy fuels everything. A size-4 city generates four production points per turn, which might equal one Auromancer every six turns or, if you’re poor, one Spearman every two. Queue manipulation becomes an art form. Warlords II lets you open a neat build window, juggle items with arrow keys, then slam it shut without ceremony, three seconds of interface bliss that made MicroProse’s text storms feel like DOS spreadsheets.
Heroes remain the crown jewels. They start weak but gain experience, raw numbers that tick upward whenever your stack wins, until they dole out stack-wide bonuses. A level-4 hero joined to six Wyverns hits harder than an eight-bit freight train, which means losing a hero can tilt a 300-turn marathon in one unlucky combat roll. Now ask yourself: do you march that hero across an unscouted mountain pass because you heard rumours of a production-boost relic in a distant temple, or do you keep him home to shave two turns off every build queue? Exactly, Warlords II whispers devilish dilemmas with every click.
Combat resolves instantly, no animated swords, no voice barks, just tidy text pop-ups and a casualty list that looks like a D&D DM hastily erasing hit-points. You don’t “do” battle in real time; you prepare for it, agonise over it, and then you witness a one-line verdict. That design, borderline ancient even in ’93, seems quaint today, yet the focus it frees for logistics is enormous. Instead of micromanaging flanking arcs, you obsess over supply chains: which forest cities can feed cavalry to the front? Which sea lanes will stay clear if your opponent discovers naval transports at the exact wrong time?
The Random-Map Rorschach Test
Long before Age of Wonders made procedural continents its brand identity, Warlords II packaged a random-map button that slapped together mountains, rivers, and city labels at machine-gun speed. The algorithm isn’t perfect, the odd one-tile isthmus spawns amphibious nightmares, but it means no two PBEM sagas feel the same. My group’s favourite variant was “All Islands,” which jettisoned land chokepoints in favour of ship hustle and surprise Elf hordes storming out of the fog like pixel Vikings.
Fog of War and the Ethics of Curiosity
Toggle “Hidden Map” at match start, and your scouts become the frontline streaming service: the only way to know the world is to wander. That single checkbox turns the early game into a horror film: Is that neutral city a sleepy hamlet or a Death Knight factory? Do you invest turns exploring, or race to build up home garrisons? The hidden-map option also magnifies betrayal. During one sophomore-year PBEM, a friend shuttled Elf-Lord stacks behind my lines via an unnoticed inlet, capturing my capital in what we later called “the Venice Dunk.” I didn’t speak to him for a week, high-school diplomacy at its finest.
Play-by-E-Mail: Hot Seat Without the Smell of Feet
Here’s the workflow that devoured summers: end turn, save game, ZIP that save, attach to an e-mail, UUencode if your provider choked on binaries, then pray the recipient didn’t own Norton Commander and a flexible moral code. We invented house rules, no re-loading, no hex editing, no peeking, scout’s honour. They survived exactly until the first time someone forgot to label a relic properly and insisted it was an “honest misclick.” Even the drama was asynchronous: you’d fire off a heated “CHEATER!” message and then wait 24 hours to see if a defence arrived. Social-media latency, 1993 style.
Legacy and Influence
It’s easy to assume Warlords II faded quietly once VGA explosions got fashionable, yet its fingerprints reach surprisingly far. Asynchronous “take-a-turn-later” design pops up in everything from mobile chess apps to Civilization VI’s cloud saves. Fawkner’s hero-plus-stack template mutated into the hero units of Total War and later bled into MOBAs where neutral camps drop artefacts to buff a roaming avatar. Meanwhile, the random-map ethos became a sacred pillar for Age of Wonders, Dominions, and swaths of indie 4X hopefuls.
Community dedication is the best metric of impact. Thirty-plus years on, a boutique forum still hosts seasonal PBEM leagues. They zip, mail, sometimes even Dropbox because nostalgia, like magic items, evolves. And now a nostalgia bundle on Steam allows Windows owners to boot the original DOS executable in an emulator wrapper without hunting abandonware sites. No upscaled sprites, no new soundtrack, just the raw, neon green-on-magenta original, challenging retina displays to a duel of dignity.
Why hasn’t Warlords II basked in the same mainstream glow as Civilization? Timing. Its incremental polish got overshadowed by louder revolutions: real-time resource harvesting, voice-acted cut-scenes, 3D particle spells. It also shipped with no scripted campaign, trusting players to tell their own stories. That makes for weaker marketing blurbs, but ironically stronger legends. Everyone who loved Warlords II has at least one war tale that begins “I had a single Pikeman stack, and then…” No intro video ever competes with personal heartbreak.
Closing Paragraph + Score
Firing up Warlords II today feels like rediscovering an old zip drive stuffed with high-school gossip: outdated, sure, but the emotional metadata hits harder than any 4K remake. The graphics resemble a children’s cereal map. The soundtrack loops make your laptop fan sound symphonic. Yet the design skeleton, fast turns, tense exploration, a hero system that turns risk into adrenaline, still punches above its weight. And nothing, absolutely nothing, matches the secret thrill of attaching a tiny save file, clicking send, and wondering if your opponent will play fair.
Final Score: 8.1 / 10.0, a Velvet Revolver in 16 colours: not the flashiest gun in the arsenal, but reliable, crunchy, and still remarkably good at starting (and finishing) long-distance bar fights.