Wizards and Warlords is a 2020 4X fantasy strategy game along the lines of Master of Magic. As the name suggests, it allows you to play as either a wizard or a warlord seeking dominion within a randomly-generated fantasy world. Magic in the setting is divided into numerous masteries, although most of the time a wizard will have to master several of them to get anywhere.
The game is available on Steam
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This game provides examples of:
- Animate Dead: The focus of the Necromancy mastery.
- The Archmage: Every Wizard is aiming to become this; while you choose some masteries to start with, you can unlock most or all of them in the long run (and there's even an achievement for doing so.) Lesser wizards exist in the setting and can become your followers.
- Badass Normal: Warlords seek to be this, trying to go toe-to-toe with wizards and supernatural threats using purely mundane capabilities.
- The Beastmaster: The focus of the Beasts mastery, which allows you to summon numerous types of animals.
- Black Magic: Several variations, including the Abyssal mastery (demon-summoning), Death mastery, the Necromancy mastery, Darkness mastery, and so on.
- Blood Magic: The Blood mastery, which focuses on both using blood as a power source and manipulating it for effects such as life draining.
- Blow You Away: Part of the focus of the Air mastery, which lets you enchant your units with air, summon air elementals, or call down hurricanes, in addition to Shock and Awe effects.
- Casting a Shadow: The Shadow Mastery, of course, is heavily focused on this, with spells to summon Living Shadows and the like.
- Character Alignment: In-universe; cultures are defined as good, evil, or neutral, and the player can (optionally) define their wizard this way at chargen, limiting their mastery options somewhat in exchange for benefits.
- Character Customization: While you can use one of the predefined wizard archetypes, you can also customize your own using a Point Build System.
- The Dark Arts: Large swaths of the spell system; everything under black magic, in addition to blood magic and numerous others. Depending on your initial race, culture, and alignment selections, some of these may be forbidden to you.
- Deal with the Devil: The "Dark Pact" trait. You have the ability to beseech your patron for quests and rewards, but at some point they're going to demand you pay your debt to them...
- Elemental Crafting: Used for Golem crafting; you can choose the material the golem is made out of, in addition to its shape, equipment, features and power source.
- Empowered Badass Normal: Ordinary units can be customized with a magical boon when recruited depending on your research, and can then be further empowered with enchantments cast on them later on.
- Entropy and Chaos Magic: In two forms; the "Chaos" mastery covers mutations and unpredictable summoning, while the "Wild Magic" trait makes your research faster but the results are unpredictable.
- Golem: The Artifice mastery allows you to create custom golems; other masteries provide different materials or shapes for them.
- Fantastic Racism: The game's races have opinions on each other that can affect their ability to work together in your employ, among other things.
- Instant-Win Condition: While not quite instant, casting the Ritual of Ascendancy spell and then defending your wizard tower for 24 turns will result in immediate victory.
- Item Crafting: The focus of the Enchantment and, to a lesser extent, Artifice masteries, allowing you to enchant magical objects. Your artisan followers can also create non-magical items to use a gifts to keep loyalty or for diplomatic purposes.
- Linear Warriors, Quadratic Wizards: The game deliberately makes no effort to balance wizards against warlords; warlords are outright described as hard mode in the interface and the game strongly advises new players against playing them because of how rapidly this trope causes wizards to pull ahead.
- Magic Knight: The Battle Mage follower archetype is this; the class type is both martial and arcane. Any arcane follower can also be this if they have the Martial Training trait.
- Master of Illusion: The Illusion mastery focuses on this.
- Morale Mechanic: Most units have a morale stat that can cause them to break and run in combat; one advantage to golems and mindless undead is that they do not.
- Place of Power: Mana Nodes can be bound to produce continuous mana income for your character, or tapped for a small quick burst (disabling them temporarily.)
- Point Build System: Used to create a custom wizard at the start of the game.
- Shock and Awe: Part of the focus of the Air mastery, which lets you attack with lightning in addition to manipulating air directly.
- Standard Fantasy Setting: Elves, dwarves, trolls, humans, and so on, with mighty wizards in towers and warlords seeking dominion over the world.
- Summon Magic: The focus of the Summoning mastery, as well as a major aspect of several others, such as the demon-summoning Abyss Mastery or the animal-summoning Beasts mastery.
