The Digital Antiquarian - 19 Jun 2026

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Although I've played way too many games for way too many hours over the way too many years I've been writing these histories, it's safe to say that I haven't spent more time with any one game than Heroes of Might and Magic II. Partly this was down to circumstance. Heroes II showed up on the syllabus just as I was embarking on one of my periodic digressions, a long series about international communications networks and how they culminated in the World Wide Web. Without the need to write in detail about a new game every fortnight, I was freer than I usually am just to play whatever I felt like playing. And what I felt like playing at that time was Heroes II. I beat every single Heroes II scenario in my Heroes of Might and Magic Millennium Edition set, some alone, some in multiplayer mode with my wife Dorte, who became almost as obsessed as I was. I must confess that my usual rule of no more than two hours of gaming per day was strained at times, shattered completely at others. But we were still in the midst of the pandemic then and there wasn't much else for me to do with my free time, so I figured it was okay to set self-discipline aside for a while. Maybe it was even good experiential research, in that it re-familiarized me with that strange hungover feeling you get when you've spent hours and hours peering into an imaginary world behind your monitor screen - like butter that's been scraped over too much bread, to steal a phrase from Tolkien. (For what it's worth, I've found that the best cure for this condition is the same as that for a conventional hangover: a long walk in nature.)

I played and enjoyed Heroes III a lot as well, but not quite as much as Heroes II. Again, I'm sure that this was down to circumstance as much as anything else. By the time I got to that game, the pandemic was over, I was busier with real life again, and my two-hour rule was firmly back in place. Then, too, I had played a lot of Heroes of Might and Magic by that point, and was perchance finally growing tired of the basic concept in the abstract. So, when I say that I don't like the more conventionally "gamer-dark" Heroes III art style as well as the previous game's brighter, more cartoony vibe, and say that I am not entirely convinced that its new factions and other additional complexities really add that much to the experience, take that with a grain of salt. My opinion might be just the opposite if I had encountered these games in the opposite order.

Anyway, all of this had led me to ask two questions. Why did I find these particular games so appealing, given that I've never been all that hugely taken with world-conquering strategy games in the abstract? And what else is out there in a similar vein that I might also enjoy?

To try to answer the first question first: I think I like the unreality of fantasy strategy. I'm not at all averse to games that depict the real world, mind you, but I do start to have a problem when such games tackle weighty subjects in a thoughtless way. Call me a woke snowflake, but I just don't want to play a Nazi general preparing Europe for the Holocaust or a Spanish conquistador subjugating the native inhabitants of the New World. I know too much about what those job descriptions entailed. I have no objection to playing a wizard, however - not even an evil one. For I know that the elves and dwarves he kills do not and never have actually existed.

The rest of this article constitutes the merest beginning of an answer to that other question I asked, about what else is out there when it comes to turn-based fantasy strategy. As most of you doubtless know, games fitting this broad description have been around since the dawn of personal computers. Knowing that I couldn't possibly play all of them, I decided to confine this investigation to the late 1990s, the era of Heroes II and III and the period we still find ourselves in in the larger chronology of these histories. I picked out three examples of the species that are generally regarded as worthy: Warlords III, Age of Wonders, and Disciples: Sacred Lands. Let's give them each a spin and see how we go, shall we? Maybe one of them will turn out to be Just Right for me or for you.

As the name would imply, Warlords III is the third entry in a series, one that was designed by the Aussie Steve Fawkner and developed by a little Australian studio called Strategic Studies Group. But just to keeping things from becoming too straightforward, there are actually two games that bear the name of Warlords III, both of them published by Red Orb Entertainment, a brief-lived subsidiary label of the venerable Brderbund Software. Warlords III: Reign of Heroes was released in 1997, only to be superseded the following year by Warlords III: Darklords Rising, which sported more unit types and additional campaigns. In a sudden outbreak of good taste, it also excised its predecessor's hilariously cheesy cutscenes, featuring real human actors - by a generous definition of the term "actor," that is - dressed up in crude latex monster suits. One of the enduring mysteries of the 1990s is why anyone ever thought this sort of thing was a good idea...

I must say that I adore the name Strategic Studies Group (SSG from here on), a wonderful example of the longstanding grognard determination to dodge the insinuation that they were engaged in anything so frivolous as making and playing games. No, friends, these are strategic studies of the battlefield, which in this case just happens to be filled with orcs and zombies and dragons in lieu of tanks and infantry and airplanes. (See TSR, or "Tactical Studies Rules," and SSI, or "Strategic Simulations, Incorporated," for other canonical examples of the trend.)

I've mentioned SSG only in passing before today; The Wargaming Scribe has done the best job of documenting their story that I know of. As he tells us, the company was founded in a suburb of Sydney, Australia, by two military-history and wargame buffs named Ian Trout and Roger Keating. They enjoyed a noteworthy international success right out of the gate in 1983 with their wide-frame conquer-the-galaxy game Reach for the Stars, the forerunner of interstellar 4X strategy games like my beloved Master of Orion. (I think that I tend to gravitate to this sub-genre for the same reason I do fantasy strategy: no messy, complicated real history to prick the conscience and muck up the joy of megalomaniac conquest.)

After Reach for the Stars put them on the map, SSG settled down to become a reliable purveyor of historical wargames, a kind of Aussie counterpart to the American SSI. Trout and Keating's strong suit was the artificial intelligence that powered their computer opponents. In an era when even games like the landmark Civilization were able to offer up a challenge only by augmenting the rudimentary algorithms governing their computer players with an ever higher stack of material advantages, to the point that the human and the computer were in effect playing different games entirely, Trout and Keating obstinately refused to cheat in this fashion. Their computer players were widely acknowledged to be the craftiest in the business, capable of genuinely surprising human players from time to time with a clever bit of subterfuge or an unexpected ambush - no mean feat on an 8-bit machine with as little as 64 kilobytes of memory.

Fantasy strategy was added to SSG's portfolio after Steve Fawkner sent the founders an early version of Warlords I for their consideration. The story goes that an unimpressed Ian Trout threw the disk in the trash - only to have his son come along, fish it out, and spend hours playing the game. On the basis of his testimony as to its merit, Keating and Trout gave it a second look, and eventually hired Fawkner to develop it further. This proved one of the best decisions they ever made. Released in 1989, Warlords I was simple and clean in a way that no SSG game had been since Reach for the Stars. Not coincidentally, it sold better than any SSG game since Reach for the Stars. Warlords II followed in 1993, and also did well by the company's modest standards.

For the third installment, Fawkner and his colleagues updated their paradigm in some ways to suit the changing times. Instead of relying strictly on randomly generated maps, Reign of Heroes offered up a ten-episode pre-scripted campaign, complete with the aforementioned cheesy cutscenes. In other areas, however, Fawkner stuck to his guns. Most notably, he refused to add player-managed tactical combat. When two armies meet on the strategic map, the computer resolves the outcome with a series of virtual dice rolls that flash across the screen while you wring your hands and hope for the best from the sidelines.

Believe it or not, this screen shows a battle in progress.

Once you get past the tacky cutscenes, which probably cost as much as the rest of the game combined if industry norms held true, Warlords III can seem almost like a shareware game. The in-game graphics are best described as rudimentary - in my opinion, actually worse than those in the previous games, which had a colorful low-res charm that these lack. The writing in the tutorial and campaign gives cause to wonder whether the author has entered a contest to see how many overwrought cliches he can pack into a small volume of sentences.

It was 1252 years since the founding of the Selentine Empire when the greatest threat to the free races of Etheria reared its ugly head (1). In the icy wastelands (2) of the far north, Lord Bane, Master of the Undead, and Lord Sartek, Keeper of the Chaos Beasts, had formed an unholy alliance (3). Like a plague (4), they swept down from the northern tundra, crushing the citadels of the High Elves beneath their bony feet (5).

(Not bad for three sentences...)

But we aren't supposed to care about any of this, we are told by a small but devoted cult of Warlords III admirers. This game is all about the gameplay.

In practice, it feels very much like a board game. You start out with a single hero, and can recruit more as a scenario goes on, but, unlike in Heroes of Might and Magic, you're free to move your armies - or "stacks," as the game prefers to call them, thus maintaining the tabletop feel - without a leader at their head. Although the maps in the campaigns are fixed, there is a lot of randomness embedded within them. For instance, you can accept randomized quests on behalf of your heroes. These often entail plundering the dungeons, ruins, barrows, and other such archetypes of fantasy architecture that are scattered around the map for randomized treasure and experience; in keeping with the nature of the combat, the results of any given expedition are revealed to you with a simple onscreen message. The scale of the strategic maps is usually huge, with dozens of towns to dispute with your foes in addition to the other points of interest, but the lack of a tactical component means that the game plays quickly even by comparison with Heroes of Might and Magic.

All of this is... fine, I guess, but I struggled to grow invested in it. I admit that I didn't get far enough into the campaign to say whether the much-vaunted SSG artificial intelligence makes a difference. With no way to control my units on the battlefield or in the dungeons, I felt like I was playing half a game while someone else played the other half for me and told me what happened. Meanwhile the aesthetics did nothing to make me want to spend time in this world. I tip my hat to anyone who has gotten past these initial impressions and embraced the great game which I am told is lurking underneath. But, speaking personally, Warlords III flew pretty wide of my strike zone.

Next up is Age of Wonders, which came out late in 1999. Designed by Lennart Sas and Arno van Wingerden, it was the first game ever from a Dutch outfit known as Triumph Studios. It was published in North America by Gathering of Developers and elsewhere in the world by GOD's biggest shareholder, Take Two Interactive.

The impression its opening cutscene gives is the polar opposite of Warlords III's: digitized cheese is replaced with lush hand-drawn art (even if it does unveil a dubious new innovation in videogame babes, the first female suit of armor to display the poor girl's nipples as bas-reliefs). The dramatically different aesthetic sensibility obscures the ironic reality that Age of Wonders owes a massive debt to the older, uglier Warlords series.

Indeed, Age of Wonders makes for a fascinating study in game design as dialog and evolution, in that almost all of its elements are so obviously lifted from earlier exercises in turn-based fantasy strategy. The core of its movement and logistics is Warlords III, with the same stacks of up to eight units, one or more of which may be heroes who can go up in levels and gain skills and equipment. We likewise have the same large maps strewn with towns to conquer, resources to corner, and dungeons to delve.

But when armies meet one another on one of these maps, there emerges an important difference. You have the option to let the battle resolve itself automatically - i.e., Warlords-style - but you can also oversee the fray yourself in a tactical game that smacks strongly of MicroProse's much-loved classic Master of Magic. There's a global magic system here which is straight out of that game as well. You receive a certain number of mana points per turn, derived from the number of magical wellsprings you control on the map. You can invest your mana into researching new spells for your magic-using heroes or have them expend it by casting the spells they already know. Some of these spells are triggered from the strategic map, where they can remain in effect for many turns as long as you have the necessary mana to sustain them. Others are one-shots for use on the battlefield. And some spells, such as heals and buffs, can be used in either situation.

When you add in a town-management layer that falls somewhere between Warlords and Master of Magic in complexity, you wind up with a considerably heavier game than Heroes of Might and Magic. Speaking of which: the influence of that series can be most readily detected in Age of Wonders's interest in set-piece storytelling, which extends far beyond the procedurally generated maps of Master of Magic or the halfhearted, poorly written campaigns of Warlords III. The campaign here is presented as a literal storybook, in which you can choose to join the side of one of two elvish factions, one peaceful and idealistic and the other warlike and pragmatic, who are each responding in their own way to an invasion by a new race known as... wait for it... the Humans. Rather than handing you a simple linear ladder of scenarios to overcome, the game lets you make choices at the macro-level from time to time, even gives you the opportunity to switch sides mid-campaign.

Age of Wonders's commitment to its fiction is impressive. The diligent and inquisitive player will come to realize that even the standalone scenarios constitute an extended story; if you play them in the order of the dates which stand in their descriptions, you wind up living through a prequel to the main campaign. The atmosphere throughout is slavishly Tolkienesque high fantasy - not exactly the highest-hanging fruit in gaming, but this game pulls it off with more panache than most. Aesthetically speaking, Age of Wonders has aged remarkably well. The art and the music seem as lovely today as they must have the day it was released. (The one odd exception is the sound effects during the tactical battles, which sound like they were lifted from old Three Stooges reels.)

Age of Wonders supports any screen resolution you care to throw at it, including widescreen ones. It ran happily for me in my monitor's native resolution of 3440 X 1440, making it only the second game I've come upon in this fifteen-years-long-and-counting journey through time about which I can make such a statement. The interface elements don't scale, and became so small at that resolution that the game is effectively unplayable, at least for someone with middle-aged eyes like me - but still, the fact that it works at all right out of the box is amazing.

For all that, though, I couldn't quite make friends with Age of Wonders either. My problem with it comes down to what the legendary game designer Sid Meier has immortalized as "the Covert Action Rule," after a flawed and otherwise forgotten game of his that came out in 1991. Meier believes that the reason his attempt to do for spies what his earlier Pirates! had done for corsairs didn't work as well was that its mini-games were ironically too well-developed, such that they could take too long for the player to complete. By the time she finally gets back to the overarching strategic layer, goes the theory, she's forgotten what she was doing there, has lost that ineffable sense of flow. "One good game is better than two great ones" stuffed into the same box, goes one of Meier's oft-quoted design principles. Of course, game design is as much art as science, and the Covert Action Rule is a real problem right up until the point when it inexplicably isn't. Speaking for myself, I don't even think it's the principal issue with the game Covert Action itself.

But I do think that it's my problem - mileages will obviously vary here - with Age of Wonders. Those tactical battles you get dropped into when armies clash are very slow. Your units usually start out well away from the enemy, far enough away that just maneuvering them into range can require several turns of careful micro-management. Worst of all are the dungeon-delving expeditions, in which you find yourself trying to move up to eight units one by one through a series of twisty little passages, hoping not to get any of them caught out by the monsters that might be lurking around every corner. It takes forever. When you're finally dumped back into the overland map after one of these extended interludes, it can be downright disorienting, as if you really are trying to play two completely different games at the same time.

These big, bland tactical maps can be kind of tiring just to look at.

It's true that Age of Wonders has the option to auto-resolve the battles if not the dungeon-delving. But doing so seldom produces the results you can achieve by taking charge yourself, even as the scenarios tend to be mercilessly tough by the middle stages of the campaign, requiring you to make use of every advantage at your disposal. And anyway, as I already noted in the context of Warlords III, I don't find auto-resolving the battles very satisfying either.

So, yes, I'm a tough crowd to win over. If Warlords III feels to me like too little game, Age of Wonders feels like too much of one, full of side-quests that are more burdensome than fun. I will say that I'm curious to try the sequels to Age of Wonders at some point in the future; I understand that Triumph Studios made an effort in them to address some of my complaints, by starting tactical fights with the armies closer together and by eliminating the manual dungeon-delving entirely. For this reason, the sequels are definitely on my syllabus.

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Original: https://www.filfre.net/2026/06/the-goldilocks-principle-in-fantasy-strategy/