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The many races of Etheria, who have been at war with each other in four Warlords turn-based games and two real-time strategy products under the Warlords Battlecry banner, have moved their conflicts to the new continent of Keshan. The creators of the Battlecry series are taking the existing troupe to a direction of colonialism and imperialism as the knights, dwarves, elves and others move to pacify the indigenous creatures of Keshan. While the setting has changed and the style of gameplay has been enhanced a little, the driving force behind Battlecry still remains the same.
 
As with the other Battlecry titles, in Warlords Battlecry III you can craft a hero of a certain class and enhance them through improvement of attributes and equipment. Your hero can be wielded not only in individual skirmishes but also in the single player campaign as well. Most games let you do one but not the other. In addition to statistics and gaining experience, your hero also carries around with them a retinue of troops. These are pre-hired troops that can be bought with the laurels of each victory. These types of features encourage better playing. If you spend time to explore every nook and cranny of a map, you'll gain more experience that you can use to make subsequent missions all the more easier. A weapon picked up in a skirmish could become a bonus you can use in a campaign.  
There is a similar twist to the single player campaign. Instead of a linear mission campaign, the game is presented on a general map from which you can select your next destination. Again, this type of approach promotes building the hero character. You can do the less important missions to enable your hero to better take on his or her tasks. It also reduces the monotony of the traditional, build, swarm, conquer, rinse and repeat cycle that plagues most real time strategy titles today.  
The game features a good mix of races. Most are discernible to the discriminate fantasy game player, and most people are discriminate these days thanks to the popular appeal of the Lord of the Rings. So the dwarves are slow melee oriented fighters as they are often depicted. Warlords preserves most of the original races. They split the humans into two specialized groups and added snake-like lizardmen called the Ssrathi.  
When it comes to real-time strategy titles, multiplayer is almost as important as the meaty campaigns of the game. Warlords delivers a Blizzard style multiplayer setup, allowing you to mix it up with artificial intelligence and real life players. The variety of units available will enable players to formulate some creative strategies. That shouldn't be a surprise for a game that delivers a laundry list of unit postures (called attitudes) for everything from attack to defense specifically for a magic user.  
The Battlecry approach to resource handling is also more conducive to skirmishes. It's more territorial as taking over a resource (for example, a crystal or ore mine) involves attacking it and then slowly converting it to work for you. Resources are then harvested automatically, although the micromanaging economist will be able to improve production by allocating idle workers to the mine. Graphically, Warlords maintains the traditional look of a real-time strategy title. The game handles many characters on screen well -- most probably because it has not succumbed to a full 3D implementation. Scrolling from one side of a busy map to another is speedy and never a chore. One nice part of the overall presentation is its use of musical scores. There's never really a dull moment when it comes to the soundtrack.
 
It's hard to believe but the first Warlords Battlecry game came out four years ago at the turn of the century. Warlords was one of the bigger franchises during the heydays of turn-based strategy titles on the PC. It spilled over to the real-time strategy genre naturally with ease (and on a side note, Might and Magic spilled over to the strategy genre from the role-playing side of things). But many approached the notion of real-time Warlords with trepidation. Would real-time ruin it as it has done with many other franchises? The proof is in the works now. In its third iteration, Warlords is turning into a solid real-time strategy franchise. It has a lot to rub up against with new entrants this year but luckily it will find itself on the shelves without the big guns (Command and Conquer or Warcraft) competing with it for space.
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