Incline Warlords Battlecry: The Protectors of Etheria v0.9 released - Now also on Steam! - free standalone mod for WBC3and sequel to the Warlords franchise

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edit:
It seems that on Steam, you need to own Warlords Battlecry 3 to play it, but if you download it from ModDB, it is completely standalone.

https://www.moddb.com/games/the-protectors/news/the-protectors-version-09-full-now-available

The Protectors version 0.9 FULL now available

Sharpen your swords! The long awaited version 0.9 is finally here!

0.9 Download​

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Version 0.9 FULL

0.9 Feature Rundown Video​

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Discover some of the biggest and most exciting changes in The Protectors version 0.9 in this early preview video! Please note that not all changes are covered in this video - there are so many that it would be impossible to go through each and every one! For more information about the changes made in 0.9, check out the changelog linked below.

Changelog: Changelog

Steam: Store.steampowered.com

Donations: Paypal.com

Discord: Discord.gg

Thank you for your continued support and Merry Christmas!

• The Protectors Team

 

[Kabas]

I dunno, some of the changes seem interesting. Many of the others however feel like a mechanics bloat and changes for the sake of changes kind of thing.

 

[thesheeep]

Been waiting for this forever.
Can't wait to play the hell out of it.

Still easily the best RTS/RPG out there.

 

[catfood]

I've never played the Battlecry series before. I'm gonna give this mod a spin seeing that it's stand-alone and all.

 

[Gandalf]

I have a good memories of Warlords Battlecry 3. It's a pretty cool game, if you ask me. I'll defenitelly check this mod out in the future! It should be a blast. Thanks for sharing!

 

[Dr Skeleton]

Battlecry 2 was better than 3 because of the campaign. 3 had some improvements to heroes, new units, dividing humans into knights and empire was good, it had weird new factions I didn't care about (Lizards seemed cool, but Swarm and Plague looked like they were cobbled together in a week from random leftover assets), unfortunately the campaign wasn't nearly as fun as in 2.

Looks like they've made some kind of a hybrid campaign of 2 and 3, so it might be good. Lots of huge mechanical changes, most of them make sense on paper, if nothing else they put a lot of thought into it, but we'll see how it plays.

 

[Feyd Rautha]

Cheers! I was going to create this thread this evening.

 

[Gandalf]

Battlecry 2

Searched this entry out of pure curiosity in my browser and just realized I was talking about WB2 in my previous post. They look similar, so I mixed them up. I'm not familiar with the 3 at all.

 

[thesheeep]

Battlecry 2 was better than 3 because of the campaign. 3 had some improvements to heroes, new units, dividing humans into knights and empire was good, it had weird new factions I didn't care about (Lizards seemed cool, but Swarm and Plague looked like they were cobbled together in a week from random leftover assets), unfortunately the campaign wasn't nearly as fun as in 2.

Looks like they've made some kind of a hybrid campaign of 2 and 3, so it might be good. Lots of huge mechanical changes, most of them make sense on paper, if nothing else they put a lot of thought into it, but we'll see how it plays.

Not quite.
They have the WBC2 conquest style campaign (with improvements I think, don't quite remember original WBC2), the WBC3 campaign, two other campaigns (one is a mod campaign, the other I'm not sure, maybe WBC1?) ... and ALSO the first 13 scenarios of their own Protector campaign.

So... yeah, quite a few campaigns to pick your poison

 

[Gerrard]

Battlecry 2 was better than 3 because of the campaign. 3 had some improvements to heroes, new units, dividing humans into knights and empire was good, it had weird new factions I didn't care about (Lizards seemed cool, but Swarm and Plague looked like they were cobbled together in a week from random leftover assets), unfortunately the campaign wasn't nearly as fun as in 2.

Looks like they've made some kind of a hybrid campaign of 2 and 3, so it might be good. Lots of huge mechanical changes, most of them make sense on paper, if nothing else they put a lot of thought into it, but we'll see how it plays.

2 didn't have a "campaign", it had a "Here's a world map, go do war." Both 1 and 3 had actual (branching) story driven campaigns.

I have the WBC2 menu theme ingrained in my mind forever

 

[Kabas]

I would also like to add that the WB2 has the most pleasing-looking terrain pallete, buildings and GUI amongst all of the three games.
IMO

 

[Dr Skeleton]

2 didn't have a "campaign", it had a "Here's a world map, go do war." Both 1 and 3 had actual (branching) story driven campaigns.

Which was better than 3's "run around the map doing random repeatable missions like a bum", it was completely unfocused. 3 assumes you give a fuck about closing a demon portal even if you play as the demons, then sends you to the lizard continent and allows free roaming, which is nice in theory, but it feels like you're a random guy with a band of brigands, not a warlord with an army, you don't have a home base and don't control any territory, there's no one else there until you go to their province and choose a mission. It was ambitious to combine a story-driven campaign with an open map, I'll given them that, but I didn't like how it played.

Choose a faction, conquer new territories, fight other factions, take their capitals, defend your territories, that's enough for me.

 

[thesheeep]

2 didn't have a "campaign", it had a "Here's a world map, go do war." Both 1 and 3 had actual (branching) story driven campaigns.

Which was better than 3's "run around the map doing random repeatable missions like a bum", it was completely unfocused. 3 assumes you give a fuck about closing a demon portal even if you play as the demons, then sends you to the lizard continent and allows free roaming, which is nice in theory, but it feels like you're a random guy with a band of brigands, not a warlord with an army, you don't have a home base and don't control any territory, there's no one else there until you go to their province and choose a mission. It was ambitious to combine a story-driven campaign with an open map, I'll given them that, but I didn't like how it played.

Choose a faction, conquer new territories, fight other factions, take their capitals, defend your territories, that's enough for me.

I found the biggest issue of the WBC3 campaign that it was extremely low on XP.
I think you could easily do the entire thing and wouldn't even be level 15 by the end (unless you did some grinding).

My favourite campaign was neither the WBC2 nor the WBC3 one, but the fan-made Conquest campaign, which was a much better variant of the "free roaming" that WBC3 attempted.

Would be nice if there was a combination of the campaign styles. WBC2 style province-based conquering/defending, but also other kinds of missions that you can do within the provinces for crowns, unlocks, etc.
The WBC2-style campaign has the problem that all missions are pretty much the same (only the map really changes), WBC3 had a lot more variety.

 

[thesheeep]

So far, I really like The Protectors and their changes were surprisingly well thought out.
And they are very responsive on the Discord, too. I don't envy the bugsmashing and feature-requests they are dealing with right now

The resource changes (every unit costs gold now, some advanced ones additional materials in addition to gold), all buildings cost stone (+gold), upgrades a mix of gold + other resources, unit abilities cost crystal.
Basically, gold is the basis of everything and the other resources are more specialized. Mines always give gold in addition to their other resource.

It leads to a much better flow when playing, as before those changes the existing resources on a map could easily block what you can do and then you'd end up with stuff like only building one unit type as that is what the resource situation allows.
The downside of the new system is of course that you now mostly do the same thing on each map, as resources no longer limit your possibilities, or only to a much smaller degree.

I did like to be forced on some maps to do something completely alien (like "ok, I guess I'll only build oakmen and dragons as the Fey on this map"). But I also like the new much more "standard RTS" flow of unit production and resource management.
I guess it would be cool if some maps brought back the old restrictions in some way and add new ones as well (eg "no flying units", "no abilities", "buildings have half HP", "double army limit", etc.).
But their "would be cool" folder is probably overflowing as it is...

 

[Malakal]

I spent so many hours playing WB1-2-3 with my friend on LAN, very fond memories and I was looking forward to this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-jdZhxEguSg here is a video about the changes and their design philosophy.

 

[Suicidal]

Questions to those who played it:

Did you guys have the weird GUI bug as seen here at the bottom right?

For me several GUI components are placed on top of eachother and constantly appear in front/behind eachother when I mouse over that part of the screen.

Tried different resolutions, both square and wide, windowed mode, full screen, running in compatibility mode - nothing helped.

Tried both the Steam version and ModDB version.

Nothing to be found on google either.

I'm on Windows 10.

 

[Lucumo]

I found the biggest issue of the WBC3 campaign that it was extremely low on XP.
I think you could easily do the entire thing and wouldn't even be level 15 by the end (unless you did some grinding).

IIRC, you could cheese it by using your hero in custom maps and stuffing him with exp/items.

Choose a faction, conquer new territories, fight other factions, take their capitals, defend your territories, that's enough for me.

Warlords Battlecry 2 was extremely broken though. I did the conquering with my hero only because I had chance of self-heal on hit + extremely high attack speed. The only obstacles were towers because, IIRC, you didn't self-heal against buildings.

 

[Jack Of Owls]

Might be worth playing because you supposedly have the whole of Warlords Battlecry 2 in this mod (considered the best of the 3), in addition to 3 and the new original Protectors campaign. Haven't played this since I got my 4K 65" display though. Can it actually be played at 2160p or are elements too small on the screen because of no proper interface scaling? I also remember a vicious crashing bug in Battlecry 3 that made it so I had to avoid using a certain speed-up or time acceleration feature. I wonder if that was fixed.

 

[Suicidal]

Found a fix for the UI issue, if anyone ever experiences it:

1. Set Control Panel to Extended in graphics options.
2. If this causes black bars to appear all over the UI for you like it did for me - set resolution to your screen resolution and display mode to borderless window. For some reason other settings didn't work.

 

[thesheeep]

Found a fix for the UI issue, if anyone ever experiences it:

1. Set Control Panel to Extended in graphics options.
2. If this causes black bars to appear all over the UI for you like it did for me - set resolution to your screen resolution and display mode to borderless window. For some reason other settings didn't work.

Generally, the Extended panel is the only recommended one, not sure why they still supply the classic one, it doesn't really work for anyone unless you are on a very old monitor.

 

[Cyberarmy]

WTF!!! One of my favorites is coming back like this! Merry Christmas <3
It's dwarven justice time!

Now only game I need similar update for is Lords of Magic. It is a bitch to get it working on modern systems.

 

[thesheeep]

Oh, btw, this changelog is being updated quite regularly:
https://docs.google.com/document/u/...4EtX6rB55hqbVYqnYroCZlqJv4U8xCdQXUg/pub?pli=1

No official release date for 0.9.1 yet, but I expect it to be out a lot quicker than 0.9 was as it will mostly be a (quite needed) bugfixing update with only minor balancing changes.
Some things are just too broken in 0.9 to really invest a ton of time, mostly the campaign just being very whack balancing-wise as the missions were all designed with vanilla in mind.

Eg. AI heroes in the WBC2 campaign receive +1 level for each of their victories, which leads to them having insanely high levels (30+) while you will still be around level 20.
I once fought a lvl 53 AI on a map, and the hero just went to my base, wrecked my shit and said goodbye. Levels above 30 are mostly godlike territory where you aren't really playing an RTS anymore, but can just play Diablo with your hero.
This will be reduced to +1000xp per victory. Which is IMO still way too much, but at least less insane.

 

[Cyberarmy]

I played this a lot when I was on vacation and men, did I really declined that much in RTS gameplay or is this mod much harder than the original? I remember finishing this one easly back then but now it kicked my butt.

 

[thesheeep]

I played this a lot when I was on vacation and men, did I really declined that much in RTS gameplay or is this mod much harder than the original? I remember finishing this one easly back then but now it kicked my butt.

It is A LOT harder. The AI is MUCH stronger now.
It'll multitask economy and several heroes/conversion/map control groups with ease while you struggle to just keep your base and hero somewhat active.

That's why they'll tone down the max army limit of AIs as a quick "fix" to this.
Hopefully with a smarter fix (eg AI reaction time) further down the line.

Especially in campaign, again with the vanilla sucky AI and vanilla balancing in mind, you sometimes have missions where you are up against multiple AI opponents.
And with the 0.9 balancing, you simply cannot outproduce them unless you start with drastically better mines. Nor can you outplay them, because the AI multitasks better than most humans could.
So those missions become borderline impossible unless you cheese them (stack companions, retinue, mercs, starting army against buildings, go and whack one opponent right away).

It is an old wisdom in game development that it is relatively easy to make a really strong AI.
But it is pretty difficult to make an AI that is challenging, but not overwhelming to the player.
Well, I think it is fair to say the mod devs fell into that trap

 

[thesheeep]

In addition to all that, though, the game plays very differently with the mod, closer to traditional RTS and less "anything goes".
You can't just set a bunch of barracks to autoproduce and forget about them. That'll wreck your economy, you need to be careful to only produce what you need while also allowing growth via new buildings/upgrades/research.
Personally, what I do is to have only one or two barracks on autoproduce, making sure that their consumption is comfortably below my income. Those will produce the bread and butter of your army. Everything else I will produce manually.

.... which would be a lot easier if building control groups weren't fucked in 0.9* - but that is fixed already in 0.9.1 so again, just gotta wait for that

* What happens right now is you assign some building to say, control group 4. Then every unit that building produces will inherit that control group. It was probably meant as a way to produce units into a control group. Which might be nice if you use control groups for units a lot (I don't, as I want to focus my attention on the army, not the buildings).
But what that leads to is that you will no longer be able to select your building via 4 because pressing 4 will instead select all units in 4, since units and buildings cannot be in the same control group.
This inheritance of control groups is disabled in 0.9.1, maybe at a later point there will be a better way to produce into control groups without messing up building control groups.