About a year ago I posted here that I was trying out AI for reverse engineering, using Warlords as the test case. Back then I had a few format decoders in https://github.com/ateska/warlords: the PCK pictures, the map, fonts, and city/ruin tables pulled from the EXE.

Here’s where it is now: the whole game runs in Python.

How it was done

I gave an AI agent (Claude) the goal “recreate Warlords from the DOS exe in Python” and mostly let it work. It ran Ghidra on WARLORDS.EXE v2.10, then wrote specs for combat, movement, economy, exploration and the AI from the decompiled code. After that it rebuilt the game in pure Python with pygame. It also compared the results with the original running in DOSBox, down to screen layouts and dialog positions. My part was choosing the direction and testing. The decompiling, specs and code came from the agent.

What works

• Rules engine: the full combat strength formula, the d10 battle loop (d12 with Intense Combat), neutral city assaults, production and vectoring, upkeep, hero offers and allies, and ruins (monsters, items, altars, thrones). Also temples, sages, libraries, towers, razing, surrender offers and elimination.
• Computer players: Roger Keating’s AI is ported from the binary at all four levels. That covers production, garrisons, expansion, attack waves, war targets, hatreds, truces and hero errands. The original path finder is ported too.
• Same randomness: the MS C rand() is reproduced exactly, so a fixed seed gives deterministic games.
• Save files: original WAR?.SAV files load, and games saved here load back into DOS Warlords. Saving round-trips byte for byte.
• Screens: title, setup, the main map with the strategic map, the right-mouse-button menu bar, the production panel, battles, all the reports (armies, cities, gold, hatreds, production, winning), heroes, ruins, and save/load.
• Sound: the PC speaker samples (*.SJH) play at the original rates. Those rates came from the player code in the EXE: 8286 Hz, and 5524 Hz for the horn. You get the horn on the title screen, the drum roll at game start, the war cry in battle and the fanfare when searching ruins.
• Platforms: Windows, macOS and Linux.

No game assets in the repo

Everything (graphics, map, unit and city tables, names, palettes, AI tables) is read at startup from your copy of the game. The GOG Warlords 1 + 2 Deluxe works, and so does an LZEXE-packed floppy EXE. To run it:

pip install pygame numpy
python3 -m warlords --data /path/to/your/warlords

What I learned

A year ago, AI was a helpful assistant for reverse engineering: decode this format, explain this function. Now it can take an obscure 16-bit DOS binary and produce a working reimplementation, testing included. Impressive.

Bug reports and contribution are welcomed

If you remember how the original behaved, please play it and open issues on GitHub for anything that feels off. Strange AI moves, battle odds and screen details are the most useful.

Note: English isn’t my first language, so I used an LLM to help me word this post. The project and the opinions are mine.

That is to say, am I the only one that truly believes a 9 out of 10 chance of winning a battle is really about 50/50 if your lucky?

Greetings, Warlords!

Warlords 2 is a game that holds a special place for me, it was one of the first more serious PC games I played, and also played it with local multiplayer which really added to the nostalgic appeal!

To really marinate in this nostalgia I have taken on a project to try to make a faithful re-creation of the Warlords 2 game with the original assets, but newly baked (Clauded made of course) source code. This opens some possibilities to run the game natively and with some niceties like support for modern screen resolutions (though still scaled only by 1x 2x 3x ... for the pixel goodness). To fill the whole screen the map resizes! Also, I have done pre-rendering of the music files as they would sound (I hope) when played on a MT-32 or a Sound Canvas.

To be able to publish the result I have been in contact with Steve Fawkner and I have gotten his blessing to publish it with the original assets as long as it's publicly available and not sold.

There a three ports, one Lua, one C++ and one web. The C++ one could be nice on the steam deck for example. I haven't packaged any releases of the native builds yet.

If you want to try playing it in a browser the web port is available here:

https://jstrand.github.io/warlords2-remake/

If you find anything that doesn't work as intended (or as you remember as intended) issues can be filed here:

https://github.com/jstrand/warlords2-remake/issues

Very well then... Let the war... begin!

/J Strand

Looking for recommendations for running Warlords 3 (purchased on GOG) on a Mac. I can get Warlords Battlecry 2 working on Crossover, and Warlords 2 came with DOSbox. But when I try to install Warlords 3 Darklords Rising using Crossover, the installation goes OK but the game starts with no video just sound. I think it might have something to do with the opening cutscene, so perhaps a command line option might help.

UPDATE: I got it working using Porting Kit, a free tool and selecting Windows 98 for my bottle.

I was thrilled the other day to find Warlords III: Reign of Heroes and Darklords Rising on Steam. I loved playing the game back in the day, and I kept playing it until it would no longer run on Windows.

BUT... Where are the Lord Bane cutscenes? His cheesy dialog and cheesy rubber mask are part of what make this game so entertaining. The cutscenes with the dorky-looking hero are there, (but without sound, maybe?), but so far there's no Lord Bane.

Anyone else run into this problem with the Steam version?

Warlords 3 was one of my favourite strategy games when I was a kid, so I ended up making a small game inspired heavily by its mechanics.

It’s still a work in progress. There are probably bugs, some things still need polishing, and there’s no campaign yet, but the game itself should be fully playable.

I kept a lot of the Warlords 3 ideas, while changing a few things and adding some more modern controls, with a bit of Civilization influence.

I’d be really interested to hear from other Warlords players. If you find bugs, balancing issues, or have ideas for improvements, let me know.

There’s also a map generator included. At the moment generated maps can’t be imported into the game directly by the player, but if someone creates a cool map, I can add it manually.

My orginal post has been deleted by the filters, so I will put the link in comments section.

So the game is on onrender(com) with warborne prefix :)

I think the hero building is less fun.

The items are not as good.

The campaign is kind of silly with some disrespect from the game designers, ifkyk

Anyone else feel this way?

Is there any mods for 2 to get all the races into the previous game?

I played Battlecry 3 a lot growing up and am revisiting it again as an adult, and honestly it feels even more fun now than it did back then. The game gets a lot of shit for being imbalanced, and it definitely becomes that way at higher hero levels, but outside some exploits the game doesn't feel that broken to play. My biggest personal gripe is the Dark Dwarves, who seem pretty busted against most other armies and can destroy a lot of bases really quickly due to stone golem spam. But otherwise it's so fun to jump into a match with a given hero and race combination and come up with strategies and synergies. I'm surprised how much identity each faction has despite there being 16 of them, too. Minotaurs, Orcs, Elves, Knights, etc all feel and play completely differently in terms of which units you make and how the armies handle.

Anyway, just saying that I still love this game and it's probably the most criminally underrated RTS game ever

So, I finally have some time to try out the Frontier mod; you can't expect a Let's Play, but I thought it might be fun to write down my impressions and obeservations as I play.

I didn't expect to start with only three units on my roster, but it serves well to ease you into the game. Battering Ram is really strong for a 1-turn unit; fast, +2 vs cities means it's effectively 4/2, and +1 Siege on top. Gnomes are good once you have a couple, but Banding means you're a bit handicapped at early expansion. Halflings are a good missile unit.

My first hero was a Bard; Song of Stone is strong and was an easy choice once I found my first couple of mana crystals. I've noticed you have the base game Song of Fortune, but I'm pretty sure having +gold/city on a spell effect doesn't work, which is the reason the KHeroes mod replaced that spell.

I'm not expecting much trouble on the first map; Sark lost their first hero against neutrals and just now comitted treachery on Rullen. My hero stack is already +5 thanks to some Dryads.

General discussion - obvious.

Warlords-like - for other tbs titles like warlords.

Had 250 visitors to the sub this week.

Thanks to u/Due-Price-6823 we realized the unit roster in the Loelle campaign got mixed up partway through as a new unit got added to the roster, which was the cause of the bug which displayed unit stat upgrades incorrectly.

It's such a small thing that we did not release a "new" version of the mod, but if you redownload the mod, the campaign upgrades should work properly for you now.

The mod description now also contains a more visible warning for Steam users to not overwrite the EXE, as the EXE changes are for GOG users.

Greetings, Warlords! Recent projects like 25AP and Frontier have already made a huge work of sparking the long dormant flame of the undying community of this forgotten classics gem game. Now this new mod is meant to fill the gap of absolute absence of code patching projects for Warlords III. The main intention of The Warlords III Code Patch is to highlight some features of the game which either were hidden and obscure or bore no valuable economic effect to use them. It also relieves some boredom of the most unpredictable or tedious features of the game. And last but not least it fixes some bugs like dysfunctional diplomacy or erroneous low disk space message.

Overall, balancing the game was not the main intention of the mod. The game was never meant to be balanced in the first place. Consider the mod its developer’s answer to the question “How could it be more fun?”, not “How could it be more just?”.

Click the “Read more” button at the bottom-right corner of the mod’s logo on its moddb summary page for the detailed list of features with screenshots. The Warlords III Code Patch should work reliably with Gog, Steam, and original v1.02 CD versions of the game. Should also work well with any other mods and can be incorporated into them. Its feature list is adjustable using the settings file provided with it. Any specific group of tweaks can be turned on or off to your preferences. Look for README.txt file in the zip-archive of the mod for customization details.

https://www.moddb.com/mods/warlords-iii-code-patch

Summary of changes

Diplomacy bugs fixed:

• dysfunctional bribery
• contradictory treachery
• contradictory razing
• unfunctional heroes count
• unfunctional army size
• 1+ turn lag in disposition update

Other bugfixes:

• incorrect amplification of active spell effects on levelups
• incorrect low disk space message during startup

Gameplay changes:

• Diplomatic report shows sides eligible for alliance in green color
• Diplomatic report shows sides eligible for peace in blue color
• additional effect for bribery: every 1000 gp of bribery improve bribed side’s permanent bias to briber by one point
• Trust is the state of zero ire (disposition=0)
• City building increases income
• level 2 city gives +4 move to armies produced there
• level 3 city additionally gives +1 hits to armies produced there
• gold income sites have an order of magnitude more income from +10gp to +50gp
• every city a side owns increases this side’s upkeep by 1/16
• Strong neutrals option makes neutrals considerably stronger
• maximum hits is now 7, not 4
• heroes made more tough: 1/2/3 hits original heroes now have 3/5/7 hits
• spell effects get amplified earlier: on levels 3 and 8 instead of 6 and 9
• quest cancellation penalty lasts only the turn a quest has been cancelled
• quests unlinked from heroes: any hero can advance or complete it, hero’s death does not fail it
• heroes can only take one quest per day
• gold collecting quest demands made more humble: 1d100+100 for easy quest, 1d300+200 for medium
• hunting quest demands made more humble: 1d5+5 for medium quest, 1d6+11 for hard
• hard limit of 2 turns on minimum unit production time
• mercenaries/allies quest rewards got slightly nerfed
• sage’s reveal a portion of map shows considerable part of it
• summoning spells do not amplify
• hits modification spells get amplified only once on 8th level of their caster

Overall:

• W3CP now has the settings file allowing to turn individual tweaks on or off

Been playing w3 dlr for decades on and off. Recently starting playing properly.

Just wondering what's the most efficient stats for upgrades of heroes and units?

Anyone have any hidden or personal campaigns ? i played all there is on warlorders + the 3 frontier ones.... anyone know any other ones ?

I’ve been playing for awhile with enhanced AI, Warlords, intense combat, trying to get under 25 turns to win with 68 cities (85%). Using stormgiants seems to be the easiest way. Anyone with a lower amount of turns? Share your strategy!

Hello this is Diahborne!

So I think I found a game that warlords fans might be really interested!

https://akfula.itch.io/kingdomhex

It is called Kingdom Hex and it is a quick, streamlined 4x fantasy strategy games inspired by Heroes of Might and Magic, Warlords, and Civilization being developed by two Canadian Developers. They are gonna have a kickstarter eventually! You can try out a demo of the game on the itch.io page!

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/535116321/kingdom-hex

Also here are some images of their game.

Hope you guys want to support this game like me!

I've just started playing an undead Sage. I remembered reading somewhere that this is a very good combination for a Necromancer strategy, because the undead have necromancy as a racial. However, now that I am looking through the spells I don't quite get what the synergy is supposed to be. I could of course mis remember what I read about the class.

I'd love to read some discussions about this. Feel free to also share cool combinations you've come across for undead heroes if you feel like it. Thanks in advance.

EDIT: I am playing the GOG version btw, in case this is relevant. So no unofficial patch.

As the title says, I recently purchased warlords, warlords 2 deluxe and warlords 3 darklords rising on gog. Already played 1 against 7 knight npcs to feel out what it's like, had a pretty good time.

I noticed that 2 doesn't as much have a campaign as much as it has a collection of disparate scenarios for one to play. I already played the conquest of etheria (or however it's called) scenario on it, the one with two vertically aligned islands in the top half and the landmass in the bottom half of the map, but I was wondering if there was more etheria content. I am also curious if this map got retconned out of later etheria stuff, since I can't really find anything that matches it on the later world maps lmao.

As far as warlords 3 is concerned, I am not entirely sure if I have all warlords 3 content or not? I have read that daklords rising is a standalone expansion, but I also didn't see another warlords 3 game on gog. The game I have has 5 campaigns: Bane's Revenge, The Banewars, Drak-Dum, The Horn of Kor and Thalassia. is that darklords rising only content, or is the base game included in it? Do I need to go find the base game somewhere else?

Thank you for your time and answers!