Good evening. You are listening to Three Moves Ahead, and I'm your host, Rob Zakene. Tonight, we first welcome back our friend and freelance writer, Rowan Kaiser. Rowan, thanks for coming back to the show. Thanks for having me. And finally, we have a first-time guest, and someone I've wanted to have on the show for a very long time, freelance writer and copy-editing fanatic Jason Wilson. Jason, glad to have you on three i'm very very glad to

finally be able to do it i've been so busy in the after hours with kid duty that i'm just thrilled

to get a chance to actually sit down and talk today uh so our topic tonight is warlock master of the

arcane a fantasy strategy game from Paradox.

Warlock is a hex-based, turn-based 4-X that bears a startling resemblance to Civilization 5, but plays like, well, I suppose that's a good place to start.

Jason, what about Warlock stands out in your mind as unusual? Well, the fact that it's a fantasy strategy game, how many of those are we getting these days? I'm kind of at a loss. Elemental? Was that the last one we had like this? Conquist, well, if you're in the indie space, Conquest of Elysium 3 came out earlier this year.

Ah, yes, yes, yes, yes. We did a show on that.

Yeah, but, you know, these things are just pretty rare in and of themselves.

You know, the last really big one was Elemental, and we know how that went,

and we know that another one's coming out here pretty soon.

What makes this game unusual for me is

how much it really emphasized just one of the four X's in

4X, which in this case to be is extermination.

I think it also does really interesting balance things with expansion,

and some of those are good and some of them are bad, but most of them are worth talking about.

Yeah, I've been playing in a fair bit these last few days.

I haven't had as much time to sink into it as I would like.

I was not able to take a review assignment for it when it came out.

So, you know, you know how it is.

Time moves on.

But I've been sort of struck by how much

it is very much like a war game in a lot of ways. Really, like, the first impression it made

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