The long-running Warlords series was one of the first lines of computer strategy games to integrate colorful high-fantasy and role-playing elements with the traditional turn-based strategy you'd normally associate with a wargame or a board game. The series went on to inspire other such games, like Heroes of Might and Magic, Master of Magic, and Age of Wonders. Like these games, the fourth Warlords game, Heroes of Etheria, lets you conquer a vast fantasy world by exploring it with adventuresome parties that consist of stalwart hero characters and fantastical creatures who become more powerful by gaining experience levels from battling enemy parties and neutral monsters. However, the new game does away with concerns like city development and alliances, and introduces a brand-new combat system that's reminiscent of a collectible card game. As a result, Warlords IV is a highly streamlined sequel that shifts the series' focus away from management and diplomacy to surprisingly fast-paced combat.

You create a custom warlord who can be carried over between battles.

Like SSG's recent Warlords Battlecry real-time strategy series, Warlords IV lets you create a customizable, persistent warlord that you can carry over from game to game, keeping experience levels and skills intact. Your objective is to raise armies to take over each of the game's maps by defeating your enemies' armies, capturing or razing their cities, and increasing your own holdings by clearing out monster-ridden neutral structures, researching magic spells, and acquiring powerful artifacts for your hero characters.

Unlike other, similar games, Warlords IV keeps management elements to a bare minimum. For instance, there are only two resources in the game: mana and gold. Mana is used to power spells and is generated by heroes and a few artifacts, while gold is generated regularly by towns and is used solely for maintaining your armies, hiring the occasional hero, and/or making an overall upgrade to your town. Recruiting new armies doesn't cost you any resources. You simply need to wait a certain number of turns for your units to be generated. Warlords IV has no specific add-ons that can be built in your town by default (though you can add a single building between missions). In addition, Warlords IV has no diplomacy or trading elements, so every other town and army on the map that isn't already controlled by you is flagged as an enemy.

These apparent omissions seem like they were made to present Warlords IV in a more straightforward, and perhaps more shallow, manner than other games of this sort. However, they do keep the pacing of the game brisk, which is especially true toward the end of a mission, when your many captured keeps require little to no baby-sitting. In the meantime, you're free to focus on building up armies and conquering the map. Since captured towns are your main source of gold, you'll want to expand more quickly than your opponents to control a greater cash flow, thereby sustaining a larger army. Neutral ruins often house artifacts, caches of gold, and powerful mercenaries for hire that you'll want to obtain before your opponents can--particularly in single-player games against Warlords IV's challenging AI opponents.

Warlords IV doesn't bother with diplomacy, trade, or complex resource management. The game focuses on battles.

Since Warlords IV has no diplomacy, there's only one language your enemies will understand. To this end, you can create armies, or "stacks," of up to eight units, including multiple hero units with various special abilities, including the ability to carry artifacts. There are 10 different fantasy factions in the game, each with different unit types, strengths, and weaknesses. Compiling an army that belongs to the same faction allows for a morale bonus in battle, as well as various miscellaneous bonuses. In addition, conquering a city that belongs to your faction, or to a faction of similar alignment, lets you recruit units of that same faction. While conquering a city that belongs to a faction of opposing alignment won't let you recruit any of that opposing faction's units.