Note - this mainly comes from single player experience, mostly with AI skirmishes and the campaign.

Warlords: Battlecry seems like a pretty humdrum fantasy world where the fate of two magic stones determines a path of good or evil, and has an agonizingly complex, stressful, and overwhelming RTS system to boot.

The player has the option of a variety of races, though is mostly stuck with human during campaigns. Each race has their own home base as well as various buildings and troops that can be utilized for different strategies. The pace can range from molasses for resource gathering and building or breakneck for trying to fight off the hordes, and oddly enough the speed of battle cannot be changed in the menu. The main way of gathering resource points is the player's (also slow) process of converting mines in the area by waving a flag for awhile. With a steady process of conversion and careful building around the map, the player can get by in regular skirmishes.

Then the campaign happens. The player gains EXP, can do quests from shrines, and level up during their journey, but will be quickly flattened by drawn-out and sadistic scenarios. There's a variety of hotkeys for movement techniques and spells but nothing is quite satisfying enough or kicks enough to gain an advantage in battle and the player can and will struggle on Easy mode if they don't know the intimate complexities to get past the second stage onward. There's a behavior system but it's mostly worthless, making important characters whom the player will lose if they die charge headlong into enemy territory on a "Defensive" role. It's very messy and the pace is either too slow to build or too fast to fight and not die, making it incredibly difficult to manage one's time.

If the player has trouble with what they're given, there is the option to bring a retinue into battle with some extra troops but it's not enough. 30-40 minute defense quests, taking down two to three laser focused AI bases, quests where killing the main hero of a faction and their base is not enough - no, the player has to destroy every single building of a faction to "win" most of the time creates aggravating and frustrating gameplay that, like most RTS games, has the player running to multiplayer for something that resembles a good time.