The primary point of the original post, though, was that the game just feels small, and obviously when I say that I mean in comparison to Civilization. You can't make a turn-based nation-building game without laboring in the shadow of Civ, and then the Warlock team certainly made no effort to avoid the comparison when they cribbed Civ V's UI.
Maybe it's meant to be an homage.
So every negative point I made (apart from the awful sound design bit) ended up with "compared to Civ" at the end of it, which made me wonder if I was being unfair. Yeah, this game is smaller than Civ in basically every way. There's less variety in the victory conditions, there are fewer nation-specific unique things, there are fewer units with less advancement, there isn't a large group of interesting scenarios, there's a much thinner collection of growth mechanics, you have fewer ways to customize and fashion your own civilization... but it's not Civ, so maybe it shouldn't be expected to conform to Civ's scale and aspirations. It's a different game and maybe it's exactly the thing that the designers wanted. So how do I evaluate Warlock on its own merits, without the comparisons?
Frankly, I have no idea. I don't even know if it's something I should do. Here's what I do know: I didn't enjoy Warlock very much for a number of reasons, and at least some of that was because I played Civ V first and I kept thinking things like "Why on earth would they choose to do it that way when the same thing in Civ was so much better?" Also, now that I've played enough of both of the games to really "get" them, there's only one that I still play for fun... so maybe a game's competitors and external context actually do matter quite a lot.
