Overview
An overview of the changes between Warlock: Master of the Arcane and Warlock 2: The Exiled.
Preface
As I was first looking into this game, I saw a lot of people wondering “How different is this from the original game?” especially in the context of whether or not this game was worth getting. That sort of discussion always has people on two sides, some saying that there’s not enough new to justify this being a brand new game rather than an expansion pack, others simply insisting that it’s a worthwhile purchase. I was very curious about the game myself, and recently recieved it as a gift, so I figured I’d take a crack at answering this question properly: What exactly is different/new in Warlock 2?
This guide will be loosely organized from what I feel are major changes towards the start working down to minor alterations towards the end. This is based on my personal experience with the base Warlock 2 game, I do not have the Great Mage edition of the game nor do I otherwise have any DLC for the game.
Game Modes
The first and most obvious addition in Warlock 2 is it’s “Exiled” game mode, which acts as a small sort of campaign, similar to the Armageddon mode from the first Warlock (Which, it should be noted, does not appear in Warlock 2), but more fleshed out.
The context of this mode is set up by the game’s opening cutscene: You are a Great Mage who just traversed a number of worlds to reach the home of the Dremors (from Warlock’s Armageddon mode) and defeat their leader, but just as you were doing so, one of the other Great Mages back in Ardania successfully cast the Spell of Unity, making himself a supreme power back there. Your ultimate goal is to fight your way back to Ardania and wrest control of it back from his unworthy hands.
You (and each other player) start off on a small map which has a single mystic portal leading to another small map, which will have one or more additional portals to gradually let you reach all of the small maps that make up the game world (How many of these there are depends on the Universe size you select in game configuration). Each portal is inactive by default, however, and when you approach it some random event will occur requiring something from you before it will open. Some will require a quick dialogue sequence, others will demand money or magic, while others will require you to fight off some mid to high-level enemies before they will open.
Once you advance through the first portal, and some time has passed, the United One’s four lieutenants will start harassing you. The first will summon two powerful dragons somewhere to fight you, the second will randomly cast Teraforming spells every few turns until you complete a series of quests, the third will place high level Undead spawners around the worlds, and the last simply waits and guards the final portal between you and Ardania.
Once you have fought your way past all of that and enter Ardania itself, the four lieutenants will attack you in person, each one on an order of power somewhere between high ranked Lords and the god Avatars, and Ardania itself will be filled to the brim with the highest ranked monsters by the time you reach it. Suffice to say it’s not an easy fight, but once the four lieutenants fall, the game is over and you win (I’ve not personally been in a position where two players are racing for the killing blow, so I’m not sure who wins if two players are sucessfully fighting them.)
Outside of this mode there is a “Sandbox” mode, which is esentially the standard gameplay mode from the first Warlock, and “Battle for the Outplanes” which uses the format of the Exiled mode, but without any of the story events.
Races
The four races from the original Warlock make a return (Humans, Beastmen, Undead, Elves), and two new races made their debut, Planestriders and Svarts. I don’t have enough experience playing with them to give a good overview of how they differ from the existing races, but suffice to say it’s two brand new races to play with. I will revisit this if I feel I can adequately describe them.
Research
Research has recieved a major overhaul from the “select one of the 5 random spells you have available” format of the original Warlock.
This is the new research screen in Warlock 2. As you can see, it is divided into three sections, Wizardry, Sorcery, and Divine Spells. Within the first two schools, you will notice that certain spells require having certain other spells reasearched, and you will also notice a series of circles on the right of each header, Wizardry having one filled with Lesser Fireball and Sorcery having one filled with Lesser Heal. Once all of these circles are filled up, you can move on to researching higher-tier spells for that school, eventually reaching such illustrious spells as Armageddon and Elemental Ressurection. Sufficiently researching the highest tier for two of the three schools will allow you to research the Spell of Unity, if the game has been configured to allow that victory condition.
Additionally, the higher tiers of the Wizardry and Sorcery schools have passive buffs you can research in addition to new spells, benefits such as increasing the production of a certain resource or expanding the number of cities you can manage (see below).
Divine spells only require you to research one spell per tier, but you must have high enough favor with a particular god before you can research their spell, and you must maintain that level of favor to continue being able to cast it.
Spells can be traded, found in monster lairs, or won from quests without caring about whether you are in the proper tier, or meet other prerequisites, to research it yourself. This can be particularly helpful with Divine spells, as a god rewarding you with a spell lets you skip researching that spell’s tier even if you do not have enough favor with them to actually cast it.
City Management
There are a number of important changes to how cities are managed in Warlock 2, the most obvious being that there is a limit on how many cities you can optimally manage.
Before I go any further, let me state for the record that you can disable this aspect of city mangement in the game setup screen. I remember seeing many people shocked and/or appalled at the game having a limit on the number of cities you can build in the forums while the game was in early access, I’m not sure if this option was in response to those complaints, but you are allowed to disable the city limit.
With that disclaimer out of the way, let’s discuss this city limit in more detail. By default, each player can have 5 cities before incuring any penalties, and this limit can be expanded through a series of passive traits in the Wizardry research tree (see above). Going beyond this limit will start to raise the level of unrest, as well as a gold penalty for managing the cities. You can probably get away with having one or two cities beyond your limit if you must, but these penalties scale exponentially with the number of extra cities you have, and it quickly becomes too much to manage.
Obviously the game doesn’t expect you to make do with just 5-11 cities however, especially in larger games, which leads to another new city management mechanic, specialist cities. Any city you have built can be converted into a Free Town, a Fortress, or a Temple City with the click of a button.
These specialist cities will not require any resources to run, and do not count against your city limit, and provide a small bonus as well. Free Towns provide gold (2 gold + 1 per population before other modifiers), Temples increase your standing with the god they are built to, and also provide mana (1 mana + 1 per population), and Fortresses don’t provide resources, but have stronger attack regardless of population.
In all cases, you cannot convert a specialist city into a different specialist city (or a normal city), but you will get a settler from destroying it if it has at least 2 population. Additionally, specialist cities will claim the surrounding 6 hexes as territory, but will not expand past that even as their population grows. Lastly, you cannot construct any buildings in these specialist cities, meaning they are unable to hire troops (even settlers), produce extra resources beyond what’s mentioned above, or make use of special resources on the map.
Captured cities cannot be directly converted into a specialist city, but if it has at least 2 population, you can destroy it and recieve a settler which you can use to build a new 1-population city and convert that into a fresh specialist city.
Unrest is another new mechanic briefly mentioned above. Certain factors, such as destroying buildings or monsters being nearby, will cause a city to generate unrest, which will gradually fill up a bar in the top right of the UI. If the level of unrest gets too high, bad things start to happen such as neutral rebel units spawning near a city, or a city rioting for a few turns, further increasing the unrest it generates as well as cutting all production in half.
To prevent unrest from building up, various actions will reduce the unrest levels, such as destroying monster lairs near a city or stationing combat units within its borders. Playing on a difficulty lower than Impossible also gives you a passive reduction to the unrest level.
One last minor point is that the game now has a proper building tree you can view, so you can see easily which buildings you need to construct before other buildings become available. The old “view all buildings” option is also available to help see what you can build.
Spell Glyphs
An interesting addition to the spellcasting system are spcial Glyphs you can use to modify your spells with. These glyphs are found randomly by clearig out monster lairs, and each spell has one, two, or three slots you can place these gylphs into.
Here is what the spellcasting menu looks like in Warlock 2. Under each spell you can see the slots to place glyphs into, and the glyphs you have are listed underneath the spellbook. Glyphs either have a small effect, such as a small reduction in mana cost, or a larger effect with tradeoffs, like a more significant reduction in casting cost accompanied by a reduction in spell power, or an increase in its casting time. As an example, you can see the tooltip for the gylph “Strikestone of the Elders” slotted into the Armageddon spell. The gylph adds a stun effect and increases the chance of a critical hit, but also increases the mana cost of the spell by a sizable 25%
Once a glyph has been placed into a spell, you can destroy it in order to make room for a different glyph, but you cannot recover it to place in a different spell, so be careful when slotting in gylphs.
Unit Upgrades
The ability to upgrade units returns from Warlock in mostly the same form, though with one major difference. You still unlock these upgrades by building certain buildings, and apply them by selecting a unit, clicking the arrow on their portrait, and paying gold based on the upgrade. 
If a unit with a certain upgrade dies or is dismissed, the usage of that upgrade is refunded (So in the image I have, if one of my units with the Drilled upgrade dies, it will change from 3/5 to 4/5), however you cannot otherwise undo an upgrade.
This change both limits how much you can spam upgrades on your units and gives you a reason to have multiple copies of an upgrade providing building.
Additonally, there are some new resources on the map to provide new upgrades, such as magic herbs which provide the “Power of Herbs” upgrade in that image, which gives a regeneration buff to the upgraded unit.
Conclusion
This guide is incomplete, as I’m sure I’m overlooking a few things and obviously I don’t have detailed descriptions of the new races written up, but hopefully this is enough to give someone familiar with the original Warlock an idea of if the purchase would be worth it for themselves. Another consideration is that any further DLC, such as what’s included in the Great Mage edition and what’s currently in the in-game store, will only be available from Warlock 2 as the base game, not Warlock.
If you think I’ve made a mistake in this guide or want to point out something I’ve overlooked, please leave a comment 🙂