Warlord seems like it would do well when you have wormholes and can blitz early in the game using mostly DDs. You can outnumber your enemy and have better crews to fight. After a while you might too far fall behind in production and tech which might not be great in a 4way.
reason why i like warlord so much, is because you can make bigger fleet than general races. bigger fleet means more firepower.
you would fall behind in tech if you go battle techs first, but by turn 100, you have enough pop to get supers in 5-6 turns if you wanted. even then, if you go battle techs first, chances are youre prolly either defending, but better chances are youre trying to double empire by taking over someone else.
if you take over someone else completley by turn 100, theres a good chance people might just give you the game.
and just because you always take warlord, doesnt mean you have to blitz someone right away or anything, you could always use warlord to make elite ships, while building empire.
i won battle other day, i was warlord, with trits, c3s, and subspace comm fusions, against someone else with zorts, mercs, and regular fusions. only reason why i won battle, was because i had veteran/elite fleet crew, and the other guy couldnt shoot anything at me. this was late in game around turn 150, never had any battle before that at all. otherwise game crashed, and we didnt want to continue.
warlord increases both ship off and ship def simultaneously, and with space acs, you can keep on increasing your ships ship off/def.