Few weeks ago I was finishing my read of a book about Blizzard and Diablo's history when in the notes section I found the following text:
Soon after the release of WarCraft: Orcs & Humans in late 1994, many gamers picked up on the similarities between Blizzard's RTS and Warhammer, a tabletop game created by Games Workshop where players arranged painted figurines and engaged in turn-based battles.
Warhammer's influence was massive.There were lots of people at Blizzard who played Warhammer and they were obviously heavily influenced by it.
During the course of development - and this didn't happen beforehand; it was somewhere along the way - Allen [Adham] proposed that we license the Warhammer IP so the game woudln't be WarCraft, but Warhammer. That was met with a negative reaction because a lot of us felt we would lose control of the game.
Several years after WarCraft was done, my dad came back from a trip to Asia. He brought back this really cool skeleton chariot. it was a chariot drawn by some skeletal horses. And he said, "I found this really cool thing in Asia, and they totally ripped of Warcraft!"
It said Warhammer on the bottom, and I said, "Oh, yeah, um, not exactly..."
-Pat Wyatt
So, almost in the lines of previous texts I have found (I & II), confirming the influence but also sustaining that the failed negotiations were not before WarCraft's inception.