Anyone still playing Kohan:AG? This game rocks!

[Anonymous]

My friends and I play every once in a while, I’ll probably get some games going this weekend. My favorite side is the Royalists. They have those Horse Archers that are oooh so good at supplementing a larger force with fast n deadly flanking maneuvers.

I remember one game I was flanking while my ally took on our enemy head on. The opposition (human) is a big fan of void/prophet hordes, so while my friend did his best with channelers and heavy infantry I took a long way around the battle with 2 companies of Horse Archers and flanked the enemy taking down a huge portion of his prophets. Take that support units!

I am not always winning tho, which is when I put all my effort into creating a 'last stand' that will be remembered. Below is link to a picture showing my biggest one. I am in control of the buildings in the middle, there's an army north west of me and an army southeast even if both aren't in the picture. I forgot which of my friends I managed to fend off.

http://users.techline.com/thomps23/kohan.JPG

I remember another fight where one of my friends was trying Royalists for the first time and went totally elementalist crazy so in response I did so as well. The skies rained fire the rest of the game. Soooo cool.

I love this game. I saw the picture of Kohan II in the latest Computer Games. Is that a mock up of what it will sort of look like or a picture of something thats actually in the works. It looked so cool. COOL!

[wumpus]

Kohan is great. However, I just can't get past that city capture problem. Eg, a massive force comes in and captures one of your cities. At that point the massive invading force IMMEDIATELY begins to get resupplied and healed. Rise, repeat, game fucking over.

The old "rich get richer" problem rears its ugly head yet again. Cities should be destroyed. Period.

[Anonymous]

I just make sure that when a city of mine is captured I get it back asap. There ARE points in the game where its obvious you have already lost, but the real trick is keeping up with the other players so that when you need troops to push back from a loss, you have them.

I'm not the best player but most of the games don't really 'suffer' from the city capture thing unless a defensive player gives the offense too much time before they finally push back.

Also I believe games in turtle mode (which is what I prefer) boosts city militia stats and gives a wait period over captured cities. This means if a force DOES manage to capture a city in Turtle mode (which is considerably harder than normal) they have to wait a short period of time before they city is available for resupply/resources.

I haven't played a turtle match in a while tho, I usually play normal. I also try to keep resupply spots near my more frequently attacked towns. That way if its clear im about to be ousted I can retreat only a short ways and regroup.

A lot of Kohan is managing the tides of battle effectively.

[Sharpe]

Kohan is great. However, I just can't get past that city capture problem. Eg, a massive force comes in and captures one of your cities. At that point the massive invading force IMMEDIATELY begins to get resupplied and healed. Rise, repeat, game fucking over.

The old "rich get richer" problem rears its ugly head yet again. Cities should be destroyed. Period.

I was in the K:AG beta test and for a few weeks they were running a build where cities went through a period of "disruption" (no supply, no production of units, no econ) for 60 to 120 seconds after capture. However, the shipped version does not contain disruption. I believe that there is a game variant or optional rule someplace that allows for those rules though.

IIRC, the problem with the disruption rule was that if you don't reward aggression, you end up having a lot of players turtling, which can be the death of online RTS play. I sorta felt K:AG made a mistake by allowing outposts to be upgraded to forts, which encouraged turtling IMO. Perhaps a better solution would have been to keep in the disruption rules, and get rid of the forts.

In any case, Kohan is the best strategy game of the last several years, hands down, IMO. An EXCELLENT mix of strategy, tactics, and action, with very cool application of wargame rules to RTS, very clean reduction of micromanagement. A game where actual maneuvers (flanking, retreat under fire, combined arms attack) really matter, and what separates the best players from the pack is teamwork, not micro or eco-managment.

I am really looking forward to Kohan II, and I also think the Kohan engine can really be used for a lot of other games: historical (medieval, gunpowder, even modern if doen right), science fiction, fantasy in other settings, etc.

Although I am enjoying Warcraft III for what it is (a small scale RTS with emphasis on special abilities, tactics, and micromanagement, with incredibly great polish & production values), as a strategy game Kohan beats it all to hell.

Dan

[Anonymous]

Yeah, then I am positive disruption is in Turtle Mode, which is a fun way to play if ya ask me.

[wumpus]

IIRC, the problem with the disruption rule was that if you don't reward aggression, you end up having a lot of players turtling, which can be the death of online RTS play. I sorta felt K:AG made a mistake by allowing outposts to be upgraded to forts, which encouraged turtling IMO. Perhaps a better solution would have been to keep in the disruption rules, and get rid of the forts.
Giving someone an entire city isn't just rewarding aggression, that's like awarding it the fucking nobel prize. If you bring in a larger force and kick my ass, that is your reward. Getting a huge, immediate economic and resupply bonus on top of that, is completely outlandish and totally unbalances the game.

Forget disruption for a second. Why not just force the cities to be destroyed? Wouldn't it stand to reason that a city under massive attack would be in ruins anyway? I never understood the intent behind the "cities will surrender and immediately convert to the enemy's side" design decision.

Such an obnoxious gaffe in an otherwise outstanding game. Which makes it all the more annoying.

And on a semi-related note, Total Annihilation was interesting precisely because you could go in so many different directions, strategically: porcupine (turtle), swarmer, octupus, eagle..

http://www.cavedog.com/totala/strategy2.html

[balut]

Why oh why can't any developer make a Grand Space Fleet combat game using the Kohan engine/system? The support slots would be capital ships, ie Carrier, Battleship, etc, and the front line slots would be screening ships, corvettes, fighters, frigates, etc. Tweak the formations to reflect this, turn the cities into planets, the forts into starbases, and you have the framework for an excellent space strategy game.

- Balut

[Anonymous]

Well cities and towns essentially serve as resource points. Would it be possible to force games of Warcraft 3 to destroy their resources while waging a war?

You CAN destroy towns. I have many times when catching glimpse of a hopeless fight thanks to advance scouting units patrolling the border of my zone of control. You just have to make sure to Raze before they arrive, since you cannot do so while under attack.

I mean the idea here WORKS with Kohan, since I haven't really heard this complaint before. I mean, I sorta get what you're saying but it just sounds like you wanna chop an arm off. The option to destroy towns is there for the player who doesn't wish their town to be taken over, but you just need some advance scouting to tell when and where to do so.

[Anonymous]

Balut: Did you ever play Conquest: Frontier Wars? It has its share of flaws but for some reason this game really makes me want to play it. Only 10 dollars most places.

[balut]

MrAngryFace: I played the demo, but something about it just didn't "do it" for me. Maybe the whole, micro a planet and a fleet and more planets in a system and micro multiple systems with more fleets, and micro the connecting waypoints between systems, that just annoyed me.

For $10 in a bargain bin, though, I might give it another shot.

- Balut

[Anonymous]

Well, admittedly its a pretty generic setting for a game, the single player story is equally generic as well. The skirmish mode is really good tho, and the multiplayer is great too.

For 10 dollars tho, easily worth it.

[Ben Sones]

Forget disruption for a second. Why not just force the cities to be destroyed? Wouldn't it stand to reason that a city under massive attack would be in ruins anyway?

Do that, and give the attacking player an immediate gold award for "sacking the city." Make the award variable based on the size of the city and the improvements that it had. Tweak the exact amount to avoid making it an unbalancing factor. Then you can reward aggression and destroy the cities, too.

[Jason McCullough]

[quote]
Forget disruption for a second. Why not just force the cities to be destroyed? Wouldn't it stand to reason that a city under massive attack would be in ruins anyway? I never understood the intent behind the "cities will surrender and immediately convert to the enemy's side" design decision.

Declaring a gameplay mechanic superior due to "realism": the last refuge of the damned.

[Anonymous]

There's nothing wrong with the way it is, you just aren't playing aggressive enough and/or using your troops effectively.

[wumpus]

There's nothing wrong with the way it is, you just aren't playing aggressive enough and/or using your troops effectively.
Yes, there is something wrong with it. The first person to assemble the largest army will dominate the game. Once they capture your city and defeat your forces defending said city, their large army will be quickly resupplied to its original strength.

If their army took some losses while capturing my city and was thus at a reduced strength, I could bring in one of my auxiliary forces to push them back. But once they get resupplied (not to mention the economic bonus of owning my city).. it's just a vastly larger army against a smaller army all over again. Enemy never get "whittled down" in the process of capturing your cities, rather, they get stronger. So they steamroll you.

It's just an outright bad design decision. But hey, don't take my word for it. Read Geryk's review of Ahriman's Gift on GameSpot where he paraphrases this argument word for word.

[Jason McCullough]

As someone who spent about a month straight playing KAG online, you're wrong, Wumpus. I guess if you absolutely refuse to ever lose a city and vaporize all your troops in last-ditch defenses any time someone comes over the horizon, yes, the person who's first to the biggest army will win.

No one plays that way that I've seen, though; it's always lots of back-and-forth. What on earth are you doing?

[Anonymous]

If you're giving them enough time to resupply that's your fault. If you don't have enough troops to match there's when the fighting starts, or you don't MEET them on the battlefield, and instead wait for them to show up at your doorstep with flowers, also your fault.

Kohan is an aggressive game. You need to match your enemies production, you need to meet them in the field away from important resource locations by building a front line to keep the battle away from home. You can't sit on your duff and cry when an uber force comes knocking on your door.

Proper scouting can reveal a force larger than you can handle. Solution? Sell off the crap in your city and burn it to the ground. No one SAID you have to let them sack the city. You can always 86 the town and fall back.

Sure, you take a loss, but your situation is better now that the enemy doesn't have your town. And yes, there is ALWAYS a point where the tide of battle turns and one side starts losing. That's how it works.

[balut]

Proper scouting can reveal a force larger than you can handle. Solution? Sell off the crap in your city and burn it to the ground. No one SAID you have to let them sack the city. You can always 86 the town and fall back.

Sure, you take a loss, but your situation is better now that the enemy doesn't have your town. And yes, there is ALWAYS a point where the tide of battle turns and one side starts losing. That's how it works.

I agree with this post.

Also, you can have a token "suicide squad" of resistance to tie up the attackers, then send in your real army to flank them, if you have enough notice.

- Balut

[Tom Chick]

I seem to recall wumpus was slapped down for this same Kohan nutiness on the old message boards. It was right around the time he said Sacrifice was "a glorified version of Quake", which was shortly after he admitted he was never able to get past the third mission in Sacrifice and shortly before he championed micropayments.

Are any of you guys playing Kohan online? Did the AG expansion "take"? Or are there still a lot of folks playing the vanilla version?

-Tom

[wumpus]

As someone who spent about a month straight playing KAG online, you're wrong, Wumpus. I guess if you absolutely refuse to ever lose a city and vaporize all your troops in last-ditch defenses any time someone comes over the horizon, yes, the person who's first to the biggest army will win.
Sure, maybe you could hide your largest army and send it to attack one of his cities while his largest army is busy attacking yours. But that merely avoids the original problem by not defending in the first place. Attacking forces should lose a lot of strength due to attrition in a city siege, thus making them vulnerable to counter-attack.

And if you cannot manage to muster a force larger than the "army coming over the horizon", you're doubly fucked once you lose a city to that guy's army. Good luck mustering anything at that point, particularly since his large attacking force will soon be back up to full strength. Probably with more forces, given the economic bonuses he just achieved by capturing your city.

Like I said, it's an aggravating case of "rich get richer". Go read Geryk's review of Ahriman's Gift on GameSpot; I am not the only person to reach this conclusion.

[wumpus]

It was right around the time he said Sacrifice was "a glorified version of Quake", which was shortly after he admitted he was never able to get past the third mission in Sacrifice
Whoa there, cowboy. Now you're making stuff up. I may not have finished Sacrifice, but that was due to lack of interest on my part, not because I couldn't make it past the third mission.

Dave Perry said Sacrifice is a glorified version of Quake. You want to argue about it, argue with the game's designer, not me.

http://www.futuregamez.net/special/shiny/davepinterview.html

Sacrifice is your latest game can you tell us what it is about?
It's a game designed for RPG gamers that like real-time action. It's intense 3D battles using magic and spells. Think of it as Quake meets WarCraft with a twist. The website is: www.sacrifice.net.

[Jason McCullough]

Like I said, it's an aggravating case of "rich get richer". Go read Geryk's review of Ahriman's Gift on GameSpot; I am not the only person to reach this conclusion.

So, if that's the case, how come neither I nor MrAngryFace see this happening? Cognitive dissonance?

I think your problem is you're fighting everything as set-piece battles. Kohan's pretty cat-and-mouse, normally.


Are any of you guys playing Kohan online? Did the AG expansion "take"? Or are there still a lot of folks playing the vanilla version?

KAG is so, so much better than the regular version. I think just about everyone's switched over.

[Anonymous]

Kohan:AG is the version to play. There is a select group of 10 people I play with online and we all play K:AG simply because the new units rock. As for random chance encounters on gamespy I dunno. I dont like most people online so I stick to playing games with friends.

Vanilla Kohan isn't a bad game tho since Timegate gave it a patch that offered lots of new heroes n stuff.

K:AG rocks tho. Elementalists GO!

[balut]

Bah, Xbow/SL/SL.

Better yet, EB/Warlock/Sorcerer. :wink:

- Balut

[Anonymous]

Elementalists are just my shiny fancy support troops. They do a pretty good job when part of a giant force. I still remember that game where I had nothing but elementalists for support against a human player with nothing but elementalists for support. Talk about a flashy battle!

I like how in Kohan, the initial city grabbing only leads up to some pretty large scale encounters if you're playing with experienced people.

[Doug Erickson]

Um, what MAF said. You can't have played a lot of Kohan if you think that getting a city taken breaks the gameplay. A good player will keep the battles at the front lines and at choke points, far far away from those few cities that are of tantamount strategic importance. Christ, half the time I lead an expeditionary advance, I shift-click an obtuse vector just to keep my foes from guessing the location of any key "army manufacturing" cities. All of the early battles and a good chunk of the mid-game ones, at decent levels of play, are never over cities - they're about key strategic points, like passes/land bridges/forest crossings, so one can muster a mega-force in relative peace. Expeditionary forces are rarely enough to take a city from a good player, especially with the 2nd or 3rd tier militia.

Yes, when you lose a city, it WILL hurt you. Kohan's at an abstract level, which is most of its appeal. However, the idea is not to let someone TAKE a key city, and at high levels (well, those that don't involve "town dancing"), town conquest doesn't really happen until the end game, WHEN THE WAR HAS ALREADY BEEN DECIDED.

[Doug Erickson]

You should spend very little time with your towns - this isn't Warcraft. If you aren't fielding large forces abroad, you're really not playing Kohan. It's not a game that is won by holing up with a bunch of forces and hoping your foe breaks themselves.

[Anonymous]

Agreed, Doug. I think a lot of people play Kohan for the first time expecting some sort of game that totally sticks to the traditional Warcraft/C&C strategies.

That's not how it works! Winning is about the movements of your army, how you use them, and where. That's how you win. You keep the damage close to your enemy.

[balut]

This is why Kohan is so brilliant - it's an RTS that puts the focus on the management of armies, not the management of towns. Sure, you have to have some sort of plan for town development, but that's maybe 20% of the focus, with the remaining 80% devoted to army deployment/composition strategy and logistics.

- Balut

[wumpus]

Um, what MAF said. You can't have played a lot of Kohan if you think that getting a city taken breaks the gameplay. A good player will keep the battles at the front lines and at choke points, far far away from those few cities that are of tantamount strategic importance.

Man, you guys are a bunch of apologists for this game. I can't believe you are admonishing me for not playing the game correctly. No, of course the game's design couldn't be at fault! Naturally once you capture a city, the attacking army should immediately be resupplied and gain an economic bonus to boot!


http://gamespot.com/gamespot/stories/reviews/0,10867,2826692,00.html

The focus on cities is imperfect, however. Because there are few on-map resources to control, cities are self-contained production engines that drive your war effort. In the Heroes of Might & Magic series, the turn-based system to which Kohan is sometimes compared, castles are essentially useless without the special resources that can be found only in mines scattered across the map, and simply marching from castle to castle does you little good if you don't have the resources to take advantage of a castle's production. Kohan's improvement-based system means that taking enemy cities will rapidly shift the balance of power in your direction, and the most effective way to do that is by massed force. In the end, there is less maneuvering and tactical gameplay than there could be.

A problem with the Kohan combat is that while units have certain special bonuses (for example, paladins are more effective against shadow units), these bonuses are not enough to overcome the standard real-time strategy focus on sheer numbers. Kohan is still about building the largest army (regardless of composition) and throwing it at the enemy. Hero units are also not powerful enough to make up for enemy numbers.

[Doug Erickson]

We're not saying that you're playing the game WRONG; we're saying that you're playing it BADLY.

Kohan is an abstraction; taking cities is symbolic and streamlined. If this bugs you, you can TURN ON POST-CAPTURE SUPPLY DELAYS by playing in the "Turtles" mode. Obviously, the Timegate folks considered this notion for the game proper and rejected it because, I dunno, it a) doesn't necessarily support their level of abstraction, and b) isn't that much fun? It's not like they simply deny you the option.

[Ben Sones]

Wumpus, I think the point is not that they are accusing you of playing the game wrong, but rather accusing your opponents of playing the game wrong. If they make their cities that easy to take, then you deserve the (admittedly significant) rewards that taking a city delivers. That's not really the fault of the game, though. If it bothers you, play against more skilled opponents.

[Jason McCullough]

'A problem with the Kohan combat is that while units have certain special bonuses (for example, paladins are more effective against shadow units), these bonuses are not enough to overcome the standard real-time strategy focus on sheer numbers. Kohan is still about building the largest army (regardless of composition) and throwing it at the enemy. Hero units are also not powerful enough to make up for enemy numbers.'

Maybe in Geryk land. If you go to the trouble of leveling up a hero, though, they become sights to behold, able to take out two, and sometimes three, comparable companies.

[Mark Asher]

I agree with Wumpus. It is too big of a swing to have the city become a source of enemy production as soon as it falls. It would be better if the city were razed. The player holding a city would have two options: Defend it or raze it and take the money. If the player chooses to defend, the city will be razed if he loses but the player will get no money.

[Anonymous]

I have offered PLENTY of options to keep you from LETTING your city get sacked. We essentially told you how to do well in Kohan, yet you call us names and keep quoting that awful review.

Poo Poo, Wumpus.

[Anonymous]

Mark:

It isn't as cut and dry as Wumpus makes it sound. Often during the process of sacking a city the buildings/upgrades within it are destroyed in the process. It happens.

It isn't like everything is just fine. PLUS there is the Turtle Mode which offers disruption for a period of time, plus the complete ability to sell off everything you put in the city and burn it to the ground if need be.

PLUS it isn't even supposed to come to sacking until end game. The way to do well in Kohan is too keep people away from your land. Build a front, mobilize armies, SCOUT ENEMY POSITIONS. See what the enemy does before they do it. If you do get a town sacked, regroup before they are able to reinforce and resupply. Chances are they are farther away from their home than you are, giving you the advantage.

Players also need to continue to press attacks all the time. Slowing down to play Sim Kohan gives the enemy that much more time to smoke your ass. Trust me, I learned this the hard way.

A LOT more responsibility is placed on the players military units than in most RTS titles. The best defense is a good offense. They SHOULD be your defense. Your militia is the last ditch effort. Use your army to attack and defend where needed.

It all boils down to the fact that if things are really going that bad with the town situation, as wumpus describes, you have already lost the game.

[Mark Asher]

Let me ask this question then: How is Kohan a better game by letting the opposing player capture your city and immediately using it to produce troops and money to be used against you?

If you had three cities, after losing one you now are behind by two cities as your opponent has four. Isn't that game over for all intents? Wouldn't it be easier to come back if you were only one city down?

[Anonymous]

Like I said, if you don't like it, there is Turtle Mode. Timgate has given plenty options to deal with the situation. It makes sense to me that capturing a city will boost resources. It really has never been a problem for me during matches. By the time my cities are being sacked I have lost anyway. My IMPORTANT movements in the field obviously did not do what they were supposed to do, keep them away from my cities.

A lot of people like how it currently works, which leads me to believe it isn't a case of something being 'broken', but it being a matter of preference.

[Jason McCullough]

Ok, a detailed explanation of why the "city momentum" factor for Kohan doesn't exist. Counterattacking to get cities back is really, really easy, the advantage you get in short-term production for a city is amazingly minimal, and you normally have so many cities it doesnt matter.

Things you get for taking the city:
Against a decent human player, you're lucky to ever capture a city with a
single building intact. It's quite obvious when you're not going to be able to hold the city, and selling all the improvements takes about 5 seconds. So, no buildings.

Unless your opponent is following up with a fully trained team of engineers, cities tend to be a state of disrepair (no hp, no militia) already for a counterattack, lowering the bar for capture.

You get 5 or 10 gold a minute once you capture the city, and production from anything in the support radius, but this is usually really minimal.

You do, however, get access to any extra building slots your opponent has added to the city. This isn't that big of an advantage, though, as it takes a pretty long time to fill up the slots, and even longer for them to pay for themselves. Also, you need to be absolutely certain that you can hold the new acquisition if you want to start filling it up with buildings; selling off stuff you've held for a long time isn't that painful, but man, does it suck to build a bunch of stuff only to sell it at a 50% loss three minutes later.

You get a few troop slots, but this is also meaningful in the first five minutes of the game or so.


Things your opponent loses:
The income from the city's buildings, in resources or gold. However, they get 50% or so cost back for selling them, so this isn't that big of a hit either, especially when you consider they've been getting production out of them for quite a while.

The income from the city itself. See above, this isn't worth anything.

The troop support space. See previous.


So, in summary, when you capture a city you get an empty, undefended, burning building, without any nearby defending forts that were nearby, that would have cost you, oh, something like 150 gold to build yourself, assuming a three-slot city, which most are.

Losing a fully upgraded mega-city will cripple you, yes, but most players have one or two of those, they're at the center of their empire, and they're impossible to take unless you're about to win the game anyway. Hell, in the multiplayer games I've played, I probably build, on average, 20 cities a game. This isn't like Warcraft where you tend to top out at 4 or so cities or gold mines a game; it's far too easy to just spread like the clap.

If I remember correctly, upgrading to a level 3 city is only "worth it," in terms of investment, for Council. The other sides get better bang for the buck by never going beyond level 2 unless they need to make a troop factory town.

[balut]

Think of the "city momentum" factor like this: the invading army just conquered the town - of course they're going to resupply off the lands and territory of that town, as there are no military defenders anymore. As most of its industries will have been destroyed in the battle, the invaders don't get any of the town's building benefits until the conquerers rebuild them.

- Balut

[wumpus]

A lot of people like how it currently works, which leads me to believe it isn't a case of something being 'broken', but it being a matter of preference.
Don't feel bad. A lot of people are trapped in abusive relationships with their games. How'd you get that black eye, MrAngryFace? Fall down the stairs again?

[Doug Erickson]

Wumpus, you're not exactly arguing your point any more, are you?

[Jason McCullough]

A lot of people like how it currently works, which leads me to believe it isn't a case of something being 'broken', but it being a matter of preference.
Don't feel bad. A lot of people are trapped in abusive relationships with their games. How'd you get that black eye, MrAngryFace? Fall down the stairs again?

We can take this as "you win," correct?

[balut]

Let me ask this question then: How is Kohan a better game by letting the opposing player capture your city and immediately using it to produce troops and money to be used against you?

If you had three cities, after losing one you now are behind by two cities as your opponent has four. Isn't that game over for all intents? Wouldn't it be easier to come back if you were only one city down?

I think you're overestimating the value of a single town in Kohan. Except for city or citadel-sized towns, the biggest advantage to taking a town is the supply rights, which will be disrupted as soon as any counterattack comes near said town.

Furthermore, unless you get rushed fairly early or just have been skimping on military development, you will have more than 4 towns, or at the very least, be able to deal with the initial loss of one town. Abstractly, I see your point, but the system just works logically for me, and can allow for a more exciting ebb-and-flow of battle. Remember, you can always take one of your enemy's poorly defended towns and use their resources. The town-capture system works both ways.

At the scale at which battles take place in Kohan, though, total city destruction doesn't make sense - towns/cities are such large civilian centers of population that once the militia is defeated, and any major buildings are destroyed, there will still be a conquered population to serve the needs of the army. This would include logistical supply needs as well as forced concription of new troops to replenish armies.

- Balut

[Anonymous]

Balut: What did you think of the Kohan II info that's been released so far. They say it will play pretty close to the original, but I am interested how the bigger cities will work, and they ARE bigger.

[wumpus]

We can take this as "you win," correct?
You've mustered a larger army, so you win by default. Just like Kohan!

[balut]

Balut: What did you think of the Kohan II info that's been released so far. They say it will play pretty close to the original, but I am interested how the bigger cities will work, and they ARE bigger.

I saw the screenshots of the massive new towns in Kohan II, and I am pretty stoked about surrounding one of these with a horde of troops for a prolonged siege, if they'll allow one.

On one hand, it allows targeted strikes at various town components, which adds a whole new layer of strategy - the development of raiding forces to take out an enemy Barracks or Mage Guild or somesuch and then pull back to friendly territory. It also makes it harder for invading forces to totally surround and overwhelm a town, in turn making it easier for reinforcements to push them back.

OTOH, it shrinks the scale somewhat, where it might require a greater deal of companies to compose a raiding squad to overwhelm and destroy small, rear-positioned enemy towns.

Overall, I'd say it's a good move, but I'm still curious how deeply the larger cities will affect the inherent gameplay, and in what ways.

- Balut

[Ben Sones]

It's an interesting shift in focus. Small towns were the result of a conscious design decision in the first game, because they wanted to eliminate many of the tactical concerns common in RTS games and focus on high-level strategy. You send a regiment to beseige the city; HOW they do it is their concern. The player isn't meant to micromanage the specifics of the siege any more than they are meant to order the Sorcerors to use their spells. It looks like Kohan 2 may be abandoning this philosophy. Based on the first game (and it's expansions), I have confidence in the Timegate teams' design skills, but I worry that this might make the game a bit more conventional. Which would be too bad.

[balut]

We can take this as "you win," correct?
You've mustered a larger army, so you win by default. Just like Kohan!

Please don't fall into the tactic of gross oversimplification of the subject. Every strategy game relies to an extent on the production of more troops than the opponent. IIRC, Sun Tzu advises a 3-to-1 troop ratio before you press the attack on an enemy.

But you still need to remember the roles that maneuvering and logistics play in a strategy game like Kohan. A large army requires a large upkeep, which can be disrupted by strikes at enemy economic centers. If the enemy has its armies concentrated more or less in one position, it becomes academic to go around and strike at the rear towns that support that army.

Even then, the enemy will still have the immediate advantage of numbers until it starts to feel the effects of a negative economy. At best, you can try to separate parts of the enemy force away and destroy them with your superior numbers. At worst, you will have to face a numerically superior army that has not begun to feel the effects of unfulfilled upkeep yet. Even then, victory or defeat should never be considered a foregone conclusion.

Ultimately, the loss of a town to the enemy's superior forces will definitely shift the tides of war in their favor, but Kohan is always a fairly fluid game when it comes to the ebb and flow of the battlefield. I still consider it the pinnacle of strategy in the RTS genre.

- Balut

[Anonymous]

Man, just played an almost 3 hour long game of Kohan tonight. The new AI tweaks can make them brutal. At one point my friends and I were really against the ropes, (note to WUMPUS) we ALL lost at least ONE town! Hell, I was down to one town at one point, but through good company management I was able to capture a few smaller towns while the enemy was occupied elsewhere and come back with a crapload of battle priests.

Me and 3 friends vs 4 Hard AI Ceyah. Battle Priests are so awesome against undead :)

Not sure how I feel about the militia tweaks yet tho. On one side they support the idea that militia shouldn't do the bulk of fighting through town dancing, but on the other hand I feel they pulled the ZoC in too far making it hard to make a decent needed retreat if things look tough. Regardless we managed to battle back from some insanely difficult pinches and won the day. Kohan rules!