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="wumpus"]

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/s...interview.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...826692,00.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.