Thoughts on coming back to King's Bounty

[BB Shockwave]

Five times in a few months? It always amazes me how fast some people can play... or how much time they have. I usually only get home around 18:00 after work, and barely have time to play 1-2 hours apart from weekends, plus playing KB no-loss is arduous - you have to redo battles every once in a while - so playing the games just once took me many months. I have played the Legend with all three classes (using different army setups), and AP/Crossworlds about 4 times, but it was a long process (am still finishing my CW gameplay with Mage/Demons).

But yeah, I recall how I replayed the demo over and over again when that was released. KB has taken the place as my favourite TBS for me - granted it lacks the major overworld strategy aspect of HOMM, but in the tactical battles part it outclasses the newest HOMM games. Especially after the disappointment that franchise has turned into ever since Ubi has taken over.

And yeah, I also played AP first in russian... found out you can easily put the text files in Google Translate and copy them back, and understand things despite the mangled english.

With the Legend, on my playthrough as a Mage I decided to go "Necromancer" and have an all-undead army. This was not easy until I got to the Elven lands, but you can get by surprisingly well with the lower level undead units + werewolves too. I ended up creating a new spell with a mod to reanimate undead troops like in HOMMIII, though, to make no-loss possible.

Originally Posted by impy

Thoughts on coming back to KB?

I never finished original WOTN, and that is a strong statement from person who spent countless hours playing former KB. Unless I hear from people like DG Dobrev, CKDamascus, FattShade and other dinosaurs of the forums it is worth it, I will not touch the DLC even if it was free. Saaad.

Same here. I put together a nice army (Jotuns, Ice dragons, viking units) by the time I stopped playing, but I still stopped because the bugs were annoying - the only valkyrie I found had an ability that did not work due to bugs (Christa's gift), many spells and skills crashed the game or did not work at all, or not properly, and overall the main problem was the "boringness" of the levels - none of the funny quests or clever maps of the other KB games was there. I played for 3 weeks maybe, trying to make myself to like the game, then gave up - and I rarely do that, mostly I finish all games I start (eventually, it might take years).

[Zhuangzi]

Originally Posted by BB Shockwave

Five times in a few months? It always amazes me how fast some people can play... or how much time they have. I usually only get home around 18:00 after work, and barely have time to play 1-2 hours apart from weekends, plus playing KB no-loss is arduous - you have to redo battles every once in a while - so playing the games just once took me many months. I have played the Legend with all three classes (using different army setups), and AP/Crossworlds about 4 times, but it was a long process (am still finishing my CW gameplay with Mage/Demons).

But yeah, I recall how I replayed the demo over and over again when that was released. KB has taken the place as my favourite TBS for me - granted it lacks the major overworld strategy aspect of HOMM, but in the tactical battles part it outclasses the newest HOMM games. Especially after the disappointment that franchise has turned into ever since Ubi has taken over.

And yeah, I also played AP first in russian... found out you can easily put the text files in Google Translate and copy them back, and understand things despite the mangled english.

With the Legend, on my playthrough as a Mage I decided to go "Necromancer" and have an all-undead army. This was not easy until I got to the Elven lands, but you can get by surprisingly well with the lower level undead units + werewolves too. I ended up creating a new spell with a mod to reanimate undead troops like in HOMMIII, though, to make no-loss possible.



Same here. I put together a nice army (Jotuns, Ice dragons, viking units) by the time I stopped playing, but I still stopped because the bugs were annoying - the only valkyrie I found had an ability that did not work due to bugs (Christa's gift), many spells and skills crashed the game or did not work at all, or not properly, and overall the main problem was the "boringness" of the levels - none of the funny quests or clever maps of the other KB games was there. I played for 3 weeks maybe, trying to make myself to like the game, then gave up - and I rarely do that, mostly I finish all games I start (eventually, it might take years).

Yeah, five play throughs of TL was pretty crazy. 300 hours in maybe 3-4 months. Something like that. I wasn't playing no-losses on TL though. I found no losses much easier in AP with the Paladin + Phantom trick, and again in WoTN I found it too hard (those bosses on the first island) so I gave up on that forever.

[Zhuangzi]

It's worth repeating that although KB might not be perfect, and while sadly there's been little improvement since Armored Princess came out in 2009 (?), KB has the best turn based tactical battle system I've ever played. I also enjoy the general idea of the real time strategic layer with no castle management required. KB might not make a lot of sense in many ways (I have to run around picking up flags so that I can recruit more soldiers to my team? Okaaay) but it's always been fun.

I was never a fan of HoMM (never played HoMM III that people always say is the best) but I tried HoMM V a few years ago and didn't like it. 3-4 months ago I tried HoMM VI when it was on a Steam special and I actually played about 50 hours of it. At first I thought it was reasonable but after a while I got tired of the tedious castle management and the repetitive enemy hero attacks on my cities and resources. Worse, I soon realised that I'd basically be using the EXACT SAME troops in every battle and the exact same spells. It's just grind, grind, grind away forever. I finished the first campaign and then re-installed KB The Legend. I won't be going back to HoMM VI.

Unfortunately, the WoTN campaign has some similarities in that in the initial islands we seem to be fighting 90% undead troops, which gets boring. Worse, I'm practically forced to use Viking units. Don't get me wrong, the Vikings are okay (I especially like the Mystic) but how about some diversity? I'm level 9 and up to the start of Istering now. I'm a mage so the stacks are listed as Very Hard or Deadly. That's okay, I can deal with that, but I'll have to keep going back to Vestlig to replenish my troops just so I can grind my way through Istering, which is a very linear island. Why, why, why did the devs construct the WoTN campaign like this? Compare this to the fun you have in The Legend in the first four areas (before Freedom Islands) and you can see the problem.

Future KB games, if there's ever going to be more, need to learn this lesson. We want options and diversity, dammit!

[impy]

You MUST give HMM3 a try, you MUST. I actually play it a bit these days, (map Uprising) I still got my original scratched discs. Get yourself Heroes 3 Complete and play at least Shadow of Death Camapign to get a feel.

[MattCaspermeyer]

I did not play the original King's Bounty, but did play HoMM1-3 and I have never played HoMM4-6.

I think my brother got me HoMM4&5 on GoG, but I have not even tried to play them, yet.

The first HoMM trilogy is just fun and awesome with 3 being the pinnacle of the series! 4 changed things to be quite a bit different from 3 and so I'm not surprised you didn't care for 4 because it turned a lot of people away from the series.

I enjoyed 3 so much that when I played King's Bounty - The Legend (my favorite in the series) that I created a whole mod (HoMM3 Babies) to weave aspects of it into King's Bounty.

The hero system was so rich - each hero had their own brief story (I alluded to some aspects of their story with keywords when you look at their description in my mod) and naturally you develop your favorites (kind of like playing Warrax in Master of Magic for those who played that game) and you hope you can recruit them instead of the computer.

With King's Bounty, the graphics are simply gorgeous and the hexagonal-based gameplay for me is an optimization problem with respect to minimizing losses. That's why I find it so addictive. Plus, with my mod and TL there is a desire to get a wife and see what HoMM3 heroes you and your wife will have so I find that as long as there are mini goals (like 10 battles to your next child or getting one of those artifacts that give you runes after 50 fights or the medals somewhat) then that helps reduce the grinding feel.

I think it has been widely discussed that the WotN battles were too much Undead. I hope I&F has changed this because once I got to the Dwarven area and had to fight more Undead I was really tired of fighting The Undead at that point and didn't want to fight them any more. I ended up finishing WotN, but I went weeks without playing it before I'd come back and slog through more Undead battles and will probably not play it again until I (if ever) mod it. I&F gives me some hope, but one thing I've learned (I was late playing TL - 2 years after it came out) is that you have to wait 6 months to a year after a new KB game comes out for it to be playable because they are so buggy. As a modder, I know how hard it is to squish bugs because I still find bugs in my HoMM3 Babies mod to this day so you really have to be on top of going through your code and checking it to ensure that you've covered all different scenarios and sometimes it's not practical to imagine all the different ways this spell or that ability may be used.

WotN should have been Undead Vikings, Undead Humans, Undead Elves, Undead Dwarves, etc. so that each race had their Undead variant (like Red Sands' Undead Lizards) so that when you went into the area you were facing Undead variants of the normal units. This would have made it much more fun, because playing the whole game against the Undead was tiresome. But if I would have had to fight Undead Peasants, Bowmen, Swordsmen, Priests, Miners, Dwarves, Giants, Sprites, Fairies, Dryads, Ents (think Tree of Death in TL), Wolves, Black Dragons, etc., etc. you can see how varied and awesome a game it could have been. That would have been a neat way to dramatically increase the number of units with very minor changes to their appearance (plus I bet the developers would have had a lot of fun making different units into Undead variants) and it would have been fun thinking of anti-talents (imagine Undead Inquisitors with Rage Drain).

AP / CW were fun because you got to fight varied enemies throughout the entire game as has been mentioned and TL is the same way and so I think the point is that it is okay to have a theme (i.e. Undead), but you've got to carry out that theme such that the game still has variety of battles - especially if there are 500 of them!

/C\/C\

[Fatt_Shade]

@impy s for your advice for Zhuangzi to try out HoMM3, it`s hard in today time for some1 to accept game that old and passed over in every aspect by modern standards. I was and still am fan of that series but only play it 2-3/year when arrange internet play with some friends, and almost never finish it because each one is time consuming.

@Matt Nice ideas for undead parallels for each race to play in WotN, but your comment that developer wold have fun making undead elves (Drow`s) undead dwarves etc you forgot that this game was made with least possible effort for highest achiavable gold coins inflow. Proof for this is easy to find in many game mechanics that were 100% functional in the Legend and Ap/Cw but didnt work in WotN. Only possible explanation is that devs were lazy to even copy/paste old functional game files, but instead made their own halfassed not-functional.
Release of Ice&Fire before full working WotN, only shows that certain developing studios want to drain last possible drop of profit from this franchise before throwing it in trash
Their selling points for this DLS were :
1) NEW creature skill system
2) NEW Necro lizards
3) Over 20 NEW creatures
4) NEW items
All this is over 3 years old news from Red sands mod, and they sell it for 9,99 as NEW ???
Play 100 hours of old material to have 20% of new locations.

This Ice&Fire is NOT EXPANSION, it`s simply mod for WotN. And they charge for it. In that case every moder should ask some % of price as compensation for their own work done from love toward this game and not profit.
I deleted WotN before finishing it, and i think i never will so i`m not fammiliar for size of I&F dls, but Red sands mod had 160MB installation, and 350MB of working files and it was FREE no charge and had all this material in it (new race, locations, items, creature skill system and more) 3 YEARS AGO. 3 years is ancient in digital era, and they had nerve to sell it as NEW. Pardon me but what a load of s..t.
I`m not impressed and am sorry to see great game as Kings Bounty butchered by bad decisions from developers