Anyone still playing Kohan:AG? This game rocks!

Games
21

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.

22

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.

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

23

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!

24

Bah, Xbow/SL/SL.

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

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25

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

29

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.

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30

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.

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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.

32

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.

33

‘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.

34

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.

35

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.

36

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.

37

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?

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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.

39

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.

40

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.

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