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?
Wumpus, you’re not exactly arguing your point any more, are you?
We can take this as “you win,” correct?
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: 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.
We can take this as “you win,” correct?
You’ve mustered a larger army, so you win by default. Just like Kohan!
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.
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.
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.
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!