Cavalary's Little Corner of the Web

Wrote two game reviews in less than a week. And that’s because I actually finished the second game in about a week. I think I may have finished Splinter Cell faster, in four or five days, because I remember wondering about how short it was back then, but that’s about it. On top of that, Kohan II somehow managed to get me back to what was my regular gaming “schedule” before meeting Andra, which involved playing for four to six hours on an average day, and that hasn’t happened in a long time. For some reason, not even King’s Bounty: The Legend managed that, though I did play it more than I have been playing anything else lately. Perhaps it helped me get back to that rhythm and then Kohan II took advantage of that “training”…
Then again, I guess the main reason is that the way I play RPGs tends to require a lot of care and planning, and I’ve been feeling worn down by it for quite some time now. But it’s very hard for me to like a game that’s not an RPG, so stumbing upon two good games in a row that were not RPGs (though King’s Bounty: The Legend has significant RPG elements, which likely helped a lot) was likely just what I needed. I’m actually not fully over that phase of perhaps seeing RPGs more like a chore than entertainment, but it’s much better now. So it was probably just what I needed, especially considering the mood I’m in pretty much all the time when my mind’s not kept fully busy by a game.

As for the deleted screenshots… I took a few that I thought were really good while playing Kohan II, but I didn’t really check its MobyGames page until after I uninstalled it and deleted the screenshots as well. I only glanced at that page to see that it only has a single review, which made me decide to write my own, but I didn’t look at anything else and therefore didn’t notice how few screenshots had been submitted for it and what small armies were featured in them, if any armies were shown at all. So, by the time I looked again and realized that my screenshots could have been really useful, I was too late…
Of course, I didn’t just keep those screenshots for myself, sending some of them to others as well. Actually, each of the ones I was thinking of submitting was sent to at least two people, one of them being sent to three. So I asked them to send back anything they might still have, but only one of them sent anything. That meant I could only submit two screenshots and it’s possible that only one of them will be approved, since the other is from the end of the game. What frustrates me the most is that the best combat screenshot I took while playing this game was among the two that I sent to others and didn’t get back.

Maybe I’ll also manage to write a review for The Bard’s Tale from what I remember of it, since there are only two listed on that page. I meant to do that ever since I played it, but could find no motivation to write anything more than a short comment about it since I didn’t exactly feel like submitting any potential review anywhere. But now that I seem to get a little involved with MobyGames, I may actually write it one of these days, assuming I still remember enough of it…

Otherwise, I seem to have found another way to avoid writing just those serious non-personal posts that I started this blog for, haven’t I? Posts about the gaming industry or games in general do fit that description, but I’m not sure if writing reviews for the games I’m playing counts… But I can’t get myself to think about anything else for long enough to write about it. I see that finding and playing games that I actually enjoy keeps me somewhat functional and try to do it as much as I can, but that means those games are also what I usually think about lately, whenever my mind can be persuaded to focus on anything other than what whoever knows me is all too aware of…

Kohan II: Kings of War wasn’t just a good game back in 2004 when it was released, but has also aged very well and can stand up to scrutiny even now, at least in my opinion. It even works without any problems on the latest versions of Windows and with the latest video drivers, which is something that many newer games fail to do.

What makes the Kohan series stand out among the other RTS games is the lack of micromanagement. Normally I greatly enjoy micromanagement, but that applies to RPGs, where I usually only have to manage one character or at most a small party, and TBS games, which give me the time to consider all options and make proper decisions. RTS games, on the other hand, usually overwhelm me with too many things happening too fast in too many different places. In this game, however, that’s not the case, and I found even the insane pace that it’s capable of in certain moments to be at least somewhat manageable.
When it comes to the economy, things are simplified in a good way. Your mines and buildings automatically supply you with a certain amount of resources without needing to make use of workers to carry those resources to the nearest settlement and you try to maintain an adequate constant supply for your troops and buildings instead of worrying about how much you have stockpiled (the only exception being gold). In addition, settlements tend to take care of themselves to some extent, workers automatically building and upgrading walls after finishing the other tasks you set for them and also rushing out to fix the damage as soon as the attackers are defeated, while militia units, different from the workers, come out at appropriate times to repel the enemy, defeating weak attackers and at least giving you some time to mount a relief effort when a significant enemy force moves in. This allows you to focus on development, expansion and offense.
Removing micromanagement also means that your companies have a certain degree of independence, guarding their area but not chasing a fleeing enemy too far unless told to do so, attempting to run away when the situation looks dire, but especially automatically using their skills to the best of their abilities to aid each other during combat. And that’s a very good thing, seeing as it’d be quite impossible to manage your troops if you had to tell your heroes and support units which abilities to use every time, as it is in other RTS games.
Another good thing is the significantly improved survivability of your troops, compared to what you see in typical RTS games. No matter how much I tell myself that they’re just a bunch of pixels on a screen, I always feel very bad when sending troops to their death, which makes me always try to be very careful and defensive, which is unlikely to work in games of this genre, seeing as they usually favor rapid expansion and an offensive approach. So I feel much more at ease when, instead of individual units, I can recruit entire companies, each having up to nine units and possibly including up to two healers, or perhaps even three if the leader is a hero with such powers, and know that, as long as at least one unit from a company is left alive, all the ones lost in combat will be revived after spending a short amount of time in the supply range of one of my settlements or outposts. This makes knowing when it’s appropriate to retreat just as useful as knowing when to press the attack, and perhaps even more so, seeing as your companies and heroes gain experience during combat and become stronger if they survive more battles.

But just this experience system is one of the things I didn’t quite like. There is no choice in the development, not even for your heroes, not to mention that your companies can have all of four levels (recruit, regular, veteran and elite) and your heroes only five (awakened, enlightened, restored, ascended and Kohan Lord). Gaining a level will always give the same bonuses to all of your companies. Heroes do gain different bonuses when they level up, improving their specific abilities, but those bonuses are also predetermined, not allowing you to choose to improve one ability more at the expense of another. This may be a good thing for fans of the RTS genre who are otherwise quite bothered by the addition of RPG elements in these games over the past several years, but I’m a fan of RPGs and feel that I’m missing out whenever RPG elements could have been included and weren’t.
The major problem, however, is the fact that they went too far in their attempt to get rid of micromanagement and they removed nearly all troop management. You’re not able to choose actual combat formations, having all of three options for combat behavior, each having clearly stated effects instead of offering you tactical options. What’s more, the independent behavior of your units can hurt you at times, when they become determined to attack and perhaps even chase an enemy company despite your attempts to tell them to do something else, or they try to destroy another section of an enemy settlement’s wall instead of rushing in and attacking the settlement itself despite the fact that a breach already exists in that wall. And retreating can also be a problem, since you can’t quite retreat in an orderly manner without having your troops stop to engage any and all enemies who happen to get near. Plus that some companies will tend to lose morale too fast and run away, completely out of control, either in the wrong direction or even when the battle was quite obviously almost won.
Something else I don’t quite like is the feeling that all races are the same, only having a different name and look for their units and buildings. Haroun cities work a little differently, while the “evil” races can have a couple of additional buildings and bonuses, but that’s about it. Seeing as you will have to switch back and forth between nearly all of them during the regular campaign, even working with more of them during the course of one mission, this can serve to prevent confusion, plus that this approach tends to be the rule in most RTS games, but it still enhances the impression that this game was perhaps simplified a bit too much.

On a personal level, this is one of the extremely few RTS games that I actually enjoyed playing, and in fact one of the extremely few that I bothered playing, not to mention finishing, over the past several years. The RTS genre itself still doesn’t sit well with my playing style, but Kohan II: Kings of War did manage to eliminate a lot of the major grievances I had with such games in the past. Though it still required me to employ strategies I’d rather not resort to and it certainly has problems of its own, the biggest one probably being that it was simplified too much in areas where it shouldn’t have been, I’ll still say it certainly was, and likely still is, one of the better games of this genre.

It would be very easy to say that King’s Bounty: The Legend is just a Heroes of Might and Magic clone, only it’s not. And that’s not just because the first Heroes of Might and Magic was inspired by the original King’s Bounty, but mainly because, while being far from original in any way, it really is a different game that stands on its own. And because, at least in my opinion, it’s much better than Heroes of Might and Magic V.

I’ll do something I usually don’t and start writing about the many good parts of this game by mentioning graphics. What the graphics of King’s Bounty: The Legend aren’t is this mix of insane polygon counts, texture details and particle effects that can make you check whether you didn’t accidentally start some video card performance testing software instead when you load one of the major titles of the recent years. What this game’s graphics are, however, is absolutely gorgeous, despite the obvious loss of texture detail when you zoom in. The art style and the colors used make the game world a pleasure to look at, while all these little details that you are even likely to miss if you’re not paying attention bring it to life on your computer screen. Squirrels darting from tree to tree and poking their heads out curiously, hummingbirds flitting from flower to flower both on the adventure map and around the battlefield, crypt walls coming alive when you get close, chests opening, bones rattling or eggs moving in nests when you pass your mouse over them, the scenery details that are normally obscured during combat but become briefly visible when the camera zooms in for a few seconds for a critical hit, kill or summon, all the very brief but extremely appropriate combat animations, including the pretty hard to notice way in which each unit type celebrates victory… But I’d better stop now and simply say that this is not a demonstration of technology, but one of art…
Something else that works really well in this game is the combat. And that’s a very good thing, considering how much time you’ll spend fighting. It could easily become tedious or frustrating, especially considering the size of some of the armies you’ll be facing, but it never does. There are relatively few units, but each of them is different, most having talents and abilities that you’ll need to learn to use properly in order to make the most of them. The fact that you can only have five unit types on your side when you enter combat may seem too limiting, but it only serves to make you pick your army carefully, according to which units best fit your playing style, how well they complement each other and how effective they will be against the enemies you expect to face. The spells are also very effective if used properly, a good and patient mage being able to fully compensate for the small armies he can lead into battle and end most fights without any losses. And the Spirits of Rage only add yet another layer to the tactics once you’ll be able to command them, which will happen relatively soon after the start of the game.
And another good thing is the fact that King’s Bounty: The Legend is a long and quite addictive game. Now that may not sound like a good thing if you don’t have a lot of time to spare, but if you’re looking for a game to keep you busy for a while or at least to make you feel that you got your money’s worth if you purchased it, this is for you. You’ll always find yourself wishing to explore just a little more, to fight just one more battle or to complete just one more quest, especially since, unlike in other similar games, your movement on the adventure map is not turn-based and the duty of managing the kingdom’s economy does not fall on your shoulders. The only resource you’ll really be managing is represented by the units you can recruit, which are usually not replenished, so if you take all the units of one type available in one location you’ll need to either find another location that sells the same type of units or decide on another type to replace them with from then on.

But not everything is good, of course. One thing that bothered me was the way wives are treated in this game. The only thing you can really do with them is have babies, since the only things you can say to your wife are that you want to have a baby or that you want to divorce her. And, especially since I’m too against having children to even have them in a game, I felt quite bad to just keep a wife sort of as an item with item slots of its own, just for the bonuses she can offer, unable to have any interaction with her. Adding a way to build a real relationship with your wife, perhaps obtaining some quests from her after marriage, and getting perhaps higher bonuses if you get along better would probably have made this aspect of the game much more interesting.
Another problem are the quests. They’re just there to keep you going, very rarely being interesting in themselves. Considering the atmosphere the game can otherwise generate, that’s a pity. Still, it doesn’t bother me as much as it normally would because the game is designed so well that it really only requires an excuse to keep playing, not a real reason. And the quests provide just that excuse and little else.
And then there’s the lack of an editor. I think a lot of interesting campaigns could have been created by the players, some of them featuring much better quests than the game itself, but this opportunity is not provided. The game has a good replay value for those who are interested, since most things are randomized and your strategy will need to be changed significantly not only according to your class but also according to the unit types and spells you’ll happen to find along your way, so the lack of an editor is more of a missed opportunity than a significant problem in itself, but it’s worth mentioning nevertheless.
I could also mention that the game’s AI isn’t going to win any prizes, but I’m not so sure that’s such a bad thing, considering the size of the opposing armies. If such powerful enemies would also use very intelligent tactics, the game would easily become frustrating or perhaps even impossible to complete for most. Still, I can’t help but be bothered when the computer makes stupid mistakes such as slowing an unit that already has the minimum possible speed or applying the same spell effect on an unit twice in the same turn.

In conclusion, King’s Bounty: The Legend isn’t an original game, but it’s a very good game. It’s certainly not perfect, but it’s a good argument in support of the idea that standing out doesn’t necessarily require doing things differently, but it does require doing them well.

When talking about the driving forces of economic growth, consumption obviously takes the top spot. More consumption also means more production, more activities for the intermediaries, more and possibly better paid jobs, more taxes being paid to the state, more money changing hands and generally more economists and analysts sighing happily while looking at the latest charts. But more production usually implies more natural resources being used, while more consumption usually implies more waste, since products are being replaced and discarded more frequently. And, unfortunately for economists, the planet’s size is quite fixed and its capacity of providing us with non-renewable resources and neutralizing our waste is diminishing the more we abuse it.
That said, it should come as no surprise when a report comes up, stating that economic growth is simply no longer possible under the current circumstances. It’s absolutely logical, despite the expected reactions presented at the end of that article, from people who obviously don’t understand how ecosystems work or that ecosystems are real and exist in any place that contains life but money are an unnecessary human invention that only has any value if we insist on assigning one to it, therefore making any economic system that relies on money equally irrelevant in fact.

What all these people who act so terrified of the necessary economic reductions fail or at least refuse to see is that the current type of overall economic growth is not a requirement of improving the individuals’ quality of life. If anything, halting and then reversing it is a requirement of maintaining, not to mention improving, the quality of life for any significant length of time. All it takes is changing what we understand by economics… Which may not sound easy, but is certainly far easier than changing how the ecosystem works. After all, we created economics and decided how they work, so we can also recreate these systems in a different manner.
An example would be Japan’s situation, even if that still relies on money. Economists are trying to turn that situation around so it will once again match the patterns they’re used to see as beneficial, but in fact the current situation is the desirable one. Why? Because deflation means that people who earn the same amount of money will afford more things if they wait, but also because the fact that they’re delaying new purchases means they make better use of what they already have and therefore reduce both waste and unnecessary consumption, which can only help the environment and therefore improve quality of life even further.

But my main point is that you don’t need overall growth if you want to be able to allocate more resources for each individual. The first thing you really need is less individuals, which means that one prerequisite is a reduction of the population, which is actually a prerequisite of solving pretty much any problem the world is currently facing. If the population drops faster than the economy, you will obviously be able to allocate more resources and products to each individual even if other things remain as they are. But other things shouldn’t remain as they are, because other necessary steps include switching to renewable resources, reducing waste and sharing the available resources more fairly among the people of the world, all of which would ensure that any development would be sustainable and that the people who currently live in the worst conditions would benefit the most from any improvements.
I have an entirely different economic system in mind and maybe someday I’ll even get around to writing about it, but the point I’m trying to make right now is that it’s illogical to assume that overall economic growth is absolutely necessary for the improvement of the individuals’ quality of life and that some significant improvement of the quality of life is possible without any overall growth even if we are to maintain something similar to the current economic system, albeit with certain changes. If anything, this drive for continued overall economic growth only serves to ensure that any additional wealth will continue to be distributed among those who need it least and only dooms us all to constantly declining environmental conditions in the future, meaning that even more production, consumption and expenses would be required just to preserve the current standard of living and making any further growth quite meaningless.

I really think we should look for new indicators and teach analysts to sigh happily when those, and not the ones they’re currently following so desperately, show improvements. They could be happy watching a significant improvement of indicators like the actual overall life satisfaction reported by individuals, especially by the poorest ones, the quality and purity of air and water and other environmental factors, the healthiness of the food eaten by the average person, the amount of living and leisure space available to each person, the amount of free time each person can enjoy, the percentage of recycled materials used in the production of mainstream consumer goods or the useful lifespan of said goods. On the other hand, while it may be hard, they should also be taught to be happy when certain indicators drop, such as the amount of waste generated, the amount of non-renewable resources used, the number and frequency of visits to clinics and hospitals, the number of cars on the roads, the average age of the people who purchase or otherwise end up owning their first homes and so on.
None of those things require overall economic growth, yet they are a few very real indicators that define the actual quality of life enjoyed by people, both directly and indirectly, through the quality and health of their surroundings. That makes them the truly meaningful indicators and therefore the ones that should be followed. Leave money and overall economic growth behind, because their only value is the one humanity decides to give them, usually even at its own expense…

So do tell me who’s the one who fails to understand how things work and what’s really meaningful?

The weather offered me a nice surprise. I knew it was going to get cold again and that some snow was expected, but assumed it’d be mixed with rain and therefore would turn to muck and only be a nuisance. Well, there was a lot of rain too, but I had a nice snowfall to watch yesterday and now I’m looking at another one. Sure, the ground is very wet because of all the rain and the snow has a hard time settling, so you still don’t have a layer on the ground, but at this rate it could just make it, especially since there’s more snow expected over the next few days and temperatures are expected to stay low until the end of next week.
This certainly lifted my spirits a little bit. Hardly enough to counter everything else for any length of time, but at least it helps a little. Especially since that pile of snow I mentioned before was much more resilient than I gave it credit for and there still was just a little of it left when it started snowing yesterday. Now let’s see how long it will really hold. Talking about both the return of winter and my slightly improved mood…

My ideal climate would likely involve something that we could potentially describe as three seasons. That means four months of real winter, with snow covering everything and temperatures likely not going above freezing for at least half that time, and the other eight split between spring and autumn. I’m saying spring and autumn because the end of one and the beginning of the other would obviously involve the highest temperatures, but not quite what the people who live in a temperate climate would currently describe as summer.
Or, actually, it could be better described as having four seasons, but with winter and summer having four months each and spring and summer having two months each, as long as the expected temperatures for summer would drop. I’m saying that because I don’t favor long transition periods, so I’d like the temperature maximums to go from just a little above freezing at the end of winter to around 30°C pretty quickly, let’s say within two months, and then not get noticeably higher for the duration of the summer. And the process would obviously be reversed in two more months after the end of the summer.
Such uneven seasons and such constant temperatures for so long don’t really seem possible, if I’m to go on what I know about star systems and climate patterns, but the general idea of harsher winters and milder summers at temperate latitudes is certainly possible even here on Earth. It’d only require a significant reduction of the greenhouse effect… And there you have a very personal reason of mine to be worried about the direction we’re currently heading in, albeit a minor one compared to all the rest.

But there have been far too many personal posts lately, once again, and I really hope I’ll be able to use the slightly improved mood to write about something else next week. I won’t say that I’ll try to write three posts because that’s highly unlikely, but maybe I’ll at least manage to write two non-personal ones. As always, there’s no lack of topics I mean to write about, just that I’m almost never in the necessary frame of mind…
Writing two non-personal posts would get significantly easier if I’d finish King’s Bounty: The Legend no later than Friday, since in that case I’d be likely to write a review for it and post that as well. That’d probably be the only way to write three posts next week, though even then it’d be unlikely…