Russian version - first impressions

[Zhuangzi]

These comments by a guy called Dark Individual are from the rpgcodex forum. I thought I'd re-post them here because he has some interesting things to say about AP:

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This is a great expansion. Not only are there new creatures, many of the old ones have been given a bunch of abilities. For example, the Knight is now a Paladin who can resurrect/heal himself and others and also reload a creature's action points. Plus he is holy, steel armor etc. The swordsman can evade attacks and has a special attack. The appearance has been changed accordingly with, for example, the Marauder having daggers.

The little dragon is drawn and animated very nicely.

This is all I got because my Russian needs practicing. The beginning has much more dialog, more NPCs and overall content that the The Legend. The story is a lot stronger with several mysteries you have to uncover and some interesting concepts. For example, the Princess leaves Endoria in a state of timelessness with the help of that Temple Guard.

There's a lot of little differences that mostly balance out the classes and make them more interesting. There's not many completely new skills but the existing ones have been tweaked and rearranged. For example, the fighter has skills that directly give to attack, defense or a mix, instead of something vague like getting additional attack when killing a troop. Mages can now can cast 3 or 2 spells consecutively if they are 7 mana or less.

The dragon is very well animated and drawn. You can pick between several and they give different skills and bonuses. The starting skills are, unlike the Spirit of Rage, ALL useful. I have 3 right now: direct damage that pushes the target, the dragon can find additional chests that your troops can pick up, and the dragon can create a wall that blocks enemies. I predict that I will use all of them and it won't end up with just spamming Soul Drain.

There are many new creatures and existing creatures have been tweaked. Some of them have new abilities, some have a changed appearance and some have different stats from The Legend.

Armored Princess is harder than the Legend. You start off with a lot less Leadership. Almost all enemies are stronger than you and many impossible. Right now I can only recruit 4 priests, for example, and there are higher tier creatures everywhere.

The setting is, as I've said, much better. It's more serious, DARK and EPIC, and I'm not joking. Right off the bat you've tasked with something important and you have several things to discover. None of the "find the thieves and the tokens they stole" bullshit.

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Wow, there's three things I really like about the above comments:

1. More balanced dragon abilities (I agree that Soul Drain was overpowered)

2. Harder than KB:TL - even on impossible, KB:TL is not a difficult game to win.

3. Improved setting/storyline. I didn't care for the storyline in KB:TL. Hopefully I'll agree that the story in the expansion is better.

CAN'T WAIT

[guciomir]

It sounds great! Thank you for the info

what will happen to the KB sense of humour? I loved some funny conversations and i hope that the game will not become too serious and dark

[Nike-it]

Originally Posted by guciomir

It sounds great! Thank you for the info

what will happen to the KB sense of humour? I loved some funny conversations and i hope that the game will not become too serious and dark

Surely the great humor is available in sequel, even more jokes and gags

[jwallstone]

Wow! This is great! I love seeing innovation and improvement in games, and it looks like the developers are very aware of the flaws in KB and are being creative in improvements.

I like that they rebalanced units. The new Knight/Paladin plans are great to compensate for it's relative weakness in games now. I'm looking forward to the other unit balancing.

The tweaking of the skills sounds great too, and it looks like they took to heart the fact that some skills weren't very useful. The improvement of the "Rage" skills to make them all useful is also great.

I like that they changed mages to allow successive castings of lower mana spells. This allows probably greater spamming of weaker spells than currently possible, allowing greater tactical variety in that area, while not allowing ridiculous things like casting Hypnotize twice or something. Very creative.

I think the developers showed great judgement with KB:TL, such as with the Talent/Rune system, the Magic Crystal/Spell system, Leadership, etc, and I'm glad they seem to using that judgement and creativity to improve the game rather than simply make a clone with different characters.

[Leind]

It's great that the game is more difficult. Even in Impossible KB was very easy if you were a veteran from Homm. I wanted all the fights to be challenging, looks like it's the case!

[Nike-it]

Originally Posted by Leind

It's great that the game is more difficult. Even in Impossible KB was very easy if you were a veteran from Homm. I wanted all the fights to be challenging, looks like it's the case!

Armored Princess will be much more challenging, it's really hard on impossible.