Players feedback/reviews

[jake21]

While I would agree that there are some balance issues; the other two flaws you mention I find disagreement; and strongly dislike the idea of being able to hire creatures anywhere on the playing field. While perhaps a minor aspect of the game; one aspect is to decide if you should go into battle as you are or seek reinforcement; if you seek reinforcement should you drop a current recruitment that is not readily available; at perhaps quite a loss of $$$ (and on impossible; early in the game; $$$ is a scarce resource to be tightly managed).

Originally Posted by bigslimyblob

I'll start by saying that this is a surprisingly good game, but one that I feel could be made into a truly great one if not for a couple very huge flaws, one of which is easily fixed and the one I'm going to be talking about here.

I'll mention this once more: this first flaw is not only huge, but easily fixed.

Personally, the one thing that annoys me the most, by far, is having to ride to creature dwellings to recruit them when you already have some in your army. Throughout the game you find flags, equip items that increase Leadership, get promotions, and of course lose creatures during battles. The need to restock creatures is constant, and over the time I've played King's Bounty, several hours have been spent just riding around restocking.

Before someone mentions Reserves... there's only two Reserve slots, they need to be bought, and you may want to keep them to transport alternative creatures. There's even a couple special situations where you need to keep one open for "quest" creatures like, say, a cyclops for the magic school, or even just to hold your normal creatures while you feed venomous things to your swamp Spirit, or maybe hold Priests to upgrade because there's no more Inquisitors available in vendors.

Proposal: enable some option to hire creatures (assuming that you already have some of that exact type in your army, of course) from anywhere on the world map, for twice their normal hiring cost. This could also solve the problem of absurdly small creature availability (three Royal Thorns, four Arctic Bears, two Black Knights, etc. from some obscure vendors) without having to resort to the Sacrifice spell to "grow" those unit stacks, because that spell is too rare to rely upon and often will only be found halfway through the game. This is something that could be done with KB and AP with little difficulty.

Huge flaw, easy solution, immense game improvement.

A friend of mine also mentioned one flaw to me. He hasn't finished the game yet, but the thing he hates most is the totally random difficulty levels. When he tried doing the mage tower in Arlania and beating Enemen in the swamps, he faced a ridiculously powerful opponent without any warning whatsoever.

His suggestion was to balance things better, but in my opinion it would be sufficient to simply put a "suggested hero level" value on quests. That'd also be fairly easy to add, so I'm mentioning it here along with my own suggestion.

The other flaw of the game is, as many people have been complaining about, the absurd level of randomness when it comes to creature/item/spell generation. That however is not so easily fixed and so I'm not going to go into any detail. I will however mention that, yes, it's pretty ridiculous, and while I understand that most of the replay value relies on this very randomness, there would have been other ways to go about it. As things are now it's impossible to "plan" a character; completing a particular set is highly unlikely, and like most players I really don't like the game telling me what it wants me to be, especially based on some dumb random number generator.

So there you go. From my point of view KB is a good game that could easily be made into a great game, and the designers/developers knowing about the randomness issue just makes it possible to look forward to future games! Not that I'm not looking forward to AP already.

[bigslimyblob]

Originally Posted by jake21

While I would agree that there are some balance issues; the other two flaws you mention I find disagreement; and strongly dislike the idea of being able to hire creatures anywhere on the playing field. While perhaps a minor aspect of the game; one aspect is to decide if you should go into battle as you are or seek reinforcement; if you seek reinforcement should you drop a current recruitment that is not readily available; at perhaps quite a loss of $$$ (and on impossible; early in the game; $$$ is a scarce resource to be tightly managed).

That's pretty much what I'm saying. Entering a battle with less than maximum units, you'll end up losing even more units, which costs gold. Dropping a stack of units to hire another type costs gold too, and of course you're likely to want to continue using that type of creature anyway (people tend to use the creatures they like). Riding back to original dwellings to hire more costs absolutely nothing, so you'll feel forced to do it to save gold, especially on Impossible.

Actually that's a good point. I'll modify my suggestion even further... no double hiring cost for hiring creature from the field. Else you'd still feel obligated to ride back all over.

Truly, having to go back and rehire creatures all the freakin' time is the one thing that makes the game tedious for me. There's absolutely no point in it; the best solution is always to run back and rehire. I don't mind working for things when I'm playing a game, but this requires no thought or skill... it's just a chore. Games should never feel like chores.

Anyway, that was my suggestion. I'm hoping rehiring won't be this unpleasant in AP (flying horse should help somewhat, at least). Else it doesn't really matter... got a whole pile of games right here.

[Vilk]

I don't like all the random in the game but I can admit that shops, items, enemies and troops random has advantages.

But there's a type of random I strongly dislike it's battle random with heavy effects. That destroy fine tactical approach. Here a list:

• Random charming, 30% chance of charming opponent troop instead of attacking. I hate this one, you are going to free a path by destroying an enemy troop and instead you get a boring useless junk in your path.
• Critical, double damages, pure random. Even if you get luck to get items increasing critical chance and play on morale it will still be heavy random. 30% chance of getting double damages or the reverse. I hate this one too and I'd love have an item that disable any critical from both sides.
• Random dodging avoiding any damages, the effect is heavy and based of stuff like 30% chance to get it. Hateful one too.

There are some other heavy random like some units that have a range damages from 1 to 4, awful but at least they aren't troop that are good fighters and worth for other points.