Map Kiting in KB:AP or KB 2

[blueshrike]

Armored Princess is pure awesome... and I'm excited to write a review soon. Not sure what final score it will receive but I gave KB a 9.3 overall - very high for the site (Gamebanshee) and overall for the game from what I've read.

So here's a simple suggestion for an upcoming patch for KB:AP or perhaps a thought for KB 2. Obviously nav maps are cool. Kiting the guards away is also, guiltily cool. It wasn't at first and I tried to avoid it, but as the difficulty quickly increased, it became increasingly more tantalizing to kite. The promises of a new land with its leadership gains and treasures before ever fighting is one of the thrills of the game actually. Mainly because exploration contributes so successfully to character progression in this game, a truly great feat in an RPG.

However, the designers have set it so that the tougher map guardians are there to prevent the player from progressing too much without sufficient advancement. This would work except that players are able to use an exploit of sorts to lure them away and steal the map (thankfully...). It's obviously not the intended design as you really need to get lucky to do this... but it's not too bad with repeated attempts. And if this was the intended behavior, why didn't they just make them stationary with an "aura" of automatic battle rather than have them chase the player?

Either it's a programmatic problem they didn't want to / have time to solve, a bug, or a rather strange implementation.

Nevertheless I'm thankful it exists, because it's made my playing more enjoyable instead of potentially frustrating.

Here's where the design problem comes in, and perhaps a suggestion that would be good for all. Players who want no-losses, especially with the Mage challenge and impossible levels make map kiting even more of a requirement for success.

Therefore, especially for those high-scorers out there, what are your thoughts on implementing a small score penalty for the number of reloads (the 1st load doesn't count - only loads where time played is less than your current time), and a slightly more significant one for re-battle attempts?

By doing so those no-loss victories will still be possible, however the scoring edge will go to those whose reloading is slightly less (only a small penalty applies here to account for luck), and whose number of re-battles were less.

Thoughts?