My thoughts about crossworlds

[BB Shockwave]

Rune Mage Revive works on Blacks? But... Black Dragons are supposed to be immune to all spells and abilities...

Rulero - who cares that units are recolors. They play IMMENSLY differently then the units they are recolored from. Witch hunters are specific anti-Mage units that are fast too, while robbers are slow units with a 1-hex attack. Imps are strike-and-return demons with fireballs, Fauns are elven ranged units who resurrect plants and put the enemy to sleep. They play wastly differently. If you want to complain about recolors, do it for games like WOW where they just put in the same enemy in green without changing anything of its mechanics.

[ckdamascus]

Originally Posted by BB Shockwave

Rune Mage Revive works on Blacks? But... Black Dragons are supposed to be immune to all spells and abilities...

Rulero - who cares that units are recolors. They play IMMENSLY differently then the units they are recolored from. Witch hunters are specific anti-Mage units that are fast too, while robbers are slow units with a 1-hex attack. Imps are strike-and-return demons with fireballs, Fauns are elven ranged units who resurrect plants and put the enemy to sleep. They play wastly differently. If you want to complain about recolors, do it for games like WOW where they just put in the same enemy in green without changing anything of its mechanics.

Plague works on blacks too. Dancing Axes work on blacks (to heal). It is awesome. AWESOME!

[BB Shockwave]

Yeah, I know about those two - but they work because they are area/all creatures effects that do not manually target them. Revive would target them... odd.

Also, anyone tried the Paladin's Prayer in Crossworlds? The description says it revives plants and mechanical units as well...

Onepiece: KB2 will be AWESOME. In fact, I wish Nival bought the HOMM licencse from Ubi and made the next Heroes game. Although I am Hungarian, and HOMM VI is supposedly developed by a Hungarian team, I'd rather have experts who made such awesome TBS games do these then a company who made only RTS games before.

[ckdamascus]

Originally Posted by BB Shockwave

Yeah, I know about those two - but they work because they are area/all creatures effects that do not manually target them. Revive would target them... odd.

Also, anyone tried the Paladin's Prayer in Crossworlds? The description says it revives plants and mechanical units as well...

Onepiece: KB2 will be AWESOME. In fact, I wish Nival bought the HOMM licencse from Ubi and made the next Heroes game. Although I am Hungarian, and HOMM VI is supposedly developed by a Hungarian team, I'd rather have experts who made such awesome TBS games do these then a company who made only RTS games before.

Plague is a target spell. Anyways, I think it is fine that it works on them. Black Dragons need a weakness... Haha.

[megakill]

Originally Posted by BB Shockwave

Yeah, I know about those two - but they work because they are area/all creatures effects that do not manually target them. Revive would target them... odd.

Also, anyone tried the Paladin's Prayer in Crossworlds? The description says it revives plants and mechanical units as well...

Onepiece: KB2 will be AWESOME. In fact, I wish Nival bought the HOMM licencse from Ubi and made the next Heroes game. Although I am Hungarian, and HOMM VI is supposedly developed by a Hungarian team, I'd rather have experts who made such awesome TBS games do these then a company who made only RTS games before.

Well then you might be happy that Nival is acting as producer of Kings Bounty online )

[onepiece]

@BB; I don't think Ubi will sell them that license and to be sincere, King's Bounty beats the **** out of M&M. I was playing the fifth when I first played TL and I though "get the **** out out me bad game!! King's Bounty here I come!

But if Katauri (or 1C) wants to develop it into a full franchise, they will need to:

-Release a full proper game
-With better translation (hire some professionals or ask us devs)
-Correct their mistakes (come on, why does the paladin prayer ability says the same thing?) and bugs and
-Better implementation of their editor

(Optional): Don't do so much "expansions" but less as to not saturate the franchise and fanbase.

Now that would put them on the big leagues.

[Dwagginz]

I don't think Katauri, nor King's Bounty, will ever hit the "big leagues", and I don't think it's their fault. It's more to do with, in my opinion, turn based/real time games like this are a niche market. If you look at Disciples III, which one could argue was the highest profile release in this genre since HoMMV, that completely bombed and I guess it was partially due to the genre just not being overly popular.

I do think King's Bounty 2 would be the best bet. The graphics are looking a little dated and it'd be nice to see a better engine and perhaps bigger worlds. Also, I'd like the dialogue to go from walls of text to something a little more interactive. I think that'd be nice, personally.

I'll agree with onepiece's suggestions completely, though. I think 1C and perhaps Katauri could do with a better translator, along with more thorough proof reading of their work. It's not uncommon for a pluralised word (As an example, Warriors) to be referred to with the singular term, leading to slightly odd comments in the combat log such as "Warriors is..."

And again, he's right about the expansions. KB:TL > KB:AP was fine. KB:AP > KB:C was bordering on being a bit poor. There's some meat to it, I won't disagree there, but I personally felt that it was a bit on the thin side for a £15 game and that it was little more than a collection of mods.

[Metathron]

Originally Posted by BB Shockwave

who cares that units are recolors. They play IMMENSLY differently then the units they are recolored from.

Well, I do, and I'm sure there are others out there who do as well. Gameplay, visuals and sound/music are all parts of immersion in the game. Certainly, gameplay is the most important of the three, but the others are important as well. So the new units "just" bring different gameplay to the table, whereas the sounds and visuals are practically the same. So yeah, for me that does take away from the immersion somewhat.

Originally Posted by onepiece

-With better translation (hire some professionals or ask us devs)
-Correct their mistakes (come on, why does the paladin prayer ability says the same thing?) and bugs

Yep, polish is probably Katauri's biggest challenge, and other Russian developers' too, if I may venture to say so.

Originally Posted by Dwagginz

There's some meat to it, I won't disagree there, but I personally felt that it was a bit on the thin side for a £15 game and that it was little more than a collection of mods.

That sums up my thoughts on the game as well.

[BB Shockwave]

Metathron, KB-CRossworlds in an expansion... to a game that was pretty much an expansion to the KB Legends game. It's more like a mod, but it turned out to be much more then that, however I think you have had too high expetations.

Armored Princess WAS the expansion of King's Bounty - it had new units (graphically too), new skills, spells, etc. - but the main game and about 85% of the units were the same, just recolored. So yeah, AP was an expansion -a standalone expansion, but expansion nonetheless. Crossworlds on the other hand, was a not-standalone mod to AP.

I was expecting frankly a lot less from Crossworlds (I thought Orcs on the March will be another short campaign) so I was pleasantly surprised. I think they made the main AP game much better without taking away any of the old game's fun factors.

I was never expecting new unit 3D models - making those would have meant this expansion would have taken more then a year to make.

Regarding translations - I found some errors in the english version too (sadly there is no Hungarian for AP yet), but seeing as the text in the game is in an extractable format somewhere, even us fans could fix that easily. I love KB for it's open attitude towards modding. Makes the game stay in circulation much, much longer thanks to the community. I mean, look at Titan Quest - the company is long defunct, but people are still making mods for that game.

[ckdamascus]

Originally Posted by BB Shockwave

Metathron, KB-CRossworlds in an expansion... to a game that was pretty much an expansion to the KB Legends game. It's more like a mod, but it turned out to be much more then that, however I think you have had too high expetations.

Armored Princess WAS the expansion of King's Bounty - it had new units (graphically too), new skills, spells, etc. - but the main game and about 85% of the units were the same, just recolored. So yeah, AP was an expansion -a standalone expansion, but expansion nonetheless. Crossworlds on the other hand, was a not-standalone mod to AP.

I was expecting frankly a lot less from Crossworlds (I thought Orcs on the March will be another short campaign) so I was pleasantly surprised. I think they made the main AP game much better without taking away any of the old game's fun factors.

I was never expecting new unit 3D models - making those would have meant this expansion would have taken more then a year to make.

Regarding translations - I found some errors in the english version too (sadly there is no Hungarian for AP yet), but seeing as the text in the game is in an extractable format somewhere, even us fans could fix that easily. I love KB for it's open attitude towards modding. Makes the game stay in circulation much, much longer thanks to the community. I mean, look at Titan Quest - the company is long defunct, but people are still making mods for that game.

After steamrolling past the two short campaigns (which have a lot of replay value by themselves, since I would love to retry them with different strategies and they are short, so no major commitment), I was really shocked to see Orcs on the March looked like a re-skinned Armored Princess.

I was almost sad... until I played it.

I highly suggest people to simply try playing it and you will be surprised. The new training schools, the new items (integrates new items plus the old gift pack mod), the new unit skills, and new spells, all open up NEW strategies.

They really did mods to the game to help eliminate some really old standing issues.

At a high level, the major changes was eliminating the near requirement to kite (or luck) and to help make far more units viable in the game. I am talking about Impossible NoLoss games.

I lamented that the game devolved heavily into using only a handful of units.

a) royal griffins and black knights were the only units with more than one counter attack, making them verrry ideal for certain combinations. Now this is no longer true!

b) black dragons were deadly and awesome, but there was no way to resurrect them, among a lot of other level 5 monsters (cyclops) and even level 4s (royal thorns), etc. Now this is fixed with rune mage.

c) rune mage also helps condense many units into one, thus allowing people to use more varied units while maintaining the old gameplay style. Plus the level 5 resurrect ability is great.

d) the orc team is totally revised, allowing for incredible combinations and now, much harder enemies.

e) training school allows you to AVOID needing to kite or worry if your game randomly generated enough units.