Sometimes, a genre sort of falls into a rut. In some ways, it's the price of success. Some small developer comes up with the next New Thing and hits the market with a resounding success. It's not long after, that producers around the industry start getting strong signals from their marketing managers that they better start coming up with something similar, because that's what the "public" obviously wants.
We reviewers are part of the problem, of course. We see something that excites us, and suddenly it's the greatest thing since the invention of sliced bread. Hyperbole aside, there's nothing wrong with touting something that really is great. The problem is that we begin to use a game - reasonably or no - as a yardstick against which all other titles are measured. This is, of course, patently unfair: every game has its own context, its own goals, and its own measure by which it should be judged. Warcraft was a great example. An outstanding game, it took what had been a rather staid, turn-based environment and gave it a huge injection of adrenaline. Gamers loved it, and love it still. I know I do.
But I don't want to play doppelgangers of my favorite titles, nor (I imagine) do most other gamers. How many hackneyed shovelware clones of Warcraft have polluted fantasy real-time strategy (FRTS) in the last eight years? I think this is where the corporate boardroom clashes so blatantly with designers - designers understand that novelty is the essence of a really big hit. Which is why, when gamers get a chance to play something that pushes the envelope, it's so tantalizing. I'm not talking about something that's just new for newness' sake, but a game that takes a few worthwhile risks in an effort to make the experience better.
Kohan, by Timegate Studios, attempts precisely this. The feel, the setting, the execution - all hearken strongly to the roots of FRTS. Like its predecessors, Kohan is a basic 4X game - start with a city and some units. Develop the city to build more and better units. Expand your control to increase your income and build more units, so you can expand more. Nothing terribly complex there.
But Timegate wasn't satisfied with making 'just another FRTS' game. They've made some ingenious changes to the basic model, and the result is a game that manages to feel at once both classic and novel right out of the box.
One of the most common criticisms of real-time strategy games is that they tend to overwhelm the player with a glut of needful tasks. The player has to intervene in a tree cutting operation here, build ships there, construct units, all the while managing a complex economy of multiple resources, stockpiles and products. And this is all before the opponent's hastily-built rush of troops arrives to start wrecking it all!
Cut to the Kohan 'drawing board'. They seem to have made several design choices from the very beginning in an effort to keep the focus on the gameplay, not the micromanagement. For example: every minute a player spends thinking about the interface or wondering "what's going on?" is a minute the player is distracted BY the game, FROM the game. They had a mandate to present information clearly, and make units easy to handle.
The most obvious answer to the unit-handling question is organization. Like in the real world, issuing orders to every individual soldier is the bane of a general (well, one who wants to win anyway). Kohan dispenses with this in two ways - squad and company management, and intelligent unit behavior.
In Kohan, nobody is alone - not even a hero. Your squads are built from the beginning to include multiple bodies. One unit type is selected to fill in the four front-row slots, (up to) two separate units are selected to fill non-melee 'support' roles, and a single individual (either a generic 'captain' or a hero if you have one available) leads the group. The four front-rankers are usually the ones that engage in melee, while the support troops can fight if needed but more frequently are archers or wizards. Some support units also help the overall squad in other less blatant ways, such as the Paladin that gives everyone combat and morale bonuses fighting Shadow (evil), or the Ranger that allows the squad to ignore terrain penalties to movement rates.
The leader has a dual role: if it's a powerful hero, you can set them to 'engage' mode, where they can wade into combat and display their awesome prowess. Otherwise, 'command' mode allows them to direct troops (and apply their squad-affecting bonuses) more effectively from someplace safer.
In general, all of these individuals actually perform their roles extremely well. Spellcasters stay back, mages blasting the enemy with a number of spells, archers peppering enemy leaders, and priests busily healing the injured. Critically, this allows you as a player to be more concerned with the momentum of a battle or the employment of reserves, instead of being consumed with keeping the stupid mage out of harm's way. This deeply enriches the combat experience, as well as allowing you (in some cases) to actually sit back a little, and watch the beautiful graphics at work.
Each squad has a choice of four formations, each being a tradeoff of movement speed, visibility, and combat strength. Combat mode is the slowest moving, but (obviously) the most effective. Skirmish mode gives a unit heightened visibility and mobility, at a cost of some combat strength. Forced march, as one might expect, means speedy movement but terrible vulnerability.
One other facet of the formation chosen is the zone of control (ZoC). The ZoC (shown in the screenshots as green for friendly, yellow for enemy) is a classic element of old-fashioned 'pure' wargames, and is a novel but welcome addition to RTS. Classically defined, the ZoC is the area in which your troops can exert their combat strength. A force-marching troop has a small ZOC (it's avoiding encounters) while a skirmish-formation ostensibly is more spread out and alert for action from any direction. These tactical options make the game only marginally more complicated, but reward the player with far more choices and more interesting options.
To improve your ability to control your troops even further, multiple units can be formed into companies of up to 6 units (therefore a total of 42 individuals). Macro formations are also enabled, so if you are forming a larger army you will have the opportunity to put the support-oriented units safely in the back, the cavalry on the wings, the pikemen in the center and lock that formation no matter how the unit turns. It can take a little time to set up, something you are frequently short of in multiplayer games, but once complete these armies can be managed as nimbly as the squads were individually.
Second on the drawing board, there are a lot of games out there that intend to portray a complicated economy - Kohan isn't meant to be one. What can be done to keep it interesting, yet minimize the impact on a player whose attention will be on other things?
Interestingly, Timegate's designers realized that stockpiling resources took a lot of time for the player to manage. In most cases, players would be more concerned with rates (Am I producing more iron than I'm using? Do I have enough stone to finish the job?) than with absolutes. So they made a radical decision and dispensed with stockpiles almost entirely. You still accumulate gold to the limits allowed by your civic coffers, but the other resources (stone, wood, iron, mana) are simple vectors. Either you're producing more than you consume and show a positive number or you are not making enough and have an ugly red negative number (which then costs you gold to compensate). This takes a whole level of analysis - usually performed by the player - and puts it right on the top of the screen.
Production rates of these resources are dependent on the structures in your towns, which are themselves part of a fairly complicated development tree. A quarry (the basic 'stone' structure) produces +5 stone/minute. Once that structure is completed, you can build atop it an advanced quarry (+2 more stone/minute), a brickyard (which then auto-repairs a damaged city), or even a stone export (which is useful if you find yourself with a surplus, since it sells extra stone for gold).
Of course, you have to balance this immediate need with your long term goals: towns can only be upgraded to the next level when their slots are full. Building advanced structures may be worthwhile now, but you are bartering your larger scale growth rate. Is it worth it? Development is key, since most villages start with only two slots for facilities. Settlements can be upgraded (expensively) all the way up to the most massive metropoli, with seven slots - allowing you the luxury of building exotic structures like temples and mage colleges - critical if you want to build the best units.
Ahh, as well there are other things to spend your resources on! Heavily armored units will also take a constant flow of iron for repairs, making blacksmithies very valuable. A heavy cavalry unit, with a mage and priest as auxiliaries, can take NINE iron and four mana per minute - they're effective, but very expensive to maintain. This may sound like a lot, and in a sense it is. But the workload is not excessive. The result of all this is that Kohan's economy is interesting and complex, without being overly burdensome.
Of course, novelty without skilled execution is pointless. Having a good economic model and great unit handling might sell a few games to serious gamers, but the graphics are going to make it jump off the shelves. Units are detailed and well-colored sprites, with well-chosen idle animations. Something on the screen (either the Ranger unit bending down to examine the ground, or vaguely-seen 'peeking things' peering out from beneath rocks in the terrain) is always moving, making even a rare slow moment in the game interesting to watch. The music too is good, sounding a lot like the score from Baldur's Gate with equally-competent voice acting in the campaign scenarios.
The included campaign is pretty linear, with some scenarios being impossibly hard (even on 'EASY') while others were pretty easy (even when I replayed them on HARD). I'm not sure about most gamers, but I was put off by a few of the 'timed' scenarios. Certainly, they weren't surprises - the briefings in each case are very well done, and when the timer kicks on it's displayed prominently near the top of the screen so it's impossible to miss. But I'm not a big fan of timed, arbitrary victories - it was only three scenarios, so even if it does bother you, I offer the following
spoiler link so you can stomp on through them to the rest of the enjoyable campaign.
I found that most of the campaign scenarios were easy to beat if you used settlers aggressively, building a lot of towns (and therefore increasing your income quickly). This didn't work very well on the highest difficulty levels however, as it was increasingly impossible to protect a bunch of vulnerable cities against an aggressive AI.
Atmospherically, Kohan presents an interesting storyline of cataclysm and rebirth. All the heroes are individuals, with unique traits, voices, artwork, everything. Each mission has a context, and a goal that advances the tale. This added a great deal to the suspension of disbelief. As a campaign, you bring your heroes (usually) and your technological discoveries into the next scenario, but due to the far-flung nature of your battles, you must rebuild your army locally each time.
I have no doubt that there will be many user-built scenarios and campaigns out there shortly, since the editor is one of the best I've ever seen. The interface is friendly, maps easy to create (even if you don't use the randomizing feature), and it even has map checking tools that help you identify trapped units or errors. The scripting utility is exceptionally well done, allowing anyone to build complex scenarios or even full campaigns with triggered actions and complicated events to baffle the players.
Building a scenario from scratch too time consuming? You can also generate random scenarios for solo or multiplayer fun in moments, with the full featured scenario generator. A lot of work has gone into making multiplayer Kohan, and it shows. Everything is built in, including Gamespy support for really easy internet game-finding. City militias (the troops inherent to every settlement), while useful in the solo game, are fantastic anti-rush devices - they give a limited advantage to defenders in the early stages of the game. Yet, the militia are surmountable by the midgame so they don't make city-capture impossible.
Kohan should appeal to many gamers; the traditional RTS'ers will find the expected level of excitement and adrenaline, while wargame-oriented players may finally see it as a title that has enough 'meat' to be worth trying. It's very easy to play, but with a number of nuances that make it fascinating. Timegate has simplified the economy without making it boring, and added features heretofore found only in more 'serious' wargames. As I mentioned above, Kohan is a classic right out of the box.
