King Arthur

[alanschu]

Bizarre title aside, I'm a bit intrigued of the idea of a Total War style game with RPG elements

 

Can't afford it at the moment, and the fact that this popped up completely out of nowhere is a small cause for concern, but I'll probably pick it up in time should I suddenly become rich!

 

http://www.kingarthurthewargame.com/main.html

[Purkake]

I put on my robe and wizard hat

[Musopticon?]

^Could you be less obnoxious, please?

 

That studio's previous resume does get my hopes up, but it's a darn good-looking game, and has features that should have been the stable of fantasy strategy games for a long time. Definitely a title to keep an eye on, so thanks Allan.

[alanschu]

A guy at work picked it up but didn't get it downloaded until this morning, so he hasn't really looked at it yet. He enjoyed Empire Total War, so we'll see how that goes.

[Pidesco]

This looks like it could be pretty awesome. I'm needing a game to scratch the strategy itch Empire failed to get to.

 

And it's cheap, too. 26

[alanschu]

If anyone does take one for the team, make sure to post feedback!

[Oner]

I'm surprised how well people reacted to this game (well, here and on Gametrailers). Wasn't expecting it.

[Pidesco]

If anyone does take one for the team, make sure to post feedback!

 

 

Perhaps I will, I was just thinking of waiting for it to be released on other outlets besides Steam.

 

In any case, here's info filched from Neogaf:

 

I've been playing a Beta version of this for review (well, it says Beta but I got the download details late on Saturday evening so I'm assuming it's pretty close to the final code if they really are releasing on Tuesday.) Thanks to rvdleun for starting this thread, because without it I would have no idea this game existed.

 

Anyway, I've played about 2-3 hours so far and it's pretty cool stuff. You start off down in Cornwall and firstly have to spread your influence over the South of England (it's sorta historical-fantasy so you have ye olde counties in England like Dumnonia sat alongside Dorset and stuff.)

 

Objectives so far have been popping up in the form of 'this King is defending his land against an Invader, go side with one of them' - which ultimately results in you taking the province (because everybody is so impressed with your intervention I guess) and an effect on the overall morality of your rule. It seems quite story-lead in that way. Events pop up and you have to deal with them.

 

If you help the tyrannical guy, you slide towards tyranny and if you help the rightful ruler you edge closer to being Mr Wonderful King. There's also another axis; Old Faith vs Christianity. As you move in whatever direction it unlocks various skills/spells and troop types. You've probably seen this stuff on the developer videos.

 

I've also done one QUEST, which involved healing a dude called Sir Gareth and getting him to tell me where the Lady of the Lake hangs out these days. These bits operate kind of like a choose-your-own-adventure thing, where you select text options and try to get the result you need (I toddled off into some swamps to find a Druid to cure Gareth and it gave me an OLD FAITH bonus at the end.)

 

Uh, what else. There is a lot in this game. As you fight and do stuff, your Knights and their armies get XP - which you can funnel into new spells, or stat bonuses or passive skills like +5% to income from a province or whatever.

 

Each turn changes the season and these seem pretty important. In Winter nobody moves, the armies just camp in their tents. This is also when you allocate any XP you have. Summer is the best for military campaigns. Spring is best for quests (for some reason, I dunno why yet really) and in Autumn you do something too (maybe recruit people, I forget sorry.)

 

When you move your little hero-and-army dude into an enemy, it's time for some real-time battles hooray. These are a lot like the Total War games. I mean really, a LOT like them. Right down to those little icons popping up on the left-hand side of the screen for 'enemy general captured' and whatnot. The camera controls are also pretty much identical. You can do stuff like hide your guys in woods for an ambush bonus (they get a little icon to show they have this.) Attacking/defending is on a similar rock-paper-scissors thing too (ie; Cavalry beat the crap out of archers), but with the added complication of your Knights being able to kick ass and cast spells. So far I've been able to use Fog of Avalon to, uh, make it really foggy and screw up the range of archers, Cleave which allows my guy to attack four guys at once (hell yeah!) and a few other defensive type things.

 

One major difference from Total War ... nobody ever runs away. This kinda threw me at first and to be honest it does have the potential to turn things into a bit of a slog-fest. I guess everybody (even footmen) are too noble to run away in Arthurian Britain. Morale still exists, but it seems to affect overall army stamina (which is obviously important during the battle) and maybe a couple of other things. Another downer is that you only really hear BATTLE NOISE when you zoom really close in on a fight - and most of the time you won't be doing that because you'll be wanting a much broader overview. This means that even when all your dudes are fighting, if you're too high up you only have the music and other effects going on which is a bit of a shame.

 

You've also got some strategic points of interest dotted around the map like Stone Circles, Cathedrals, Villages and whatnot which give your guys bonuses for that battle (or result in more food being captured if you win etc.) I'm not sure what happens if one side captures ALL of these ... it may be an auto-win, but I've not seen it happen yet. I've always won by killing everybody on the opposing side so far.

 

Another slightly weird thing is that on the main overview map, I have two heroes in the same army and can't figure out how to separate them yet. That said, I'm still in a semi-tutorial phase I think ... recruitment and research haven't opened up for me yet, so it's possible I'll be able to split armies once it tells me how to do it.

 

Whew, that's kind of a mega-post. In summary I'm having a lot of fun so far! It seems to be delivering on what it promised, with the caveat that the real-time battles are possibly not quite as 'sophisticated' as Total Wars. I think I need more time with those to make a better judgement.

 

Britain is divided up into counties/realms and from the map each minor King seems to own a couple of areas of land. So far I've only gone up against regular troops in various forms (footmen, axemen, spearmen, bowmen and so on - oh, a note on bowmen, they seem very powerful at present.) Looking at the morality chart thing, it's clear that later I'll be able to hire these guys named Seelie (or UnSeelie if you're evil.) Those guys are in the Old Faith column, so I think they're sorta wood spirits/elvish kinda folks? The UnSeelie are those blue-hued thin, spectral figures who've popped up in some of the videos.

 

I've not met any Giants or anything like that yet, however the mythology seems to be pointing towards there being more fantastical stuff up in the North (which is obscured for me at the moment) so I think that'll crop up later. I'm still in Chapter 1 (of 4, I believe) - there's an objectives panel where you can check on progress. Most events have two paths which then branch into further objectives and events. I mean, it's a fairly simplistic dichotomy so far (help the good dude or the evil dude) but it may well get more complex. Even if it doesn't, it's still pretty neat.

 

As far as PLAYING as different factions goes, I haven't seen that. You can launch a 'scenario' from the main menu, which is basically a Total War quick battle - and there you can choose whatever troops you want. Not sure about doing that on the campaign map though, it always sticks you in Cornwall. Possibly something you can unlock? (I know that you unlock 'very hard' difficulty when you've completed the campaign once.)

 

 

 

I think I probably need to play more battles to properly answer this. I'm playing on Normal and I've only just reached the point where I think I'll reload and have another shot at the battle (I got pretty wrecked by some powerful Brigand bowmen ) - so I'll try some different tactics and see how it reacts. I've seen it try to sneak some cavalry behind my lines through some trees - and it's happy enough sending units off to try to capture special objective points. When I was shooting arrows into one of its units, they started moving pretty sharpish. So I guess I can say I haven't seen anything utterly boneheaded yet - but nor have I seen anything amazing or really pushed the AI too hard.

 

Something I didn't really mention earlier ... performance seems pretty good. I'm playing on an E4500 dual core, 2gig of RAM with an x1950 pro card - on high it stuttered a little, but on medium it was totally fine. I could probably raise a few more details if I wanted to. Loading times between battles take a little while (feels about a minute), but nothing horrific.

 

Some other nifty things to do are give captured areas to your Knights (each of whom has different positive and negative traits about how they'll run things) which increases their loyalty. And you can also supposedly marry them off, but I've not had the chance to do that yet.

 

---

 

If you imagine the morality chart like one of these political spectrums: http://shades.piquant.us/images/political_compass.jpg and instead of people's names on there you've got units, spells and general skills - that's what it's like. So, for example, I'm close to unlocking 'Yoemen' at the moment (who are up and to the left a bit) because I've done deeds that have nudged me towards 'Rightful' (upwards) and 'Old Faith' (to the left.)

 

The XP you get in battle goes on skills and spells for the specific units and Knights (Heroes) who've fought in the battle. You never actually see 'King Arthur' because he's us, I guess, and does all the guiding of units on the map and whatnot. But you DO see his Knights of the Round Table (of which you can have up to 12 at once.) They lead the armies, show up on the battlefield, govern provinces and all that jazz. You can spend XP on spells or abilities - but yeah, you can buy a spell first and then next level-up buy an ability, it's up to you. Heroes very much show up on the battlefield! They have a little beam of light over them (as seen in the dev videos) so you can keep track of them. They also kick all kinds of ass.

 

---

 

 

There's a 'withdraw' button you can use to try to get your guys out of there or disengage from one unit and attack another. It seems sort of hard to tell what units are 'wavering', although if you mouse over it gives stamina/health info and all that. You can also switch to a more detailed breakdown which may well show morale and stuff .. I'll look into that.

 

I actually HAVE now seen a few guys run away, but it's sorta weird. Units don't seem to individually go 'uh oh the battles going badly' and bugger off for a bit and then potentially come back. The only time I've seen units flee is when I've basically won, just killed off their Knightly leader and the remaining 6 guys or whatever run off while the victory screen shows up and my dudes start cheering. So it seems like any remnants of units breaking and running is very much an 'end game' for the battles.

 

A couple of other things - now I've met the Lady of the Lake, more control options are unlocking. I can split armies up on the map and stuff now, so that's in there. My next task is to 'establish a stronghold' .. so maybe once that's done I'll be into research and recruiting and stuff. It's quite cool how it gradually introduces all this info.

 

---

 

Haven't played a siege battle yet, sorry. In-battle the units don't have any little voice notifications which is a bit sad On the main campaign map they do, and "yes my lord/my king" is exactly what they say.

 

The animations I'd say are passable. When they're marching around all spearmen/whatever are doing an identical 'march' movement. In combat they'll do 'combat' animations, but it's a bit like Total War in the sense that when you get really close you can tell that some guys are just waggling their swords at nothing. The Knight animations are pretty cool - when Sir Balan does his 'cleave' thing it has a special animation.

 

To be honest I haven't paid a huge amount of attention to the real close-up animations simply because there isn't a great deal of respite in-battle to start checking out up-close details of your guys (unless everybody is engaged in combat and you have nothing better to do.)

 

I think I've finally figured out how Morale works too. There are two bars at the top of the battle screen, which originally I thought were like the Total War 'here's your total unit strength right now' indicators. In fact they represent Morale - and if one bar falls to zero, then everybody runs off and you win/lose. The special battlefield objectives (which are only on some battlefields, it turns out) - as well as giving bonuses - also affect the balance of those Morale bars. So yes, if you capture all of them on a given battlefield I think that'd be an auto-victory.

 

I've also just learned how to recruit soldiers from villages and settlements at any time, which is pretty damn helpful.

 

If anybody remembers the old Games Workshop game "Dark Omen," the battles remind me of a cross between that and an early Total War (Shogun/Medieval.) I realise Dark Omen wasn't exactly great overall, but it did have the whole 'heroes with special abilities' thing and that's the aspect I mean.

 

---

 

Q: "How available is magic during battles? Is there mana which depletes when spells are cast? Or do you get limited uses of each spell per battle? How many hero type characters can you have per army? Is it just the Knight you place in charge, or can you attach other characters too?"

 

Yep, that's exactly how the magic works. Each Knight/Hero has an amount of mana (which can be increased or boosted as he earns XP) and each spell has a mana cost. There are a whole bunch of different spells to learn, but each Hero can only take four into battle with him at any one time. Any you take into battle can be cast multiple times if you have the mana for it. The spells tend to have a 'recharge' time though - so you can't just spam Firey Doom all over the place.

 

Each army has 16 unit slots and a Knight + his attending unit take up two. So, technically you could have a badass army of 8 Knights and their units with one of them designated as leader. But I think in practical terms that would be unwise! Although you can recruit units at villages and settlements, they don't go anywhere unless they have a Knight to lead them. Given that you seem to need your Knights doing a bunch of different things (protecting your lands, going on quests, attacking other people) it's probably a bit of a waste to not have them leading their own army.

 

I think I've kind of screwed myself in the campaign I'm playing. I'm trapped between two Kings who decided to declare war on me (one of them because I didn't send an envoy to bargain for his loyalty in time .. whoops.) Quests are popping up all over the shop that I can't deal with and I'm massively overpowered on two fronts. Time to back up a bit with a reloaded save I think

 

It's pretty cool to discover such a potentially awesome game right on release day.

[alanschu]

I agree!

[Stephen Amber]

Looks like it's got horses at least.

[Tigranes]

Interesting stuff, but my strategy itch has been reserved by Heir to the Throne (EU3's third xpack). Let me know how it is guys.

[Purkake]

^Could you be less obnoxious, please?

It was my expression of happiness.

 

This game looks relevant to my interests.

[TheHarlequin]

Once it comes to impulse im buying it!

Edited November 27, 2009 by TheHarlequin

[Tigranes]

Codex had a good and fair impressions post:

 

Okay, I got a chance to play some more. I'm pretty sure I've seen most of what the game has to offer feature-wise. The preview below is lengthy, so just read the parts you care most about... or skip to the conclusion. There are next to no spoilers.

 

Character development: Your knights have 5 basic stats, such as Fighting (their own strength in melee), Reign (how much gold they earn you and how much they lower the upkeep costs of your units) and Loyalty (the morale of the knight and his troops. Your knights have classes. I have a Warlord, a Champion and some dude I just got so I can't remember his class. When they level up, they gain one skill point, and you can use this to learn new active skills (such as Dragon's Eye which negates penalties for fog on your archers) or passive skills (such as Holy armor which shields your units). There are lots of skills - 15 for each class roughly. You gain XP after every battle - and ALL your units gain XP, even a basic unit of footmen. The basic units can level up in melee, defense, archey, stamina or devotion, the last of which lowers their upkeep-cost.

 

Management: Seems pretty okay, so far. You conquer cities and special areas (such as Stonehenge) within each province. These give bonuses and sometimes recruits are available (recruiting is the main way of expanding your armies). Units cost gold, and consume food and cost upkeep while you have them. Each turn consists of a season, and true to the arthurian universe, you rest in winter. So you can't attack in winter. Summer, autumn and spring all offer different bonuses/penalties depending on your actions. Winter is where you level up if any units gained XP. You also pay upkeep and that stuff in winter. While this all could be a staple of the series, I'm having lots of fun managing my little part of Brittania. It's horribly impeded by the GUI, though (see below). One of the innovative parts of this is the round-table screen. Here you can manage your knights, dismiss them, find wives for them (raising their loyalty), torture enemy knights you've captured, release them for ransom, kill them, and that kind of stuff. What I'm worried about is the recruitment; it seems you have to visit each city when recruitment is available, to add the forces to your army. While maybe realistic, it certainly isn't fun. It seems much a la returning to your town in heroes of might&magic; wasted turnes spent moving, recruiting, ending your turn, and then get to actually play.

 

Quests and objectives: There are two types of missions. The objectives are basically; "do you want to side with bad king or good king, christian king or old-faith king." Then you fight whoever you didn't side with. Sometimes it's a little more complicated, like: "Which city will you claim as your Stronghold"? Quests are a lot more original in this type of genre. They're basically little text-based minigames, where you meet several skill challenges. You encounter something on the overland map, read the quest, and then choose which knight in the army that encountered it who'll do the quest. You then have several options to how you will complete the quest. The options you have are based on the skills of the knight you chose. So some options are greyed out (if your knight doesn't have the skill) or red (if he will fail because his skill is too low). When the quest resolves, you gain rewards such as XP, CAREBEAR/EVUL points and so on. The C&C has no effect on the storyline, as far as I can see, except in terms on the morality-wheel. Besides that it only matters in terms of reward/how much effort it takes to get through the quest. For a game of this type however, I'm more than willing to forgive this.

 

For example, I sent my diplomatic knight on a mission, and only completed it by paying 2000 food to the resident lord, because I didn't want to use the Tyrant-option and I didn't have enough Christian-points for them to just trust me straight ahead. In the end it earned me a CAREBEAR-point, some XP, and so on.

 

The next quest I sent my fighting knight. I conviced a group of soldiers to join me, but only by claiming them in Christianity's name. My diplomacy was too low to convince them to join freely. This lowered the morale of the whole army, but granted me the units and some Christianity-points.

 

It's entertaining enough, and if it keeps the same amount of options throughout the game, it's definetely worth my time.

 

The writing: Is pretty "meh." It's your classic King Arthur setting, but I'm very thankful it's less "CLIVE OWEN WILL TEAR OFF YOUR BALLS!" and more the original saga. The setting is ****ing solid - the writing itself not so much. As for how much you'll see; you'll see it in quests, objective-descriptions, the notes on storyline supplied by your advisor and small notes. There's also a story-compendium explaining what goes on. Kindda like the codex from Dragon Age. It's an okay read, but don't expect novelty.

 

The fighting: I don't know much about this, since this is my first wargame of its kind. I'm having fun, though. In my earlier post you can see how much has an effect on the outcome, and it really does. In my first "hard" fight (meaning outside of the tutorial battles), I fought the fae people for the first time. I was utterly crushed on my first three attempts (playing on normal), until I hid my archers in a forest, flanked their light infantry, and wedged into them. My archers got in a tricky situation because they had wargs, which were damned fast and broke off from the main battle as soon as they realized I had archers. I was too slow to hunt them down, so while, overall, I beat them soundly, I lost 3/4 of my archers in that battle. Damn. Maybe someone with more experience on wargames can give a better assessment of the combat. The only really bad part of the fighting is micromanagement. You can't just put your light cavalry in your heavy infantry group and move them at the same time, for example. If you do this, the cavalry will storm ahead all alone, because they're faster, and thus get killed in an instant. It's incredibly annoying that they won't wait for the rest of my guys, like in every recent RTS-game. You can do the CTRL-#-thing, but you'll want 5 or 6 groups in the large battles, and that gets a little tedious. The battles are RTwP however, so you can do the micromanaging while game is paused.

 

The GUI: Holy **** that **** is confusing. Not only because of all the options. But the layout too. It'll take some time to get used to. I still misclick and stumble around in it after playing for 2-3 hours. It must've been hard making a GUI that could support everything you can do in this game, but ****. There is no intuitivity. It took me 15 minutes to find out how to split an army. It's easy enough to use once you figure it out, but there's no reason you shouldn't be able to do it from the armyscreen itself; instead you do it from the overland map by bringing up a menu-wheel. The same goes for the round-table screen (managing knights and so on), though it's more intuitive than stuff revolving around army. In the battles themselves it takes time to figure out the GUI too; withdrawal is extremely important for saving your knights, and you have to click a disengage button first. You can't just run away. They did this because pressing this button lose you some of your army, which is fair, but they could've implemented the withdrawal to the action of fleeing itself.

 

Conclusion (level of potential): There's potential for a gem, I think. But main worry so far is that the battles themselves will become really repetetive. If the character development is done right, this may be thwarted somewhat. I'm a bit pessimistic though. The management is the same deal; if it continues to surprise me with its complexity I'll call it a gem, but if it presents me with more carebear/evil kings to choose between, or quests that are handled by a) giving 2000 food, b) threaten or c) use diplomacy, it'll probably get really repetetive.

 

All in all though, I'm already certain it was a good purchase. I support the effort, which is considerable, no matter what.

 

My ability to judge the game is heavily diminished by the fact that this is my introduction to the genre, so I'd like to hear some thoughts on it by someone who's strong in stuff like Total War. The GUI, for example, might be something the whole genre suffers from as far as I know.

[Hurlshort]

It sounds like it has some Mount and Blade similarities as well.

[TheHarlequin]

Am I in error, or do some games NOT come to impulse but only steam?

 

If so... sadness...

[Purkake]

Am I in error, or do some games NOT come to impulse but only steam?

 

If so... sadness...

Why would you expect them to?

 

Steam, Impulse, D2D, GOG, Greenhouse Games, Gamer's Gate, etc. are all distinct competing services, there's no reason why everything should be available on all.

Edited November 28, 2009 by Purkake

[TheHarlequin]

Am I in error, or do some games NOT come to impulse but only steam?

 

If so... sadness...

Why would you expect them to?

 

Steam, Impulse, D2D, GOG, Greenhouse Games, Gamer's Gate, etc. are all distinct competing services, there's no reason why everything should be available on all.

 

If I was a publisher I'd want my game to be on as many as possible. Basic retail 101 really.

[Purkake]

How about extra money/free advertisement for only being on the most popular one?

 

Business is business, if it doesn't work out, I guess the joke's on them.

Edited November 28, 2009 by Purkake

[alanschu]

Depending on how it's made, competitors might not want it.

 

Some games have Steamworks built in (using a variety of Steam's services for free and whatnot), and competitors don't want to stock that.

 

It's also possible competitors don't WANT to supply the game.

[Pidesco]

Apparently, King Arthur will come to other game sellers, including physical retailers. Just, not yet.

[Tigranes]

If it's only on Steam, I can't get it. Useless interfering piece of rubbish that does nothing I need or want. That reminds me, got to uninstall ETW so I can get rid of Steam...

 

Of course, I've heard numerous people swear Steam is great for them, so bah to logic and impartiality.

 

Has anyone here played the game yet?

[alanschu]

Steam is awesome

 

My friend and I chat with it while our games of CoH are loading ;P

[TheHarlequin]

I only use impulse. Its less invasive and easy to remove if I so choose. Plus the cool thing about impulse (and may be the case for steam don't know) is if I buy a DVD ver of a game and install it, and its for sale by impulse, impluse will flag it on my impulse account. So if I ever got to reinstall it again it will then show up on my 'purchased' list of games on impulse. Never have to install via the dvd again. This has happened for 3 games so far. Its a cool and useful feature.

[Purkake]

There's about ~40 games that work like that with Steam as well.

 

How is Steam any harder to remove than Impulse?

 

Also, you do realize that you can use both, right? This isn't a all or nothing deal.