Been playing King's Bounty games recently. I've actually not finished any of them before and this time I decided to go on a binge.
KB: The Legend:
- Mage is probably the strongest here of any game (so far). 2 spells regularly deletes armies outright, especially if using Armageddon (which hurts you, but you can work around that...). This is mostly because intellect scales better here than in later games while enemy stack sizes remain fairly close to yours in power.
- Paladin and Warrior are literally joke classes. Half their shit is retarded utility crap that should be automatically available (and is in most later games). Additionally while they are supposed to be advantaged by 50% and 100% over mage in leadership respectively, in reality like 50%+ of your leadership comes from flat bonuses from exploration and plot, so they really barely get ahead at all. Warrior's better rage is barely notable since everyone gets lots of rage anyway and the moves kind of cap out at a fairly weak lethality compared to spells.
- Progression feels very constrained and natural. Slowly getting access to better units with all areas plot-locked. Could be good or bad depending on what you like. Levels are a lot lower (end of 29) and far between, stats aren't through the roof and items aren't absurdly strong. Though if you are a Mage relying on fire nuking you're gonna have a fun time finding a way around demons with 50% fire resistance around the midgame.
- Overall a bit long. It does that late game RPG thing of "lets make an area near the end of the game that really wastes players time". I ended with 477 fights, but I basically cleaned out everything so I don't think there's any more you could get (despite the end game scoreboard having a character who did 570).
KB: Armored Princess
- Mage is still vastly overpowered compared to other classes, but at least leadership being more level and class based rather than exploration/plot based means other classes can shine a little, and their abilities aren't complete crap. But still mostly crap. Rage abilities are actually pretty good now though, but again its kind of like anyone can use them just fine since the rage abilities are pretty early in the warrior tree. But you can't just nuke everything this time around, spell scaling is nerfed and damage isn't enough.
- Lots of wild and wacky units. A good number of them extremely overpowered and ripe for abuse.
- Summons (yours and your units) are just generally OP, and just shitting up the battlefield with half a dozen summons makes most battles easy. There's a mage skill that gives all summons +50% size and rushing it makes most fights trivial as you just summon stuff faster than it can die.
- Difficulty is otherwise really high though. Enemy stack sizes can have 4x the leadership you command easily. Difficulty is especially absurd for Orc groups, which are completely fucking broken with OP abilities that should take turns to charge for you but they can use immediately. You do kind of have to abuse some of the strongest stuff to win on impossible here.
- Progression is very fast, end up at level 60 or so. Game is also relatively pretty short, I ended with 311 battles and I cleaned up everything. But battles do tend to be longer just because enemy armies are so strong. I also liked how islands were small and themed around a specific race, lots of variety without feeling like you are forced to fight the same thing for hours on end. Except the dwarven area.
KB: Warriors of the North
- What do you know, mage is still better than everyone else again. This time the Mind/Green character class is the highest leadership while might is for rage, in practice there's still only about a third of the might tree that is useful, 1/5th of the mind tree, but like 80% of the magic tree is amazing for everyone.
- This game is LONG. I ended with 652 battles, and I kind of skimmed over 3 end game areas and completely ignored a 4th. A full game clear is probably 750 battles or higher, which is like TL and AP put together. There's also just way too many annoying endgame fetch quests, so I ignored like 20 of them. You end up massively overleveled and can come close to maxing out the skill trees for other heroes with all the runes you get.
- Even more new units, but they seem far more... constrained. Nothing as earthshatteringly broken as AP adds, though AP units return (a few are nerfed).
- Unfortunately the enemy is like 2/3rds undead everywhere. Get ready to deal with their annoying mechanics and immunities all game.
- Game absolutely showers you in permanent stat boosts. My end game mage has 28/23/67 with no equipment on. By comparison I ended AP with 11/14/33 and TL with 8/9/20. I think the devs really went overboard here, you just get way too overpowered with time and exploration in a way that you never did in previous games. The fact that late game enemy heroes have pathetic stats also makes me think the devs weren't really playtesting this.
- While stats are bloated, and you find vastly more equipment in this game than previous ones due to the length (and much of it more powerful), you can actually use less of it because where TL/AP has 4 equipment slots for your wife/follower here its taken up by valkyries which offer bleh bonuses. Kind of sucks and makes all of the item sets feel useless.
- There's a massive roadblock in the form of the spider boss which SUCKS ASS and prevents you from progressing past the first 4 isles. It will probably take you hours of practice and planning to beat on Impossible. Past that is when the game difficulty begins the drop off a cliff.
- There's a unit XP system added which is... superfluous and annoying. Superfluous because for most units its just generic stat boosts, while the enemy ALSO gets XP based on progression, so your stat boosts just cancel each other out. Unless your stat boost was to the already-overpowered summoning stat on summoning units, which makes more units which becomes more OP because summons are consistently OP in these games. Annoying because leveling units takes a long time and you're just hoping RNG gives you the stats you want. It really disincentivizes changing units because going through the whole leveling up process is painful, even if there's plenty of fights in the game to get it done many times over.
Figure I'll start Dark Side soon. Of the 4, it's the only one I haven't even tried before. Was super buggy on release and apparently still is pretty buggy. But from what it looks like its actually done the incredible task of making non-mage characters potentially good, with awesome unique skills. So I'm gonna have to decide between the other two classes for once...
