The first game in the Kohan franchise featured a peculiar form of RTS gameplay that focused more on macro-management and manoeuvring of armies – gameplay designs that are usually seen in the slower-paced turn-based strategy genre.
The sequel intends to expand on the gameplay and backstory of the first game. While the efforts at the former are commendable, the efforts at the latter is just at best, decent, as will be elaborated on.
The sequel, which is subtitled Kings of War, is a narrative continuation of the first game. A plot for world domination by the Ceyah, which is the antagonist faction in the previous game, had been thwarted. Their remnants are now hunted across the realms by the victors, while right-minded civilizations rebuild but remain wary of any treachery.
The game makes use of its story quite well for the purposes of introducing the gameplay mechanics, which are a mix of retained designs, new ones, and ones revamped from the preceding games. However, the actual story-writing itself is a mix of tropes and more refreshing plotlines, making it less convincingly good than the gameplay.
The tutorial mode utilizes the aforementioned aftermath of the first game; a newly recruited champion of the victors – who would be one of the protagonists - is investigating the presence of Ceyah remnants in a particular region of the world. The tutorial starts with instructions on how to move this character around; players who are no strangers to RTS games would find nothing new here.
Eventually, the player comes across a patrol squad that the character has to conscript in order to waste no time in his mission, and thus is where the game introduces the mechanic of companies.
All regular units that are not special characters are grouped into squad-like groups called "companies", a term retained from the first game and which may still rankle players who actually know something about real-world nomenclature of military groupings. Despite seemingly having their statistics lumped into several ratings that represent the entire group, these are just averages, because each individual in the group actually has his/her/its own hitbox, health counter and other statistics. Regardless, it would appear that the entire group moves at the same speed, that is, the speed of the slowest member of the group at the time, irrespective of the conditions of the individuals.
As in the previous game, a company can be set into one of a few formations, which impart changes to its statistics, in addition to rearranging their models (which by itself also has ramifications on gameplay). For example, the column formation grants additional speed to the company but halves its effectiveness in combat; furthermore, the column formation means that one individual would engage in combat a couple of seconds before his comrades do. The player can change the formation of an entire battalion with just a shortcut button, so he/she can have entire armies simply beating feet with column formation, or switch to combat formation from column when he/she wants them to pile in.
If there is a problem with formations, it is that they are also tied to the A.I. scripts that the companies are using. For example, companies in column formation will not attack any enemies in their path unless intercepted by enemies, apparently eager to get where the player has ordered them to go. Conversely, the combat formation makes them rather belligerent and thus vulnerable to baiting. It would have been more convenient to have separate options for formations and A.I. behaviour, but as of yet the player has to juggle between formations and their automated behaviours.
An interesting consequence of the mechanic of companies is that devastated but not annihilated companies can be returned to full strength by having them return to the supply zones of a settlement or outpost (more on these later) to obtain reinforcements and healing for completely free.
Such designs encourage a player to be more careful with the committing of units to battle, which is a good consequence as it rewards shrewdness on the part of the player. To illustrate, a player that is careful enough to distribute damage among units in a severe engagement with the enemy such that most of his/her units are devastated but still operational can have them all return to supply zones to be reinforced; he/she may be better off than an enemy player that had taken losses such that he/she has surviving units at near-full strength but has few of them left.
However, there are deliberate limitations on resupplies in order to prevent exploitation, as will be elaborated on later.
The most important design of companies is that the player has significant control over their composition. Like in the previous game, the player can choose and mix different types of units to assign roles to the resulting companies. There are four options: frontliners, flankers, supporters and the leaders (typically called "captains").
Units that are designated as frontliners give the resulting company its main battlefield role. For example, a company with swordsmen as frontliners are expected to engage in close combat, while a company with archers as frontliners is expected to fire on enemies for maximum effect. They also provide the bulk of the company's durability, understandably enough.
The flankers provide the company with subtle benefits. For example, a company with swordsmen as frontliners and archers as flankers would have the archers firing on any enemy flankers that happen to be close-combat unit, only switching over to the enemy frontliners after the former have been dealt with. Another example is swordsmen flankers holding back for a while before joining the fray in order to target any enemy flankers or flanking the enemy frontliners, thus putting more pressure on the fringe units. These subtle benefits are best seen in small-scale fights, but they dissipate in epic battles where the lines of battle reduce flankers to the role of frontliners.
The flankers also constitute the designs for the game's take on the mechanic of scissors, rock and paper, which at the time of this game was quite the convention. They decide which kind of enemy that the company is most effective against, against which they gain bonus damage. For example, sticking archers to swordsmen turn the company into an "Infantry Foe" company that is effective against companies that are composed of infantry units (i.e. soldiers on foot).
The supporters are the ones who would impart a lot more visible benefits on the resulting company. These tend to be units that are different from the ones that fill the ranks of frontliners and flanks, such as healers and buffers. They generally improve the combat capabilities of the company, but because these units tend to be some of the slowest in the game, their utility comes at the cost of the mobility of the company.
Captains are powerful units that enhance the company's morale (more on this later) and frontline or flanking capability, depending on the compatibility between the captains' combat roles (melee or ranged) and the kinds of frontliners used.
The player can also choose to create companies that are mainly composed of frontliners, forgoing supporters, flankers and captains, which are all optional. For example, the player may create companies composed of only light cavalry, for purposes of patrolling the paths within a map. That said, scouting remains an important aspect of the gameplay, as to be expected of a strategy game.
Any company composition can be conveniently saved as a unique but changeable recruitment option within towns, which will be elaborated on later. There are also other nuances with company composition, but these concern other mechanics and thus are best mentioned when the relevant mechanics are elaborated.
Returning to the tutorial, it only gives a very brief dissertation on what has been mentioned earlier about company composition. For more advanced learning, the player has to play the story modes, which have moments when certain units are introduced together with the benefits that they bring to the companies of which they are a part of.
The tutorial soon pits the player's single company against a weak enemy company that happens to be a straggler among the Ceyah remnants. This is of course used to introduce the fundamentals of combat and how the statistics of companies come into play. There are the usual matters of hitpoints, damage output and bonuses brought forth by armor and the rock, scissors and paper mechanic mentioned earlier, among other mechanics that would seem mundane by the time of this game.
Then there is morale, which determines how long companies will stay and fight (with the exception of companies composed of Undead; these units are practically unaffected by the benefits and disadvantages of this mechanic). Every unit contributes to the morale counter of the company; there is no averaging, which makes calculations simpler. Once the morale counter of a company hits low levels (usually through taking losses, especially if its captain or a nearby Kohan dies), it breaks and retreats to the nearest outpost or settlement. The retreating company is difficult to run down, as they happen to gain considerable speed bonuses when doing so; this can frustrate any efforts at trying to annihilate enemy companies.
However, the player that owns the retreating company loses control over the retreating company, and more importantly, its retreat path may betray the location of outposts that the enemy is not aware of yet; they may even run right into enemy blockades or roving bands. Furthermore, the fleeing company continues to lose morale as they flee, making recovery longer to achieve when they do end up somewhere safe; a company that is completely exhausted of morale simply stops, only defending itself if it is attacked. An option to have broken companies fight to the death anyway would have been welcome, if only to give the player more options in deciding whether to preserve units or to have them die holding the line.
Returning to the tutorial, after dealing with the Ceyah stragglers, the player will come across a small town, which the player will be told to appropriate and raise additional companies from. As in the previous games, settlements are the "bases" that players use to spend resources to gain armies and other kinds of assets that augment said armies.
However, unlike the settlements in the first game, which can be built anywhere as long as they are not within the zones of influence of existing settlements, the settlements in the sequel can only be built on predetermined locations (not unlike what has been done in other competently designed RTS games, like Microsoft's "Age of..." games). This helps gameplay balancing efforts, but this also means that players have fewer strategic options now that settlements cannot be theoretically built anywhere.
On the other hand, considering the ability of settlements to generate resources on their own, this prevents players from resorting to too much turtling, which can frustrate gameplay that focuses on macro-management.
Another major difference is that facilities built in a settlement now appear as actual buildings next to the settlement's centre of operations. These can be independently attacked in lieu of the main building, and if they are destroyed, the owning player loses the ability to utilize any benefits that they bring. However, if a player can destroy the main settlement building, the settlement faces demise..
The aforementioned re-designs can be exploited for incessant raids on enemy settlements intended to stymie a player's progress up his/her tech tree, so it may come as a relief to those who despise such tactics that a ring of walls can be erected around a settlement. This enclosure is automatically gained when cities are upgraded and can be improved with options offered by the Quarry economic building in order to prevent easy raids and delay any attacking army (which has to bash away at said walls). However, it also prevents armies that have been raised from the settlement from leaving in any way other than through the gates. Ironically, this restriction on the departure of the defending army allows enemies to make hit and run attacks on other parts of the wall.
Considering that most walls are sectioned into separate segments that have their own health counters, enemies can attempt to focus on just one segment to quickly get in, which of course would defeat the purpose of having walls to deter raids in the first place. The only exception is the Shadow faction's walls, the entire ring of which shares a unified health counter. Although this does mean that the Shadow's walls render most tactics oriented around hard-hitting fast raids obsolete, attacks from multiple directions can bring such a wall down rather quickly and render the entire settlement vulnerable.
Like in the previous game, settlements cannot build every facility available, thus requiring the player to have each settlement specialize. The ramifications of this design are much more pronounced in the sequel, due to the fixed limitation on the number of possible settlements in the map. This means that the loss of a single settlement can have more serious consequences than in the first game, for better or worse. However, this does reduce the possibility of stale-mates. In the previous game, a losing player can come back as long as he/she has some settlements hidden from the enemy; in the sequel, there is no such chance.
In addition to settlements, there are outposts that have the function of holding territory. Any enemy entering their supply zones (more on these later) will be assailed by the militia garrison of the outpost. This militia consists of a few companies of basic units, at least initially before the outpost is upgraded into greater forms, like a fort. After it has been upgraded, it has bigger and more sophisticated militia, as well as increased supply range and durability. An outpost won't stop a determined enemy onslaught, but it can certainly harry any enemy attempts at raids or reconnaissance and delay any actual attacks, as well as stall the progress of the enemy's attempt at map control.
However, it is not in the interest of the player to plant outposts everywhere to maintain map control, as the game designers have wisely included the requirement that outposts consume resources as long as they exist; there will be more on resources shortly.
Both settlements and outposts exert their influence over the land in the form of supply zones. In the previous game, supply zones are needed not only to reinforce and heal depleted companies, but also to control resource nodes on the map. In the sequel, the latter function has been removed, in return for a direct capture of the resource nodes; this is a handy change, as it removes the requirement for planting settlements or outposts, which consume resources, just to obtain more resources.
As mentioned earlier, companies that have taken casualties can move into friendly re-supply zones to regain strength. It would appear that all units in a company are healed simultaneously, but the game is actually healing the most hurt unit at the moment, alternating between units as the most hurt no longer remains the most hurt.
Healing appears to be percentage-dependent, so high-hitpoint companies are nominally healed to full strength at the same time as a company that had taken the same amount of casualties. After the existing units have been healed, slain units will be respawned at less than full health, so they have to be healed too.
Such rules in healing means that if a retreating, depleted company has not returned deep enough into friendly territory or at least behind some screening companies after having successfully retreated, it runs the risk of being chased down by pursuers that penetrated into said territory just to finish them off. This risk becomes greater if the enemy is fielding units with the Siege quality, which renders re-supply zones far less capable of replenishing depleted companies. (Of course, Siege units tend to be slow, but retreating companies do not have the necessary A.I. to avoid retreating into territory that is already under attack by enemies fielding such units.)
Kohan II may seem to be different from other RTS titles at the time, but it is not too different such that it does not implement a resource-gathering and –expending mechanic. The resources in this game are gold, stone, wood, iron and mana, which would be very familiar to players who are veterans of medieval- or medieval-fantasy-themed strategy games.
Gold is the most readily available resource, as it is generated by settlements automatically. Also, like the original game, it is the only resource that can be accumulated in a counter. This is because all units require immediate expenditure of certain amounts of gold; this is a typical design of RTS games.
The other resources are only denoted by negative and positive flow counters (though gold also has its own counter, thankfully). Negative incomes of non-gold resources cause gold to be gradually depleted, while positive incomes simply lead to waste; these are designs that the game will inform the player about, fortunately.
Certain units consume other resources as long as they exist, reducing the income of those resources. For example, the aforementioned swordsmen consume a bit of iron each. Such requirements prevent the player from creating powerful units whenever enough gold has been accumulated to pay the fee; this can seem stifling, but it does promote some gameplay balance.
To obtain other resources, the player needs to explore the map to capture resource nodes, which can now be captured and retained in a manner not unlike that seen in Heroes of Might & Magic, to cite an example of a similar design. These nodes simply increase the appropriate resource incomes. To reliably retain them, one can build outposts close to them and overlap these nodes with their supply zone; losing control of these nodes is a lot harder when there are militia companies that would readily contest them.
As in the previous game, having excess resource incomes leads to waste; this can be curbed by building the right structures that consume these resources in return for benefits like access to buffs for units or simply additional gold revenue. These are designs not new to the series, but are now easier to take advantage of, due to buildings now appearing as discrete structures in the settlement instead of under tabs that only become visible when the settlement is selected. The player can remove and add buildings that alter his/her economy more easily in the sequel.
One may wonder that having discrete buildings would mean easier raids that are targeted at hurting an enemy's capabilities, assuming that the raiders can get through the walls in the first place. However, this is not always the case, because buildings happen to be very difficult to bring down without siege units, and these in turn are terrible against other units.
It would take too much time to bring down a single building – time that could have been spent throwing units at the main building in a settlement instead, which is the town hall, city hall or citadel, depending on the rank of the settlement. Even so, this is not easy, as the other buildings block this important building from direct approach or fire, forcing the attackers to literally move through the streets of the settlement.
Destroying the main building causes the settlement to revert allegiance to the victorious player. However, any building that the vanquished had in the city simply vanishes, some of its costs refunded to the vanquished player while some going to the victor as spoils. Despite having some money as reward, the victor could actually be losing momentum, if he/she decides that the settlement should be developed, which in this case has to be done from scratch.
Considering that resources never exhaust, these game designs, when coupled with the rest mentioned earlier, makes stalemates a possibility. Compared to the previous game, which let the victor retain some basic facilities in conquered settlements (which can be razed anyway if the player is not bothered to retain them), this can be seen as a step back for the franchise.
Due to the game's focus on macro-management, the units in this game are not exactly remarkable or memorable. Most of the variety in the game's roster of units lies in the support units, and this is distributed between the six playable races. The main differences are in the aesthetic designs, statistics and resource costs of the units that they have, but these are just about their extent. They would be very, very familiar to players who have played strategy games with medieval or high fantasy themes, so to such players, such designs would seem rather mundane.
On the other hand, there is a lot of fun to be had from creating the right companies to balance out armies with. Deciding to hold back companies as reserve or for ambush and successfully committing them can also be fun, as is deciding when a company should just high-tail back to safety.
Then, there is the mechanic of experience. Like in the previous game, all companies and Kohan can gain experience (more on Kohan later). Seasoned companies are a lot more powerful than rookie ones, and may even be capable of bringing down less experienced companies that are designed to counter them. They also have better morale, meaning that they are more than likely to fight to the death if the player wishes to sacrifice them for the greater good.
However, Kohan II lacks a strong implementation of the design convention that was intended to prevent the player from amassing seasoned companies from becoming too powerful; in other RTS games, a player always risks the death of seasoned units when they are committed to battle, but in Kohan II, this risk is mitigated by the option to have companies retreating pell-mell towards supply zones. Incurring heavy losses but not being annihilated appears to do nothing to diminish the companies' levels of experience.
Yet, this actually works to the game's emphasis of macro-management and planning ahead. If the player sets up an imbalanced army and nurtures it but later realizes that the enemy had created an army that can counter that of the player's, adaptation is a very difficult change in strategy to pull off as the new companies made are all rookies. Existing companies cannot be re-customized either, and they lock up resources and the hard limit on the number of companies that a player can have (though the player does have access to an option to have them commit suicide). In other words, such a player faces a battle of attrition that may be impossible to win, unless the enemy makes mistakes that cause his/her/its own experienced companies to be annihilated.
One new mechanic that further differentiates the sequel from its predecessor is the faction mechanic. Although there are six distinct races, each of them can be affiliated to one, two or more factions. In the story mode, the player is usually of a specific faction, in accordance with the campaign being played. In other game modes, the player picks a specific faction, and can thus only gain units of the races associated with that faction. However, the player gains access to the unique global bonuses that are associated with that faction, so there may be some interesting strategic permutations to be had from the mix of races and factions though the player does not have many customization options.
It is worth noting here that the Human race is present for recruitment in just about every faction in the game. It happens to offer the most balanced armies, so this design can be seen as an attempt to include a reliable fallback strategy for players of these factions if they are facing enemies that cannot be countered with the more exotic races. It is also worth nothing here that the Shadow race is only unique to the Fallen faction, which fields some of the most insidious units in the game and is canonically inimical to all life in the world that the Kohan live in.
The mechanic of entrenchment returns, by which idle companies can gain defensive bonuses to their combat capabilities and morale as time wears on. However, it has to be noted here that the previous game's Engineers return in weaker forms in the sequel, and entrenchment no longer grants bonuses as relatively fantastic as they were in the original game. Therefore, exploiting Engineers as a cheap solution to temporarily hold chokepoints against scouts is not viable anymore.
In addition to settlements and resource nodes, maps in all game modes also have some lairs and camps inhabited by creatures that are not aligned with any player and are hostile towards everyone. These, of course, act as risky but rewarding early-game challenges, meant to be taken out for an early infusion of gold and experience points.
These are of course not very new designs, but it has to be mentioned here where other RTS games with more unforgiving unit health mechanics may saddle the player with permanent losses if he/she is not careful in rotating out damaged units when dealing with these "neutral units", Kohan II's company system allows the player to be a bit more reckless.
Terrain also plays a part in gameplay, though veterans of the strategy genre would not be surprised at the implementation of movement and combat bonuses or penalties that certain terrain types render unto any companies that are traversing or fighting over them. This is not a remarkably new mechanic, but it is otherwise effectively done.
Last, but not least, is the namesake mechanic of the game. The immortal heroes known as Kohan return, but unlike the previous game where they are special leader units, the Kohan can operate as independent individuals as well, though they work best when attached to companies (for which case they supersede any existing leader, though the leader is still around to contribute to combat) because they have benefits that they can impart on the companies. On the other hand, Kohan are speedy individuals on their lonesome, making them effective at reconnaissance.
Hero units being both leaders and individuals may not be a truly original design (after all, earlier strategy games like Heroes of Might and Magic IV have done this), but this was certainly refreshing from the usual designs that portrayed hero units as individual powerhouses.
Kohan, like companies, can gain experience and become more powerful as they survive more battles. In addition to gaining improvements to their statistics, they also gain more unique powers and confer more bonuses to the companies that they are attached to or any nearby companies; each Kohan character happens to confer bonuses unique to himself/herself/itself. Each faction has its own Kohan heroes, which differentiate factions better than their global bonuses and race permutations.
As in the previous game, Kohan units retain their biggest weakness: dying causes them to lose all experience gained. In the story mode, this weakness is emphasized further with objectives that require Kohan to survive; these are very old tropes in RTS games that have story modes, so players who are tired of such objectives would likely not appreciate the inclusion of such old tropes.
In other game modes, this would be a refreshing change from the usual designs of having hero units come back with little permanent damage other than lost time and resources. On the other hand, Kohan units return from death without any consumption of resources, which may encourage players to use them like meatshields, if his/her strategy involves mostly making use of non-Kohan units.
The backstory is used by the game designers to design a prologue for the story mode that has themes of underdog struggles in the single-player campaign mode. The player may be entertained by the secondary themes of delusions of grandeur and defeatist attitudes, as the protagonists of one of the campaign branches happen to be remnants of the Ceyah from the first game, which still cling to any hope for any chance to return to power, whatever the cost.
The themes of amnesia, reincarnation and redemption that offered very interesting intrigue in the story of the previous game also return in the sequel. However, unlike the more touching plotlines of treachery, forgiveness and unconditional love in Immortal Sovereigns, the plotlines that handle these themes in the sequel do so with ham-fisted effort. The occurrences of brotherly tough love and whiny despair do not seem to achieve the same emotional pull.
Of course, one can argue that the first game did not make use of cutscenes to portray the development of the secondary plotlines, instead resorting to voiced-over text and pop-ups. However, the cutscenes in the sequel only highlight deficiencies in the graphics, such as lack of facial animations for many models with actual faces. The voice-acting is also rather forced, especially for the two protagonists of the game, one of whom rasps while the other over-exerts when making exclamations, sounding a lot like a meat-head (though his character may have been intended to be a meat-head).
On the other hand, the story in the sequel does divulge more on the backstory, if a fan of the Kohan franchise is looking for more answers about the mysteries posed in the first game. The nature of Ahriman's evil forces is explored further here, taking the form of the Shadow, which is a playable faction; the drawbacks that the Kohan have to cope with in return for their immortality are also explored more.
As for the challenge that the story mode poses, it typically depends a lot on customized scripts to craft challenges for the player - challenges with weaknesses that can be discovered and exploited. For example, the story mode relies on a lot of triggered spawns of enemy units to presumably ambush the player's forces with, but these ambushes can of course be pre-empted with a convenient game-reload. Considering how difficult some scenarios can be if the player plays the story mode as the game designers intended, he/she may well resort to such cheesy exploits, which unfortunately can make the game rather easy.
The skirmish and multiplayer modes pose more challenge, of course. Skirmish mode plays a lot like skirmish modes of other RTS games, e.g. the A.I. is usually competent enough to oppose the player if it is selected as an enemy, or to support and respond to the player's suggestions if chosen as an ally. However, the A.I. is not good enough to showcase some of the peculiar features available to modes other than story mode; this will be explained shortly.
In multiplayer matches with other humans, players may find that some of the features that Kohan II has for multiplayer mode are quite different from those in other RTS games, and perhaps even refreshingly so. One of these involve "giving" buildings over to allies, essentially having the buildings divert their output over to allies while still consuming the owning players' resources. However, A.I.-controlled players appear to be incapable of using these features, at least in the launch version, though they compensate in more mundane ways; for example, although the A.I. is not able to give buildings over to other players, they are easy-going at transferring excess gold over to allies who are in need of cash.
For the purpose of multiplayer with persistent stats, the developers have resorted to GameSpy and other third-party service providers instead of their own proprietary service; in hindsight, this may have been wise considering the revenue that TimeGate Studios would later earn, which would be too meagre to fund the next entry in the franchise but just enough to keep TimeGate around up to now (and is still supporting the game). If a player does not wish to play online, then Kohan II thankfully still offers the option for LAN games.
Kohan II is graphically superior to its predecessor; this would seem certain when the player has witnessed some of the more glamorous particle effects in this game, which typically belong to spells. That is not to say that the more mundane aspects of the graphics are less impressive; unit animations are more than decent to show that TimeGate Studios has placed considerable effort into the graphical designs of the game.
Combat is understandably and believably hectic, so this is where the player may appreciate the mechanic of companies as it alleviates the need to monitor individual units. The only exception is the Kohan, but chances are the Kohan would be meting out visually impressive punishment on regular units such that not many enemy units would be crowding around them to frustrate the player's attempts at selecting them. Furthermore, the Kohan's hitboxes are large, and in the case of some characters, their models are large enough for the purposes of standing out.
The maps and building models in the game have plenty of detail to disguise the fact that they depend a lot on textures and lighting to give them character. Even if the player realizes that they do not have a lot of polygons, the application of said textures and lighting as well as the shadows that result compensates very, very well. The same can also be said for unit models.
As befitting a game with themes of medieval fantasy and conflict, there are plenty of sound effects for battles and use of arcane magic. They would seem familiar to players that are experienced in such games, but the latter parts of the story mode throw the player into heated battles where the cacophony of such noises would be difficult not to be appreciated.
However, it would appear that TimeGate Studios may have thought rather highly of the aesthetic upgrades that it has wrought for the franchise. It has insisted on having most of the exposition of the story done through cutscenes rendered by the game engine, as has been mentioned earlier in the story mode. These moments remind the player that although the game engine is designed well for the purposes of portraying RTS gameplay, they are still not good enough for cinematic purposes.
Jeremy Soule, who worked on the soundtracks in Knights of the Old Republic, contributed to the musical designs in this game. Most of the musical soundtracks in Kings of War are forlorn and sometimes depressing to listen to. There are some tunes that suggest hope, but generally, they tend to invoke despair. The other tracks are foreboding or suspenseful, sometimes both.
In summary, Kohan II may not stand out amongst its peers as much as its predecessor did during its time because the sequel does not do anything that is remarkably new, either to the franchise or the RTS genre itself. However, it is undoubtedly aesthetically superior to its forebearer as well as being more sophisticated overall in gameplay.