The third rank is much harder to justify, between Knights being poor units for the player and Circle Attack being a lot less reliably useful. In practice the second rank is seriously worth considering, as Flaming Arrow makes Bowmen quite good, and they're already solid units that are consistently useful throughout the game, while not requiring you to burn too many Runes to acquire it. It's not even a particularly coherent thematic group of units, or something, nor does it push the player into some specific, interesting dynamic. The fact that the collective progression demands you use a specific set of 4 units for maximum payoff is also annoying and weird. It ends up feeling less like an actual Skill payoff and more like randomly denying two specific units a Talent for failing to be in the player army. Training 3 is particularly good of an example, as Circle Attack requires specific conditions to actually make sense to use (Having multiple units adjacent to your slow-moving melee unit), so not only do you have to be using a specific unit at all to benefit, but even if you are using it the Rune expenditure may be doing nothing for you because you didn't have a good opportunity to use the special Talent! Training 1, on the flipside, has this awkward dynamic of making it so Swordsmen and Guardsmen are, for player purposes, essentially intrinsically able to use Smashing Blow (Because you're going to get the first rank, just to unlock other Skills, and it's early and cheap), but in enemy hands they don't have it. It creates weird inequalities between what is theoretically the same unit in both your hands and enemy hands, and it's a very peculiar form of army specialization. Training is an interesting idea, but one I'm glad the later games don't really reuse. Swordsmen and Guardsmen gain Smashing Blow Talent. Here's the Warrior's symbol to start us off: (These being Might, Mind, and Magic Runes, respectively) The labeled costs are always for that level alone -Training 1 requires 2 Might Runes, and then Training 2 requires a further 3 Might Runes and a Mind Rune, not the 1 of each that cumulative costs would be. ,, and is used to label the Rune costs for purchasing a given Skill rank. (eg Training 2 does not cease to provide Smashing Blow) In some cases I implicitly leave them cumulative. Bowmen Commander doesn't slash off 10% of the Leadership requirements, and then another 15%, and then another 20% -the reduction is 20% total at Level 3. Generally, descriptions are total, rather than cumulative. (ie a Might tree Skill will never require a Skill from the Magic or Mind trees) Skills also never have cross-tree requirements. Upgrading a Skill just requires the previous level be purchased to unlock. AP follows on from TL and although you wouldn't be lost if you should skip it, you miss certain unique things that TL included and going back from AP to TL is painful.New Skills never require more than the first level in their required Skills to unlock. These games can be completed on Impossible difficulty and incurring a total of ZERO losses involving certain spell and unit combinations and judicious use of the 'quicksave' and 'quick load' features.ĪP is better than TL in my opinion but you definately want to play TL first. I hope that no-one gives you game breaking tips like certain unit and spell types/combinations. This means that if you quicksave and make a major boo-boo, you can go back to Quicksave #2 or Quicksave #3. It has 3 quicksave slots which is automatically rotates through, replacing the oldest every time you quicksave. Golden nugget of info: The game uses a rotation system with it's quicksaves. The real time system allows you to 'kite' mobs out of position and collect the items they were guarding without engaging. I have a love/hate relationship with Steam when it tells me stats like thatĬertain friiendly castles allow you to store units inside them to swap into and out of your team as and when. EDIT: KB:TL - 42 hours, KB:AP - 92 hours.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |