Kohan for Linux Ships

kdgarris writes: "Kohan: Immortal Sovereigns, a real-time strategy game is now available for Linux from Loki. The announcement is not yet on their website, however. A demo was made available earlier this month."

Comments

Reports of Loki's death...

[rneches]

...were greatly exaggerated, it seems. What a releif!

Been out for quite a while...

[Chagrin]

I downloaded the demo on August 10th, so it's been out for quite a while, really.

...and of course, like all of their demos, it installs and plays flawlessly.

Re:Been out for quite a while...

[Accumulator]

Yes, I've played through the demo. It is quite excellent. I'm thinking of ordering the game.

It is a good strategy-game. You build towns and upgrade them (new buildings are in the town, not separete buildings like Warcraft). And you build mines and outposts. Unlike in other similar games, you can't control one unit alone. You form companies, which can consist of up to 7 units. And you have a support-zone around your towns, so that if you loose men in a company, you only go back into a support-zone, and they will automatically be resupported with units.

The companies are also divided into 'front line' and 'support'. If you have units you don't actually have a big use for anymore, you disband them, because in this game, you pay your units salaries.

It is very difficult to control your companies during battle, because they fight their own life. And if it gets too rough, they will retreat. That is quite nice, because if you have a hero in a company, he may flee when almost everyone is dead, and then you keep him :)

Well, maybe some windozers already know everything about this game, but this is to the other slashdotters.

Another site to buy Kohan

[lmd]

Kohan is also available at Tux Games and its a little cheaper as well. Disclaimer: I don't work for them or have any affiliation with them. I just have their site bookmarked.

Re:Another site to buy Kohan

[linuxpng]

Yeah, but if you do it from Tux Games, loki isn't getting all the cash. Tux has some overhead and loki has sold it to them for less than $46. Given that loki is in chapter 11, I've paid them directly.

My copy left Loki on the 27th of August

[Cef]

The subject says it all really.

Of note: I'm in Australia, and it takes 4-7 days to get stuff shipped here from Loki, using their standard international service. Last stuff I ordered from Loki took 4 days, so I'm hoping I'll have it in about 24-48 hrs.

Loki sent me a note on the afternoon of the 27th (their time, morning of the 28th here) telling me my copy had shipped.

If anyone in Melbourne (Australia) goes to the PC-IT trade show, you can probably get to see the game in action, assuming it turns up in time, on the LUV (Linux Users of Victoria) stand.

Linux Ships?

[Old Wolf]

This'll give the sailors something to do in those boring hours between journeys then..

I also wasnt aware that there were ships using Linux now.. I guess that erases the following scenario: "Yes.. just one more bomb and we will win the war" "Doh"

Slick installer...

[CurlyG]

On the strength of this piece I went to lokigames.com to get the demo.

Their generic installer app is a testament to the way that gaming-related companies can occasionally surpass even the best efforts of absolutely everybody else in terms of making a software task, no matter how essentially complex or problematic, slick, stylish and user-friendly. I went the get the Kohan demo and ended up, by choice rather than coercion, downloading the mpeg preview movie, the Simcity 3000 demo, and a few other things.

Admittedly I'm getting between 36-40kb/sec (thank $DEITY for DSL) without which I might curb my curiosity a tad, but that too can be partially atributed to the sensible automatic choice of planetmirror.com as the closest server.

It's Gnome compliant, of course, and takes my theme just nicely.

Whatever Loki's financial situation is at the moment, the quality of their approach to the installer says a lot about the way they go about their work.

Now go show 'em you care: Download the demos... /. the bastards...

Re:Slick installer...

[Dr.Dubious DDQ]

It's Gnome compliant, of course, and takes my theme just nicely.

It seems to support KDE fine, too (it added itself to my menu and such)...so much for the "horrible burden" of having to support different window managers/"desktop environments" that the minimally clueful among pundits have mentioned a few times...GO Loki!

Choice Good!

Re:No graphics + no gameplay = no nothing

[drsoran]

A $50 hole in your wallet, a cardboard box, and the sad realization that even though you're buying every Loki game as they come out the company will still go out of business. Come on guys, for every game Loki can port there are 100 games coming out for Windows. Buying old games from a porting house like Loki isn't the way to get games on the Linux platform. You need to start convincing the vendors to code their games to be easily portable when they're starting out and then release a Windows and Linux version on the same CD. How many Loki games are there now? A dozen? Two dozen? There are thousands of Windows games to choose from. Vendors just don't see a market for wasting their time on a Linux version. Selling even 10,000 copies of a game for a Linux platform is paltry compared to the millions they sell on Windows. Face it, dual booting is still the best option if you want to play games. Buy the game when it comes out for Windows (in some cases years before Loki will ever port it) and have fun. Leave the politics and advocacy for the server platform.

Re:Seriously

[jandrese]

I respectfully disagree with your accessment of Kohan.

Caveat: I've only played the demo.

• Graphics: The graphics are beautifly drawn 2D sprites that move quite fluidly. The Backgrounds are quite varied although they game draws them a little weird (when you walk next to a large mountain the entire mountain draws, even the stuff that's well outside of your LOS). Personally I think pure 3D is a bad idea when you have lots of units on the field (it's hard to make out the differences between polygons when each unit is only half an inch tall) so I commend Kohan on it's choice here.
• Friendly unit AI: The pathing in this game is acceptable, but not phonominal. The stuipid units (zombies for instance) seem to get stuck more often than the smart ones for some reason. Also, if a unit gets too far seperated from it's company it will be "lost in the wilderness" and you will have to wait in your supply zone to regnerate it. The battle AI is ok, but basically it just runs each company into each other and see who's left standing. The Morale bar is a very nice touch though. It is rather frustrating at times to see some stuipid unit just walk around your back lines instead of walking _around_ some obsticle to engage the enemy. This is very noticable in the only multiplayer map in the game, on the left side there is a town on the top of the map. At the beginning of the game when you attack the town all of it's milita will appear in the crevace behind the town and attack your only your front unit. The rest of your units will just sort of mill around and wait for the guy in front of them to be killed.
• Enemy AI: Pathing and attacking are the same as friendly AI. The computer's strategy is generally to build up one or two companies and attack (at least in the demo). The computer is also very expansionist, building towns everywhere it can (which is very important to your economy). The computer will launch surprise attacks and will send companys down to attack some poorly defended towns you might have. Unfortunatly the demo AI doesn't have enough smarts to build armies big enough to combat a 3 or 4 army strong force for long. Once you get 6 armies (especially if you use beastmen/Grenadiers/Skeletons/Bone Reavers) all together you can pretty much just run over the rest of the computer's defenses. Fortunatly Kohan supports (at least in the Windows version) pluggable AIs, which promise to keep the game interesting. There's also multiplayer, but I havn't seen many people on the demo multiplayer servers yet.
• Interface: The games interface does like to throw up lots of windows everywhere, but once you get the hang of the interface it's pretty fast. My only beef with the inteface is that it is fairly hard to manage a large number of towns (although there is a mechanism to make it easier--a town list---I havn't gotten the hang of using it yet).
• Fun factor: Honestly I consider this the best RTS since StarCraft. It's one of the first ones in a long time to offer something different in terms of gameplay, and I rather like how you don't have to micromanage everything in the game, and in fact you CAN'T micromanage the battles (which means higher level players will be the ones with superior strategies instead of the fastest clickers).
• Story: There is something about an immortal race of beings that get converted to artefacts (amulets actually) when they die. You are one of those beings and are trying to piece together your lost history (apparently sleeping for 100s of years makes you forget). Most RTS games aren't heavy on the story (although StarCraft did a pretty decent job here, I was ready to kill that bastard Arcturus when he let Kerrigan die), and the demo doesn't give a lot of indication one way or the other to how much the story means to the game.
• Misc: I really liked the ability to change your units defensive stance in order to increase it's movement rate. You can even go on "forced marches" when you need your units to be somewhere quick, but don't expect them to fight since they'll be too fatigued to move after running half way across the continent.

My verdict: 4.5 out of 5. If you like RTS games, but are tired of "he who clicks fastest wins" this is definatly the game for you. Strategy (but not RTS) fans will also want to try the demo, you might like it. FPS only players and "twitch gamers" should probably look elsewhere as well, unless you're ready to give up the speed drip. Benchmarking sites are going to ignore this game because it doesn't even come close to pushing the limits of my computer, but it should run on most any reasonably modern ( Personaly I hope this takes off. I'd like to see more people online to play against, and I do believe that it is an excellent game, and Loki did an excellent port.

Re:Seriously

[tmark]

Why post something as pointless as your comment? What you enjoy is not necessarily what other people might enjoy. The game got great reviews from magazines, and I personally rather
enjoyed the demo

Is his comment pointless just because he didn't like this game ? And since you point out that "what you enjoy is not necessarily what other people might enjoy", why did you even bother indicating 1) that the magazines enjoyed it, 2) that you enjoyed it ? Doesn't that rate your post equally as "pointless" as the original ?

I bought it and I'm glad I did

[Vicegrip]

In fact, Loki's announcement of support for games has caused me a couple of times already NOT to buy the Windows version and to wait.

You may be happily voting to send your dollars to the Borg, but for all the effort of a little time, you could be gaming on Linux instead of Windows... personally, I'm taking my dollars elsewhere everytime the option avails itself to me.

Press Release

[michaelsimms]

I cannot find a copy of the Press Release on the Loki site, but there is a copy of it here at linuxgames.com.
While I am on the subject, Tux Games is expecting our latest stock of Kohan to arrive with Fed-Ex later today, so order now and you should get it shipped tomorrow morning.

25 minutes..start to finish

[cnkeller]

Now that's what I call service. for my Kohan order:

has status of entered as of 2001-08-30 10:43:51
has status of preauth as of 2001-08-30 10:44:41
has status of approved as of 2001-08-30 10:45:00
has status of postauth as of 2001-08-30 11:08:16
has status of shipped as of 2001-08-30 11:08:44

Loki is doing one hell of a job keeping my business, wish more companies were like this.

Good reasons for Linux games

[Salsaman]

There's great advantage for me in having a Linux port, because my network card is very flakey under 'doze (it's a Netgear from PC World, so you'd think it would work OK) and the driver seems to hang after about 5 minutes of network play.

Under Linux, the card runs flawlessly. If it weren't for Loki's port of Q3, I'd never experience the delights of fragging somebody from halfway around the world.

I'm looking forward to getting Rune as well. I could've bought the Windows version when it came out, but I waited for the Linux port instead.

I hope Loki can get out of their financial problems, the more money they have, hopefully the quicker they can get games out the door, and capture more of the dual boot market.

Re:Seriously

[jandrese]

There is something about an immortal race of beings that get converted to artefacts (amulets actually) when they die.

My impression is that the amulets are artifacts created to trap the immortals rather than an aspect of them dying.

That comment came from the fact that whenever one of your Kohan heros kicks the bucket on the field, you get his "amulet" back, and you have to pay to convert the amulet back into a usable hero.
It will be cool if you don't have to babysit special units like you do in other RTSes (usually the mission statement is something like: Do so and so, XXX must survive).

I got an email the night of the 27th saying the game shipped, so I'm expecting it to show up today or tomorrow.

Re:No graphics + no gameplay = no nothing

[SurfsUp]

Face it, dual booting is still the best option if you want to play games.

Yeah, right, dual boot to what? I deleted all my Windows partitions ages ago after I noticed I never used them. Why should I? Dual-booting is such a pain.

I'll buy every Loki game as it comes out, thanks. As far as I'm concerned there are no other games.