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

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.