Knights of Legend: The Agony and the Ecstasy

How do you like me now, bandits?

With the wisdom imparted from my first experiences at combat, I did a lot better in the next two quests. I implemented the reforms that I said I would, starting by purchasing backup melee weapons for my archers, though one weapons store owner was racist against elves and wouldn't sell to them.

"Wisp" is a pejorative term for an elf? Who knew?

The simple act of buying a longsword for my archer illustrates the continuing absurdity of the game's interface. I want to have my archer equip his bow as his primary weapon, and put the longsword on his belt so that he can access it in combat when his arrows run out. The annoyances start the moment I buy the longsword, when the game insists on immediately equipping it as my primary weapon.

At this point, I need to select the character, click on the "equip" icon, wait a few seconds for the "outfitting your character" screen to load, select "weapon," from the slots on the right, click the "eye" icon to take a closer look at my weapon, click the "swap" button to put the sword on my belt, select the first "pocket" slot (where the longbow went) to find the bow, click in the "eye" icon again to view it, and click the "swap" icon to equip it. I'm reasonably sure that the process takes longer than it would take to physically equip a bow and longsword.

At last: everything where it's supposed to be.

Once in combat again, I made better use of the terrain, sent scouts forward to lead the enemies to me one-by-one, and only advanced my full party when I had a clear path to another defensible position. I kept better track of my arrows, used the archers sparingly, and marked each enemy I killed so I knew how many were left.

Establishing a killing ground at the end of a bridge. Since I anticipate that he's going to run forward two squares, my melee attackers in position 1 and 4 can target that square with slow, powerful attacks, intercepting him when he arrives. (Unless the game makes them go first, in which case they swing at empty air.)

 
I was surprised to see that enemies weren't in the same positions during my next assault on the bandit castle, so I had to do a more thorough job seeking them out. This--sending my scout through corridors and alleys to find every last bandit--was the most tedious part of the game.

Come out, come out, wherever you are!

 
In the end, I defeated all 12 of them without losing any of my characters. Among their loot, I found the Knights' Standard and gleefully headed back to town to resolve my first quest. It took about two hours total.

The end of a battle presents you with a certain number of "adventure points," gold, and equipment from your slain foes. I nearly left the excess weapons and armor rusting on the battlefield--I must have been thinking about Pool of Radiance or something--but boy am I glad I didn't. I made more money from selling the equipment than from the battle itself.

All of Aedd's quest rewards go into healing. It's like a vicious circle.

 
This money turned out to be vital for healing my wounded party members (health doesn't just regenerate on its own) and of course checking into the inn to save the game. This is the only game I know where you have to pay money so you can stop playing. I look forward to this conversation later this week:

• Irene: "Chester, stop playing that stupid game and come to bed!"
• Me: "I can't afford it!"

 

The innkeeper, grinning like a guy who knows he has me by short hairs.

For my second quest, I decided to try the "ruffians" who had stolen Stephanie's gavel, talisman of the alderman's guild. I didn't know exactly where they were, but when I asked people about RUFF, they directed me to "Johnathon," the racist weaponer, who told me that they had been following the River Passing into the Tantowyn woods. I consulted a map, headed off, and found their encampment along the river.

Hell, yeah, I'll partake!

 
The battlemap seemed smaller than the bandits' castle, with one great place to stage an ambush right at the beginning. I took down half of the eight ruffians there, then moved into the camp to find the rest.

A great place to engage the enemy. Three of my melee fighters can take him here, but none of his friends can come through.

In the process, I found the gavel in one of the buildings, which was a surprise. In the previous quest, I never found the standard as an object; I just acquired it after I'd defeated all of the bandits. This makes me wonder whether it's possible to complete a quest by sending a fast character into the map, finding the quest object, and fleeing.

The gavel looks oddly like a sword.

In this case, it wasn't necessary, and I killed all the ruffians again without losing any of my party members. I returned with it to Brettle. This quest time was maybe 90 minutes, though I accomplished it slowly while watching Netflix and doing other things, so it's hard to say for sure.

During the combat, I found a use for my Kelder's flying abilities. This ruffian wouldn't budge no matter what; he just kept shooting arrows at us. So I had the Kelder fly across the water to his back side, thus allowing more than two characters to engage him in melee combat.

 
When turning in both quest items, the quest givers gave me the passwords to their guilds: AKLOM for the knights and KYDAR for the aldermen. Presumably these will be useful in some other town.

Unless my next quest takes me to Chicago, I'm not sure how this is going to help.

 
In addition to the two quests, I had plenty of random encounters on the road and in the forests, usually by small parties of relatively easy foes like goblins and gremlins. The prospect of surviving one of the long quest battles only to be killed by a random encounter on the way back to town, before I could save, was mildly horrifying. I had to keep reminding myself that you can't actually "die" in the game, though losing all of your equipment and gold couldn't be much worse. What I wonder is whether you can lose quest items in such circumstances. That would suck.

That these are "level 1" suggests a potential for random combats to get harder later.

 
I didn't come close to "dying," though, and on the whole I like the random battles better than the quest battles. They're much shorter, and they don't make you funnel your characters through such restrictive terrain (though at the same time, they don't give you much ability to make use of the terrain, either). Perhaps they get more deadly later on, but right now they're contributing nicely to my bottom line, and I don't see any need yet to purchase the horses that I eschewed dwarves to acquire.

A screenshot from a random battle.

 
Three more thoughts on combat:

1. The combat maps are full of interesting terrain and structures that you never really get a chance to explore, especially since the combat ends upon slaying the last foe. I'm not really getting a sense of the totality of the battle map.

2. None of the foes so far are very distinguishable from each other. I can't really tell the difference between bandits and ruffians or ruffians and goblins in terms of their AI or the danger they pose to my party. Presumably this will change as I encounter enemies with special attacks and spells.

That all enemy health portraits feature the same muscular thing with hooves and horns doesn't help. I feel a bit sorry for this guy, incidentally.

 
3. I'm not really sure how the injury system works post-battle. Each character has a "health" bar that turns red the more injuries he takes, but the specific injuries don't seem to remain active in between battles. In other words, if Coll takes a serious hit to the head in one battle, in the next battle his health meter will be a bit depleted, reflecting that wound, but his head is no longer injured. Since I've yet to carry a heavily-wounded character between combats, I don't know how this low-health-but-no-specific-injuries system affects the character's performance in combat.

When I finished with these first two quests, my characters all had 1,038 adventure points and an average of 907 gold pieces, and I decided it was time to spend a bit of both on training and magic.

This is a random screenshot of outdoor movement, because this section was just going to be a lot of text otherwise.

 
The magic system in the game is one of the oddest I've seen, and some commenters have opined that it is unnecessary to play the game. Essentially, each spell consists of a five- or six-syllable "word of power," with the various syllables determining the race of the target, the statistic that you want to affect, the severity of the spell, the duration of the spell, and the specific "subclass" of the target. So a spell intended to severely damage the offensive skill of a hill giant at close range for a long time would be KUMKUTYONOA, where the various letters indicate:

• KUM: Giant
• KUT: Offensive skill
• Y: Great
• ON: Close range
• O: Long time
• A: Hill giant

A spell to heal a human a little bit at long range would be DAYNALYRTA:

• DAY: Human
• NA: Body
• L: Moderate amount
• YR: Long range
• TA: Used for humans, elves, dwarves, and Kelder

This means that I have to have separate healing spells for each of the three races in my party--human, elf, and Kelder--as well as separate damage spells for every type of creature I want to hurt.

You purchase spells wholesale, but if you join a magical order, you're given the option to modify the syllables of certain spells that are the specialties of that order, turning a spell that does a little body damage to ogres into a spell that does a lot of body damage to cliff trolls, for instance. But I guess you can only join one order, so you have to be careful about choosing the one that specializes in the spells you plan to modify.

Purchasing spells from a sad-looking old man.

There are 29 creature subclasses, so I don't think the best strategy is to create random offensive spells and hope they come in handy; rather, spell creation (and modification) must be a process of careful planning based on what you know about your next quest. Whether offensive magic ever becomes useful, I could see defensive magic helping a lot. My two archers have been doing a lot of standing around and resting while the melee characters fight (so I don't waste their arrows), so I can't see any harm in having them spend some of their fatigue on spells that heal and boost the other party members.

The wizard in Brettle only had spells that could improve the health or fatigue of humans or elves at short or long ranges. Since my elves would be doing the casting (and staying out of the fighting) in most cases, I gave them spells to heal humans at long range to start. It appears that you can only cast these spells in combat, so my hopes that they would help spare the expense of healing at the temple are a bit ruined.

Spending my adventure points is a bit more complicated, and I could use some advice on it since it's not covered well in the manual. My understanding is that each town has a weapons trainer, where for a combination of gold and adventure points, you can increase your offensive and defensive scores with certain weapons. The cost seems to be 100 adventure points per skill point increase, plus around 200 gold pieces for each "session" in which you can train up to 5 points.

Each character started with proficiencies in certain weapons. For instance, Aedd, pictured below, has an offensive score of 12 and a defensive score of 5 with the mace. Reaching that equivalent with a different weapon would cost 1,700 adventure points--far more than I've achieved so far--so my natural predisposition is to stick with the weapons with which the characters are already proficient.

I just noticed this instant that Aedd came with a crossbow skill. I guess I should buy one for times when I only have space for three melee fighters.

However, I understand from your comments that certain weapons can't be trained very far; that advanced trainers in certain weapons were planned for modules that were never made. What I don't know is what weapons are rendered useless by this system and which are good. I thus wouldn't mind a list of the specific weapons that are trainable to a high level. (I tried Googling it, but everything seemed to be buried amidst a bunch of other spoilers I didn't want to see.) In the meantime, the trainer in Brettle doesn't seem to focus on any of the weapons I already have, so I'll wait to get your advice or to travel to other towns before I train.

For my characters, the next quest is the recovery of a magic quill from some ghouls somewhere to the south. After that, I'll be moving on to a different city, I guess. However, I may intersperse some articles on other games amidst Knights of Legend postings, as I anticipate reaching a point soon where I'll only have a paragraph or two of material based on hours of gameplay.

I'll say this for the game: I have never felt such honest-to-god relief at the end of CRPG battles before. Remember my posting on the kobold battles in Pool of Radiance? This game is like experiencing that agony and ecstasy with every fight. This is both an extremely good thing and an extremely bad thing. This is, in fact, both an extremely good and extremely bad game.