Knights of Legend: The Sweet Taste of Victory

A first-time player has no idea what he's getting into when he says "yes" to this message.

 
From both the manual and the comments you've been giving me, I got the impression that combat in Knights of Legend is a complicated and often tedious affair, but I was thinking along the lines of Wizard's Crown, which at the time was the most complicated and lengthy combat system I'd ever seen, but still somewhat manageable.

Hoo boy.

My first Knights of Legend battle lasted so long that I couldn't finish it. I needed to be somewhere else; I needed my computer with me; I wasn't going to travel with the computer open; and DOSBox doesn't survive the closing and re-opening of a laptop (at least, not on my computer). I realized then that I would need a significant chunk of free time before I could play the game again--time which regrettably didn't arrive until today.

When you leave towns, the map changes to a larger overland map with a tiny flashing cursor indicating your location. As long as you're on a road, you can use the "Road" button to continue moving along the road without having to use the directional keys. This is one of exactly one ways in which the game makes playing it logistically easier.

Exploring the outdoors. I actually thought the road I was on was called "Mid-Morn Road" for a while.

There's a day/night cycle outside, and the game forces you to camp at night. I didn't notice any time passing when I was in town; it was always day.

I stopped off at a tower near the city, where an old dwarf named Fistan Stockhard (which, I'm obliged to note, would make a great porn name) reminisced about his times with the Duke's Highwaymen. He didn't have a lot to say, but it was fun to see the slight differences with which he greeted Coll, also a highwayman, and the female non-highwayman characters in the group.

A slight difference that didn't matter in the overall dialogue, but still it's the rare CRPG of the era that gives different dialogue responses for different character types.

This first combat occurred not long after leaving the tower, and it was with the bandits who stole the Standard of the Guild of Knights. I found them along a main road. I rather expected that their fortress would be annotated with some kind of icon, but instead I just got a message stating I had arrived at it while I was wandering along the path. Good thing I didn't deviate from the road.

Combat begins with a quick overview of your foes, and then you're launched into the tactical combat screen.

My party faces off against Zorro and his clones.

This game seems to combine just about every other tactical combat engine with its options. It has the multitude of actions from Wizard's Crown, a targeting system similar to Ultima V, the "line up each of your characters' actions, then watch them execute all at once" system introducted in Wizardry, an attention to individual body parts seen in Phantasie III, tactical use of the terrain seen in Ultimas IV and V, and the tedious square-by-square movement system seen in Paladin.

On top of all of these systems, though, it adds a few of its own contributions--primarily an action-selection system for which the term "torturous" was invented. Let's examine all of the things I need to do to move my character one square to the left:

• Double-click on the "move" icon (fifth in a choice of 7 icons)
• Click on the square adjacent where I want him to move.
• Click the thumbs-up "confirm" icon.
• Double-click on the icon representing the speed at which I want him to move (out of three options, or six for the Keldar, who can fly).
• Review the combatant window to ensure that the game has it right.
• Click the "Confirm" icon again.

Trust me: actually managing to move a square deserves an exclamation point in this game.

This is in notable contrast to literally any of the engines mentioned previously in which moving one square to the left required pressing the left arrow. The approach used in Knights of Legend would be slightly more tolerable if you could use the keyboard to select your options, but no, everything requires the mouse.

Now all of this would be tedious enough if combat took place on a map the size of an Ultima V room, but the combat maps are enormous, and it could easily take half an hour to mince your way from one end to the other even if you didn't have to fight anyone along the way. Making things even worse is that you start without knowing anything about the direction of your foe, so you could easily spend the better part of an hour just wandering around, looking for the enemy you're supposed to fight.

Combat begins. Where do I go?

Fortunately, my first battle included just enough map information (visible from only two characters) that suggested that the foes would be found to the west. I started moving my party that way only to encounter yet another annoying feature: after you line up all of the movement options, characters move in order of their initiatives. If the lead characters don't move first, the rear characters end up bumping into them and wasting their movement for the round.

Flashbacks to Ultima IV dungeon room navigation here, though that was a lot quicker.

When you finally encounter a foe, the available options really explode. You have four basic options: attack, fire a missile weapon, attack with fists, and use magic. Each has numerous sub-options. After choosing "attack," for instance, you next choose the type of attack: berzerk, hack, thrust, and slash. Each has different advantages and disadvantages in terms of speed, damage, accuracy, and available defense options during the same round. Then you choose the area of the body for which you'll be aiming: high, medium, or low. The decision here has something to do with what area of the opponent is least lightly armored, and which areas are already injured. Finally, you select your method of defense in the same round: panic, stand, back up, dodge, duck, or jump. Again, these options are based partly on the consequences on fatigue and partly on what you anticipate the enemy is going to do.

Targeting a foe. Attack options include do nothing, berserk, hack, thrust, and slash.

Fortunately, Season 5 of Mad Men just arrived on Netflix, so I'll have something to do while spending 90 minutes fighting every group of five goblins.

Stamina, rather than health, is the most important attribute in combat. You don't even get a health meter--just an icon showing blood where you've been injured. Various actions eat up different amounts of stamina--sprinting or hacking in heavy armor takes more than walking and thrusting in light armor--and this is further affected by the wounds you've taken. A bleeding character might lose stamina with every step. You can rest or walk slowly to try to recover it in between individual foes. If the stamina meter turns completely red, the character collapses and apparently doesn't revive for that combat.

Coll has a chest wound but most of his stamina (note the small amount of red at the top of the meter).

The interesting thing is that characters can't die. They can only fall unconscious. If all of them fall unconscious in a single battle, the enemies loot your bodies, but you eventually wake up and can limp back to town. Wounds don't automatically heal or anything--you still need to find a healer or you'll be at a disadvantage in the next combat.

In my first attempt on this map, I started moving west and found myself in a narrow corridor in which my characters had to proceed single-file. Owing to the movement problem I discussed a minute ago, that was a bit complicated to line up. As I emerged on the other side, I found myself facing my first bandit foe, and it was some effort to exit the corridor and slowly move my characters into position where more than one could attack him at once. I killed him after about three rounds, but my fighter suffered some wounds in the process. I continued moving up the path to the second encounter, at which point I had to quit the game so I could go to work.

The second time, I decided to get my party into formation at the mouth of the other end of the corridor and see if he would come to me. After several rounds of resting, I realized that wasn't happening, so I gingerly sent one of my characters down the hallway to see if I could catch their attention and lead them to my other characters. This was part strategy, but it was actually less time-consuming than sending all six of my party members down the corridor together.

Resting while waiting for enemies to walk into my ambush.

This basically worked, though I had to travel a lot farther than I expected to find my first foe: there wasn't one sitting just outside the corridor as the first time. Hela, my Ghor tigress, found one bandit and sprinted back to her colleagues, leading him behind her.

No! Don't chase me, Mr. Bandit!

She got to the exit just in time to collapse from exhaustion; I wasn't paying enough attention to her fatigue meter. The hapless bandit found himself beset by three melee fighters and two ranged attackers, but it still took me three rounds to kill him.

Note Hela's spent body just south of Coll.

20 minutes into the battle, I'd killed 1/12 of my foes, and I was down one fighter from my own stupidity. I resisted the urge to start over and started to move everyone through the tunnel.

Before long, I found another chokepoint of sorts at the northern end of a double-wide bridge leading into the bandits' castle. I decided to try to exploit it the same way by sending my Kendar (who can fly up to three squares at a time) down the corridor while the rest of my truncated party lingered outside. These bandits had bows, so it didn't work quite as well: I had to hide the characters around the mouth and then converge in a couple of rounds when the bandits got close enough that they could see them and start shooting. Fortunately, my own archers turned out to be extremely adept, killing several of them in one blow.

A nice arrow shot from Yder the Elf.

At this point, I was about 45 minutes into the combat, and I was getting a little sick of it, so I decided to just charge forward and see what happened.

The party ever-so-slowly moves across the bridge.

What happened was I encountered four bandits in a courtyard with a pool in the middle. One sniped at me from bow slits in a tower that I couldn't reach. The others alternately fired at me and engaged me in melee combat. Aedd, my Dark Guard, soon went down. I killed two of the bandits but a third unexpectedly moved into position to engage my lightly-armored ranged characters. Changing from a ranged weapon to a melee weapon takes at least two rounds, and I didn't have backup melee weapons anyway, so I just had them flee while my melee characters tried to engage him from behind. He died in a few hits.

Another character goes down.

About this time, I started to understand the "foresight" system, which I'll describe below, and my tactics started to improve. Two more bandits who wandered into the courtyard from side-passages fell to my blows. But by now, my Kelder was suffering from serious wounds and getting fatigued quickly, my two archers had run out of arrows (I guess you only get about 20 per combat), and I'd only killed slightly more than half my foes. I rested for a while before heading down an east passage. Logistics of movement were rendered a bit easier with only four characters.

Moro's fatigue meter is almost entirely red--which is bad. Time to rest.

The bandit in the next fight took forever to go down, and Moro collapsed from exhaustion during it. I now had four enemies left to be taken on by three characters, one of whom was wounded and two of whom had no weapons. In the next two fights, which took place in a narrow passage next to small buildings, my unarmed attacks (principally headbutts) were surprisingly effective, and the foes went down.

This feels like fighting dirty.

More than 90 minutes now.

The next bandit who came along dodged every attack I made and knocked out Onia, one of my martial arts experts. I eventually killed him, leaving Coll, my highwayman with a serious chest wound, and Yder, my elf with no weapon and wounds to his chest and leg, to try to finish off the last two foes.

Yder attempts a headbutt.

They failed. Coll went down in the next attack and Yder's feeble headbutts couldn't overcome the bandit. The bandits looted my party of their gold but mostly left their weapons and armor.

Two hours and nothing to show for it.

Hey! I don't even have a dwarf!

I'm not really bitter, though. It was a good learning experience in which I made lots of obvious mistakes. Towards the end, when there was still a chance I might pull off an unexpected victory, there were moments when it was almost exhilarating.

The best combat innovation in Knights of Legend is the foresight/intelligence system by which characters can assess what their foes are going to do. The character's foresight determines the order in which he or she plans his or her moves. This is different than the order in which the moves are actually executed, which is determined by quickness. Characters with high foresight plan later in combat, after all or most of the enemies have planned their moves.

Characters with high intelligence can estimate the enemy's likely methods of attack and defense. (Unfortunately, they have to be able to target the enemies to do this, so it's limited to melee enemies right next to you or ranged enemies if you still have some arrows.) If the character is correct, it's a huge boon for him and any character who plans his moves after this point.

As an example, take a look at this screenshot, featuring a bandit next to two melee characters (to his right) and two ranged attackers (to his left). One of the ranged attackers has figured out (by his body language, I guess) that in the round to come, the bandit plans to attack by thrusting at the head of the character directly to his right. Moreover, he's poised to duck to avoid any melee attacks directed at him.

Assuming my other characters haven't planned their attacks yet, I now have a good idea what to do. Both melee characters should avoid attacking his head, to start. In fact, leg attack would be a good idea, since he's planning to duck right into it. Coll, the character he's planning to attack, should adopt a "backing up" or "duck" defense to avoid the thrust. If Coll is already injured, I should have him decline to attack and put all his efforts into defense. Meanwhile, Moro, the other melee character, can put all his effort into attacking since the enemy isn't planning to attack him at all.

Here's another one. This guy, who has a wounded left arm, is planning to make a slash attack at Coll, the character to his immediate right, aiming at the center of his torso. He plans to defend by standing still and taking the brunt of the blow on his armor (this is different than doing nothing). Since he doesn't plan to move, I should use a powerful attack, probably directed at his center to increase the chances of incapacitating his already-injured arm. Meanwhile, Coll should plan to dodge by backstepping. Moro, again, can do nothing for his defense and put everything into the attack.

And a third. The foe below is on the far left of the screen, and he's running to engage my characters in melee combat. Since he's running, there's a good chance he'll go first in the round to come, meaning he'll land in the square to his right--next to my melee characters--before anyone else goes. This means that Coll and Moro can target the empty square that he's planning to run into--and they should use their slowest, most powerful attacks.

That worked out pretty well.

This system is fascinating, and it introduces a tactical level I've never considered in a turn-based RPG. Now that I understand it better, I think I'll be in better shape when I return.

Some other notes on combat:

• The game features a "fog of war" by which you can't see enemies around obstacles. The neat thing is that when the enemy moves, you can see the fog of war from his perspective, and you know which of your characters he can see and target.

The bandit fails to see my party lurking on either side of the bridge exit.

• Enemies don't seem to be subject to the same rules about switching weapons as party members. My bandit foes went smoothly from bows to scimitars in a single round, without having to drop one weapon and equip the other first.

• You can flee from combat at any point. There's a chance that you'll drop your equipped weapons as you do. I love the little icon that manages to convey a character running away in desperation, discarding his sword behind him.

• Kelden can fly over obstacles and water. I haven't really exploited that yet

• Enemies are dumb enough to walk into obstacles or fire their bows when they have no available targets.

• The "body parts" system is more complicated than I described above, but I haven't figured it out yet. I gather that incapacitated arms and legs affect the character's ability to use certain weapons, run, and do other actions that would naturally require them.

• My colorblindness is hurting me again. I can't tell what the heck the icons are supposed to be. Both my characters and my foes just look like speckled blobs to me. I find it hard to distinguish my characters from the cobblestone walkways and the bandits from the grass and trees.

• There's no way to view your character sheet in the midst of combat to remind you of your stats and items.

• There is, of course, no way to save in the middle of combat, nor immediately afterwards. (Short of cheating with a DOSBox version with save states, which I'm not going to explore.) You have to get back to a town and pay to stay at an inn.

There are a few things I don't understand yet, and I wouldn't mind discussion on these:

1. Is there any purpose to the unarmed options (punch, kick, headbutt) except as something to do if the character has lost his or her weapons?

2. If I can target an enemy with multiple melee fighters, does it make more sense to have them target the same place (head, body, legs) or to spread out the attacks?

3. If I sheath my weapons before fleeing, do I lose nothing from the action?

Even though this posting has been fairly detailed, I'm going to have to do a step-by-step combat posting later on, when I understand all the options a little better, and when I have magic to include in the discussion.

From this one experience, I can understand why players have a love/hate relationship with the combat system. It is at once stupid and brilliant, tedious and invigorating. What makes it particularly annoying is that it could have been unquestionably great with just a few additions, like mapping the buttons to the keyboard, setting an "active character," making the maps a little smaller, and the ability to set a destination point instead of forcing the player to specify the direction of movement every round.

My take-aways from my first experience are to keep a closer eye on my stamina bar, make sure the archers have backup melee weapons, make better use of the environment, and don't waste all of my arrows early on, especially when I'm fighting a single enemy in range of several melee attackers. I might even go back to the drawing board for the characters, paying closer attention to foresight and intelligence (and perhaps getting a dwarf).

For those of you wondering at my post title, I did manage to win one combat. In a re-load, I was attacked shortly after leaving town by a single goblin.

He went down in two rounds without doing any damage to my characters, and I was able to loot 42 gold pieces and a mace from his body. After the two hour ordeal above, this victory--any victory--sure tasted sweet.