King's Bounty - The Legend

As you might imagine my life is pretty intense, what with IPOs and haxxors and political grassrooting and administering an empire cumⁱ a bunch of naked chicks. Consequently, how better to spend my valuable timeⁱⁱ than catching up on all the gaming I didn't get to do in 2008ⁱⁱⁱ!

So therefore, let's give a look to King's Bounty - The Legend, which is a relatively recent installment of a glorious francise.

To the right, my delicious pirate wife-to-be (if only I feel like it). She doesn't want to have children on the grounds that her current clothes wouldn't fit anymore. She wants to yarr and arrrr and blow me down matey! all over the high sees with her trusty crew of pirates by her side. To the left, the speaker for a stack of demon chicks, ever so subtly veiled by the irisations off a phoenix' wings.

But seriously now, you can get married in this game. So what, right ? The target demographic of computer games are computer dweebs, of course you'll be able to game-marry. Well... first off it's single player, so no dweebery. I never thought I'd live to say this, but there can be too much of a good thing and there can certainly be too much of the Internet thing (just look at the cloud scam for that matter). Second off, it's not just getting married. One possible wife is this chick that was an unruly child, ran off with the local robber baron to be his bitch, got a ring as a present which was stolen from a grave and cursed so she turned into a zombie, you end up buying her from her thief... boyfriend, shall we say, and give her four babies (because she only has four slots and once she fills them she won't kiss no more). These are cheapo artifacts, I had a +5 defense babe which really helped early on.

But then you divorce her and either get the pirate chick or the frog princess (which you gotta keep kissing if you don't want to give her babies because she keeps turning into a frog, and you don't want babies because you have artifacts by now and your artifacts are better than her babies could ever be - just like irl!) if you prefer intelligence. Or the demon chick, if you like demons, or the elven princess. In short, you are well catered to, harem game all the way.

I went into all this matrimonial detail exactly to illustrate that the detail is there. The lengths to which Katauri went to cater to the player are nothing short of outrageous. The game is well polished in all the angles, it has this old HoMM rock-like stability and roundness to it. The quests (about 100 of them or so) are intricate, well written, muchly inclined to subvert tropes. The rock which doesn't want to be just a rock is an unbearable pile of cute. They're all touching, warm, intimate - a world apart from the purple prose and rambling nonsense most quest writing had become before the Massive Multiplayer revolution came thundering and washed into the bottomless oceans any consideration of player experience and such stuffy old antiquated notions.

The graphics are very good, the maps are very well built (and there's a whole lot of them), the entire game is nothing short of a jewel.

The only drawback is that well... there's not so much strategy involved. Whatever you do, you'll win. Wanna play animals only, sure, take red and black dragons, griffins, royal snakes and perhaps eyes or cyclops. Wear the druid staff (+50% animal attack), perhaps the griffin regalia (+30% more troops) and you're well set. Wanna play snakes and spiders ? The +3 Int frog princess gives you +100% snakes and spiders attack in her frog form, add the druid staff for a whopping 150% total and there's truly ample supplies of them all over the world, you'll never run out. Want to play all human knight ? Sure, get the coupla human morale bonus items, load up on knights, mages and inquisitors and again, you're set. Same thing with elves, get the princess for her morale bonus. Or demons. Or even pirates^iv.

I did pick a mage and leveled magic with a passion, which gives me the significant advantage that I can cast twice for the first three rounds, and that can either be Fire Rain for ~4k damage per square, so if you hit three squares it comes to 4k x 3 x 2 x 3 = 48k damage right off the bat (not counting the spirits of rage, notably Death, which does 30% of a stack so I've seen 20k damage on occasion) or alternatively Demon Gate yielding something to the tune of 50 Succubi or ~35 Demons per. Nominally I could do this six times in the first three turns too, but my mana restricts me to about four^v.

I have no idea how a warrior type game would play, but I can't readily imagine the advantages. As it is I have 17k leadership (which allows 6 black dragons!) and unless the warrior gets something like 50k to compensate for the loss of the magic damage pump (plus somehow more money to pay for all his proportionately larger losses) I tell you I don't see it. At any rate, seeing how the dragons have ~60 Attack and Defense naturally, the paltry 10-20 the hero could be adding seems a complete waste of effort. Much better concentrate on Intelligence^vi and Mana (some rage is also useful, especially because the Spirits make it easy to keep it filled).

If you haven't ever played this I do advise you to get it. And if your spouse complains of the resulting neglect you can either threaten her with turning into a zombie or kiss her preemptively so she doesn't turn into a frog. The choice is, of course, yours to make.

1. It's a Latin word, it means "with". Honestly. [↩]
2. I have people making summaries for me. It usually works thusly :

   mircea_popescu https://community.bitfinex.com/content.php/32-Regarding-recent-team-change
   person Which # of "I've worked my ass off and I am not sleeping/personal problems/busy" is this? It must be a self-perpetuating phenomenon. You have to really give it to people who got shit done that they've thwarted the seemingly inevitable point at which said phenomenon just up and eats the world completely.
   (...)
   "I believe one of the main problems of Bitcoin is the lack of professionalism that a lot of trading sites have" headdesk. I wonder what the Giancarlo guy sees in this clown.

   [↩]

3. Because I was busy then catching up on 2003 because etc - I tell you, one missed night when you're 15 and suddenly one thing leads to another and before you know it your entire life becomes unescapable turmoil from which you shall never (ipso definitio) ever escape. [↩]
4. Early on I always carried a Mercenary troop and painstakingly looted every body on the battlefield - it turns out a mostly pointless exercise, I am sitting on ~1.5mn I have no real use for at the moment, other than perhaps paying alimony if I divorce. That's right, you can send your wife packing, she will take some of your dough. My original zombie wife got ~100k, took her four chitlins and settled down somewhere.

   Incidentally, since we're all into cryptocurrencies these days : the game does make the firm statement (in one of the quests) that 10k gold coins equal 1 kilogram of gold. Thus therefore my virtual ex virtual wife's virtual divorce cost me about 150k dollars at today's prices, right ? Fascinating what computers can do, I have four babies somewhere and an estranged wife to whom I've paid the average Romanian wages for ~2.2 lifetimes. All in game money, to boot! [↩]

5. I have 130 mana, I also have the +3 mana per turn belt x 2, and the predator thing (turns 5 rage into 5 mana each turn) and the +6 mana per turn from the skill tree, for a whopping +17 mana per turn, aside of whatever the Ice spirit's Chargers add (about 24 or so). Even with all this, at 35 mana a pop the Demon Gates are expensive as all Hell. [↩]
6. Mine is 35, which means my spells get duration +2 turns (not that I ever use anything with duration) and my damage gets +40%, which matters. [↩]