I played the original King Arthur and found it to be a mostly fun game that was brought down a bit by its brutal difficulty and weird Total War-like combat model. But it had magic. Not just magic but Pagan magic. (Always the best kind.)
I started messing around with “King Arthur II The Role-playing Wargame” today and I am terribly early in the campaign. As in, I just started it and have fought one whole battle against some Sherwood Rebels. But that’s enough to make a few bullet points…
* First off: the game CRAWLS on my PC. I am running Windows 7, a Core II Duo 3GHz with 3 GB of RAM and an AMD Radeon 6800 HD videocard with brand new drivers. So is this a screaming fast PC? No. It’s not. I know it’s not. But hoo boy it’s bad. I have a Dell 24″ flatscreen monitor and when games run at anything other than 1900×1200 resolution it looks a tad weird. This sucker, when I run th egame at the medium to low video settings runs at a blistering 8 frames per second on the OVERLAND map! That’s not even the battle map! The battles, oddly enough, run around 15-18 FPS, which is still not great but a hell of a lot better than 8.
* The battle I fought against the Rebels was clearly an intro battle designed to get your feet wet. Still, this game looks to have a similar oddity that I know will be hard for me to get around. Units don’t flee. I am so used to games like Shogun and Rome and Medieval where if a unit takes a ton of damage they up and run, as morale breaks. Here, those rebels fought to the death. No one was left alive. Cavalry charging some archers? They stand and fight. Additionally, I still have a hard time determining if I am winning or losing a battle. Total War fans are used to seeing that all important line “Winning Slightly” or some other hint as to how things are going. Here, all I get is some annoying advisor telling me,. “Your units are going to die!!!” He said this no less than 15 times in this battle.
Then I win the battle in a landslide. Um, ok. Can I fire that guy?
I think I know why the game does this “no retreat no surrender” thing. This is part strategy battle game and part RPG — it has a story to tell and you can’t very well have lingering armies wandering the landscape when they aren’t meant to be there. That’s just a guess, but that’s the best I can come up with as to why these fights are designed in such a way.
I hope to get these performance issues worked out because it’s going to be a real bitch evaluating it right now.
Time to turn everything on Low and see what that gets me.I hope it does as even with the flee issue, I want to dig into the story and kill some monsters.
I was browsing through the forum link you posted and it seems to me that one of two things is happening: (1) bad drivers or something buggy like that or (2) it’s not a GPU issue, but a CPU issue. So many users are reporting something like 18fps on max settings and 23fps on low settings, which makes me think the CPU is being overloaded, not the GPU.
Anyway, the fact that the Neocore dev mentioned how 24 fps is what the eye can see so that’s what they aim for in developing their games is patently absurd, but I’m hoping that was miscommunication and not how the team actually views things.
As far as the lack of morale, well, it’s been a while since I play the first game, but I don’t recall units standing there until they die. Perhaps they do. I would like to think I’d remember something as strange as that happening. Anyway, for your sake I hope it’s just this intro battle where that occurs as it seems like such a basic concept to leave out. If you want my opinion in general about Neocore it’s that they make a really deep and interesting tbs game with a relatively poor real time tactical system. Sounds like that might still ring true. Shame.
Yeah game runs bad on high settings no matter what PC you have.Mostly medium settings make the battles run smoothly.About the moral thing,the units have it as a stat,but I rarly see them run.Maybe deeper in the game there will be some skills or magic that make units flee,but didn’t see them yet.In first one they didn’t have moral stat for each unit rather than overall pool where you loose if take many loses.That mechanic was exploitable when you could kill all enemy units but the hero and have all of you army attacking him and losing moral,units and in the end the battle.
Yeah they now have a “will to fight” rating which I *think* starts at like 400 and degrades over time. Does that number reset after each battle? Not sure. I’m going to fire the game up today and continue the campaign.
But like you said, that Will to Fight number drops SO slowly that it almost seems irrelevant at the moment.
Does that number reset after each battle?
Yes.And its different for every unit,there is units with 200,250,400 and can be upgraded 5% every lvl if IRC