garasaki said:
Are there many people playing this online? Is it a good online game?
I recently bought warcraft 3 to fill my online, team based strategy warefare fix, but it turns out I'm terrible at it due to the intense micromanagement required....
Well, I have just recently started Kings of War and haven't gotten into the online play much yet (still finishing the campaign), but I did play Kohan IS/AG (the previous games) fairly extensively online.
I expect that the online atmosphere is probably very similar.
It's definitely not going to be the gigantic community that is on Battle.net, but rather a smaller group of hardcore players. The earlier Kohan games stayed alive online for years (at least up until this new game) despite the dated graphics and such...and the code was supported and updated the whole time. There was even a community patch released eventually. Definitely a lot less bodily orifices per capita than on WC3 too.
Another nice thing is that there is a very good random map generator in the game. Multiplayer typically uses random maps so that no one knows the map going in...makes things much more fair and interesting.
There is a significant learning curve in getting good at online play on this game, but it's a different type of curve than WC3.
In WC3, you're having to develop your mouse clicking micro skills. Sure, there's tactics to learn and some basic strategies, but they will do you no good at all to know them if you can't micromanage up to speed. IMO, it's not worth the effort and practice to get good at it if there's any other good alternatives.
In Kohan, getting up to mouse clicking speed is pretty easy. There just isn't that much clicking to do and most people play the game at reasonable speeds. The learning curve is more in learning all the strategy involved. How and when to build what kind of companies with what kind of economies. When it's okay to tank your eco...when to retreat and flank...when to worry about your supply lines, etc... Learning that type of stuff is fun, though.