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[Mictlantecuhtli]

A bit of background:

King's Bounty is a turn-based fantasy computer and video game designed by Jon Van Caneghem of New World Computing in 1990. The game follows the player's character, a hero of King Maximus, appointed with the job of retrieving the Sceptre of Order from the forces of chaos, led by Arech Dragonbreath. King's Bounty is notably considered the forerunner of the Heroes of Might and Magic series of games.

A Mega Drive/Genesis port was developed and released in North America on February 21, 1991, with a multitude of graphical changes. The gameplay was also modified to incorporate real time overworld exploration.

King's Bounty is widely considered to be the precursor for much of the gameplay in the Heroes of Might and Magic series (the Might and Magic series being the basis for the storyline), both of which were published by New World Computing and designed by Jon Van Caneghem. Among the many similarities, an emphasis on hero development and combat style are especially prominent in both. In the introduction to the player manual of Heroes III, van Caneghem credits King's Bounty as the precursor to Heroes of Might and Magic.[1] King's Bounty is included in some HOMM anthologies, including the Heroes of Might and Magic Compendium and Heroes of Might and Magic Millennium Edition. The anthology versions also provide a native executable for Windows, though not fully supported in Windows NT-based operating systems.

In 2008, a spiritual sequel titled King's Bounty: The Legend was released.

So I've been playing the hell out of this series. I've been running through 'The Legend' again lately, and loving every second of it. I have all the expansions to The Legend, which add about.. 3, 4 times more gameplay than vanilla. I say this safely. Vikings, ho!

The second game is 'Armored Princess', which, again, I've played the hell out of. It's gotten love in the form of the Crossroads [which... does a lot] expansion pack, but the game was already rather huge to begin with anyways. Orcs, ho!

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Considering the last expansion for KB:TL was two years ago, Armored Princess might be getting further expansion if they don't get to making a whole new King's Bounty game.

Of course, the formula should be familiar to strategy fans. You are a hero, and you have a party of troops. You travel on an overworld map and avoid/engage in battles, dig up treasures, complete quests and generally try not to get murderized.


The combat is difficult. The units are varied and the pool to choose from is massive. Strategy is necessary or you will not complete half of the game. I love everything about it, as it hearkens back to the old HOMM's [which.. it inspired originally]. The games are very good. The company developing this is famous for Men of War/Space rangers. Quirky, yes, but solid and very good games. King's Bounty is another of these, with massive amounts of gameplay rammed into two games.

I will make a better OP if this topic survives.  If you enjoy HOMM-like games, this game will definitely scratch your itch. Just gauging whether any Bay12 likes King's Bounty enough to gush over it. Hell, this topic can even be for speculation on the next King's Bounty release.

[Frumple]

... wasn't the latest thing Legions? Wait, no. Actually looking at dates, now... looks like the last thing was Warriors of the North, which was the third game, like AP was the second. And it got some kind of official DLC thing just this year.

Anywaay... yeah, KB's great. I don't have WotN, but do have anything crossroads and earlier. Still... still haven't actually finished any of them, though. Campaigns seem to get incredibly rough, difficulty wise, quite quickly. Approaching nasty "Win with no losses or reload" stuff. Still... it's fun. Like it, would recommend to anyone that liked HoMM.

[MoLAoS]

It was fun for a bit. Until you get to the stage where you constantly have to run back around the world to pick up new creatures. I got so pissed at the point. The level of tedium involved was IMMENSE.

[Sonlirain]

I played it quite a bit but NEVER completed it. I have Legend and Princess but never played princess because i want to play them in order... and the furthest i got in Legends on both my Warrior and Mage characters was the icy dorf mauntainlands and i always kinda burned out at that point.

[Fikes]

I own several of them but didn't really get convinced that they were good games. The combat is similar to HOMM and it has a similar army mechanic, but that is where I feel the similarities end.

This is all from memory and I didn't play much but from what I remember the game pretty much devolved to fighting easy fights and getting units with high health. I don't think there was a way, outside of combat, to earn money. That means if you survived a fight with only 2 units left you didn't really have a way to get back on your feet.

The high health thing came from the healing mechanic. If you had 50 units with 10 health and they got hit for 201 damage, 20 would die and one would have 9 health left. If you than healed that bunch of units for 200 points of damage you would only REALLY heal that one unit for 1 damage. On the other hand if you had ONE unit with 500 health hit for 201 damage, you could heal it for 200.

[Anvilfolk]

Played it a ton, had fun, but eventually ran into the same problem where I teleported to some sort of pirate world and then couldn't find enough good units to fight the people there and ran out of money. Then it became impossible to come back from that :\ I also got kind of tired of fetch quests...

Still, pretty solid!

I remember reading some criticism that Armoured Princess was basically the same as the original one or something like that? After that I became convinced there wasn't really lots of new content. Not that new content for the game would've helped me much, since I basically never ran through all of the content of the original anyway

[Neonivek]

It was fun for a bit. Until you get to the stage where you constantly have to run back around the world to pick up new creatures. I got so pissed at the point. The level of tedium involved was IMMENSE.

Yeah if there was a weakness to the game this would be it.

I mean I play as conservatively as humanly possible, and even I find that my resources are dwindling away.

Also I like the Princess' dragon mechanic 100 times more then the 4 guardians.

[GP Trixie]

I love this series too. I think crossworld is the best one. The latest one warrior of the north was too rushed, half of the units have mistranslated descriptions with some meaning the complete opposite of what's actually hapening. And numerous crash to desktop, at least for me. Don't buy that one.

Crossworld on the other hand is well polished and great. It stills have some balance issues, some games you will get super good items, spells and awesome troups and sometimes you'll struggle very hard. There is a tool for scanning the game to see what troops and items you will get, but there is cleary something wrong if you need to rely on that kind of thing.

I won the game multiple times on impossible so here some tricks if you find the game too hard.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Warrior is the easiest class by far. You get much better leadership, and the full potential of the dragon pet. If you invest early in the dragon skills he'll do most of your damage for the 3/4 of the game. The problem of the mage is you *need* good items for doing the same kind of damage with your spells. So you ever have use the scanning tool or get insanely lucky.

The key to win in king's bounty is to get no loss or negligeable loss at every fight. There is not that much ways of doing this.
-The easiest one is to get an army of droid. You can get them as soon as the third island. Split the repair droid in 2. As long as none of the stack is completly wiped out you can ressurect the stack to full healt. Add the phantom spell for even more ressurection capacity. You don't need anything else for winning in impossible.
-Completly overpower the enemy. Sounds obvious but the best way to do this is to kite the monsters that guards the scrolls map, and collect every items in the game before starting fights. You can kite nearly every monster, but sometimes it requires insane timing. Active pause and autosave are your best friends.
-Now if you want to do the game the hard way, the best to use in the best way lvl 5 units. You can get a green dragon in the fourth island. lvl 5 units are good to stay alive with only the healing spell. Even in late game. The key thing to keep them alive is good resitance. With 95% resistance, which is doable with stone skin and good items you can tank the biggest endgame stacks even in impossible. Without good items you are screwed.
-The last you can do is get an infinite mana source and use ressurection on everything before the end of each fight. There are multiple ways to do that, all of them are super boring. The spell mana spring if you can keep a distance or no retaliation enemy stack for the end. An inquisitor stack you phantom, use its spell to get rage and get mana back with the dragon spell. Green dragons works quite well too.

One thing that helps tremendously is the medals you can get. Even if you don't care about loss try to get the no loss medal as fast as possible it helps a lot early game. The +% resist medal is extremly good too, you can get it easily if you get a few archmage and use them to always cast their shield when they can for the 10 first turns of every fight. The trapper medal helps a lot too if you can manage to get it. It's quite hard as you have to get ennemies stacks to die on your traps. Archmages with their telekinesis help once again.

A fanmade expansion exists for crossworld. It's called red sand, and it seems to add a lot of new things (new troops, spells, islands, a new ice damage type ...). The problem is I think it lacks the same kind of polish as warrior of the north. The translation is even worse, but it's fanmade so it's already a little miracle there is something else than the russian version. And they don't solve any of balance issue I talked about, so I never managed to really get into this one. But you should totally check it out if you want even more content than in crossworld.

[Mictlantecuhtli]

My people, hear me!

There's a new King's Bounty!

It's cheap too!

[Sonlirain]

Woo!
It's one of those games that i get a bit into then burn out and by the time i return to it i have to start all over becausemy save disapeared!
Quite a pitty really... i should plot through it at least once.

[ragnar119]

Its really time for Kings bounty 2 and not for more of the same (with very little new things with the last few expansions).

[Retropunch]

I played this a tinnyyyy bit and quickly got burned out - I really wanted to like it but just could never gel with it due to the fact that the margins were so small and you never seemed to have that awesome 'winning' feeling with it - it just felt like I was reloading and trying again until my losses were manageable.

Might try it again with some of GP's tips!