Review

What does the 'S' in 'RTS' stand for again? Oh, that's right, "strategy"! Strategy, as in "devising and executing a plan for achieving your objectives." Somewhere over the last several years worth of brainless emulation of the Warcraft recipe, the 'S' in 'RTS' got left in the dumpster of some grimy truck stop. The genre, as genres are wont to do, held tightly to its acronym despite the increasing discrepancy between the label and the product. What has essentially become 'Real-Time Clicking' continued to pass inspection as 'Real-Time Strategy', with few gamers apparently having the empathy or the zeal to utter even a peep of dissatisfaction. Well, Kohan is a Real-Time Strategy game, standing tall in a field of imposters. It's no Holy Grail, to be sure, but it's a real-time game that puts player decisions back in the limelight, where they belong.

I've played multiplayer KIS (Kohan: Immortal Sovereigns) quite a bit with friends in a LAN environment, and I got about halfway through the single-player campaign, which is further than I've gotten in single-player for any of the typical RTS games that I've played. I was tempted to dismiss the single-player campaign out-of-hand only because of chronic disappointment with the single-player portion of RTS games. The typical tech-tree management and lackluster AI in most RTS games make the gameplay in single-player campaigns very rote, or alternatively an attempt is made to cover up those failings with heavy-handed scripting which succeeds only at making the single-player campaigns very frustrating. KIS avoids this because the scope of the military tech advancements is across the entire campaign, and the economic advancements are city-based and therefore not only sensible for any given map but also (for the most part) actually possess strategic relevance. Furthermore, the AI proved respectably engaging.

From a design standpoint, there is a long list of things that I think KIS does right. First and foremost, however, is the combat. Combat is what every other RTS I've played does horribly wrong, and their failure is rooted in the fact that units can be individually controlled. Units that CAN be micro-managed become units that MUST be micro-managed because there will always be players that do whatever improves their chances of winning, irregardless of how frustrating and inherently unfun it is. Before I go into more detail, or perhaps in lieu of going into more detail, I strongly urge you to read my AOE 2 review.

At any rate, KIS presents a (shallow) military hierarchy mechanism via companies, and groups of units actually engage intelligently and intuitively AS groups of units. This fact alone puts KIS a league ahead of all of the other RTS games. It's much easier to be forgiving and accommodating of both UI and unit-level AI when I know they aren't determining my success or failure in a game. Through the concept of engagement, KIS puts all of the players on level ground in this respect. It also significantly slows the effective pace of the game, which is critical for an RTS. If I want to play a fast, twitchy game, I'll go play UT. Strategy games, whether real-time, compressed-time, phased-time, or turn-based, should be about decisions. KIS has made great strides in this regard, as far as combat is concerned.

Another thing I greatly enjoy about KIS is the flow economy, coupled with the inexhaustible resource model. My friends and I stuck with Total Annihilation long past its prime because of that combination alone. One of the things that has rubbed me wrong from Warcraft through every one of its lemming clones to this day, including Age of Mythology, is how the depleteable resources on the map dictate the nature of the game. I cannot stress enough how much more enjoyable it is to play in an inherently sustainable environment. Again, this is one of the many features of KIS that puts player decisions back at the front of the line for determining the course of the game.

A third excellent feature of KIS is that build management isn't forced to occur exclusively through the main view. The city management panel is mostly what allows KIS to scale as well as it does, though even so, things start to get fairly cumbersome with more than about a dozen locations to manage. AOE2 has a pretty nice hotkey setup that helps mitigate the fact that you have to do everything through the main isometric view, but it is still inherently ungainly. Developers seem to chronically make the mistake of sacrificing usability in the name of "immersion". The best counter example to this besides KIS is the unique and effective unit management UI in Hostile Waters: Antaeus Rising.

However, while on the subject of build management, I can discuss the most significant issue that I have with the KIS design. Despite the city management panel, and at a more fundamental level, the fact that upgrades are abstracted into building slots, despite these things it is actually the city/econ management that injects the most micro-management into the game. Like I said above, if something CAN be micro-managed, it is essentially something that MUST be micro-managed if you're playing competitively. I'm talking about build orders, and the fact that a competitive build order is timed down to the second. I understand that discovering optimum build orders is alluring to some players, but I object to the constraints it places on the player's attention when it can't be automated. An excellent analogous example is with a high-end racing simulation such as Grand Prix Legends. Discovering optimum car setups is obviously part of the enjoyment that some players extract from the game, but the game doesn't force every player to tweak their car setup for every race. How much fun would it be if you had to micro-manage the brake bias, gear ratios, toe-in, etc. while simultaneously driving during the first lap of every race, especially if you used exactly the same settings 99% of the time? Racing simulations recognize how incredibly frustrating this would be, and thus provide a mechanism for saving and applying car setups. Car setups are actually a large part of the strategy of a racing simulation. That they can be saved and automatically applied doesn't lessen their strategic value, rather it enhances it. I think the same can be said for build orders in an RTS. If you want to allow players to discover optimum build orders, then do that, but also allow for players to save and automatically apply build orders. Let the player focus their attention where they wish, and don't impose a UI that demands player attention for the sake of optimal efficiency. The human player should be free to do what a human player is good at: planning, reacting, learning. This is the same reason why unit queues showed up almost immediately after Warcraft (in C&C I believe, and certainly in Total Annihilation). The player should have the freedom to focus their attention on tactical decisions. Leashing the player to the UI by tightly coupling timing to efficiency is, I believe, a design flaw.

Other little issues:

• There should be an option for revealing the map terrain, but WITHOUT units OR buildings. Generally, there should be more options for Fog of War and visibility than just on/off. The 'scene 24' cheat is a decent alternative, but it would be better to see more legitimate and independent visibility options, such as whether or not mines are visible, whether or not lairs are visible, and whether or not non-ally city placements are visible. Also, I think there should be an option to make player scores available during a game. I personally prefer not knowing scores during play, but that doesn't mean that it shouldn't be an option. Every gameplay option is somebody's pet peeve. While discussing these visibility options with a friend, he had the interesting suggestion for another: whether or not major terrain features are visible (such as mountain ranges and water). I thought this was a great idea. An interesting combination would be to turn full Fog of War on, but allow major terrain features to be visible.

• While using TAB to cycle through cities in the city management panel, it's nice that the view (and consequently the mini-map) centers on that city. City location is such a significant part of the build management, and its imperative that location information be made available when using the city management panel. However, it would be interesting to see if this could be done in a more formal way. I find that one of the most valuable things about the city management panel is that it provides the player a means of allocating some attention to economic issues without completely abandoning whatever else they might be focusing on at the moment. Frequently, I pull up the city management panel when I'm scouting, or establishing a front line, or even just baby-sitting a retreating company. What this means is that my current view is important to me, and when I use the city management panel to tab through my cities, I'd like to be able to know their locations without having my view hijacked.

• KIS subscribes to a traditional accumulate-and-spend economy model, for commissions and buildings. I'd love to see alternatives to this.

• I think it's excellent that the capability exists to issue commands and communicate with allied AI players. However, I think it might be nice to have this capability more legitimately incorporated into the UI, and perhaps presented as a general means of using fixed communications with any allied player, AI or human. In the heat of combat, it'd be great to have a convenient means of requesting that a particular location or company be attacked, defended, etc. Of course, there will always be the need for complex communication between human allies and I doubt anything other than the chat bar would facilitate that, but at the same time, a means of quickly issuing common strategic commands to any/all allies would be extremely powerful. Note: Battlefield 1942 does exactly this, and it's impressive how effective it can be as a catalyst for teamwork (assuming the inclination is there in the first place).

• Also, on the topic of issuing commands to AI allies, I think there should be the option to force allied AI to give tribute and even transfer cities and mines. The AI is never going to be perfect, and even if it was, its purpose in the game is to help the players have fun. If for any reason its behavior instead is detrimental to the fun, then the player should be able to override that behavior. The AI isn't going to get its feelings hurt, it has no ego, and it won't mad if it has to give up a hotly contested city to an ally.

• Key bindings should always be configurable. Always.

• There is a very steep learning curve in KIS for being able to accurately appraise the combat matchups for the tremendous number of possible company configurations. Add the effects of terrain type, company formation, and level of entrenchment, and the prospect of gauging combat outcome becomes an extremely complicated affair. The temptation is to make rough assessments of situational advantage/disadvantage based on company counts alone, along with rough adjustments for obvious technological differences. This only leads to failure and frustration. You'll witness 3 of the enemy's companies slaughter your 4 companies, who were fully entrenched next to an outpost, because the enemy's support units matched up in some specifically advantageous way to your units. Given this, I'd like to see the game offer a better means of learning these combination subtleties. A combat simulator of some sort would be very welcome. The player could easily stage fights between companies, tweaking company configuration and changing formations, entrenchment levels, and terrain. I firmly believe that players would get incredible mileage out of such a feature. This is analogous to the battle simulators in 4X games that feature highly customizable ship designs.

• A group of companies should be able to respond to a retreat command even when only some of the companies in the group have actually engaged.

• A company that is regrouping should still be able to receive move orders, it just won't follow them until after regrouping. The same goes for a company in retreat. In other words, like waypoints, I think that the player should be able to queue move orders for a company unless the company is actually engaged. I think the penalty for retreating and routing is in the fact that the company has to reach its retreat or rout point, and possibly regroup, before doing any thing else. Being unable to queue orders for a retreating/routing company means that the player must baby-sit that company in order to issue subsequent orders as early as possible. This is essentially micro-management and prevents the player from being able to issue orders and then go focus on something else.

Summary

So I just prattled on about a bunch of negative issues with Kohan, or ways in which I think the design can be refined. Don't let that sour the impression I'm trying to make. Kohan is a very good game. It is because the design has such a strong foundation that I have the luxury of indulging in some nit-picky design critiques. Kohan is sufficiently entertaining to me that I've played it enough to actually care about these subtleties. Too often, my experience with RTS games is repugnant to the extent that I just don't care about the nuances, good or bad, of their design.

Is Kohan fun? As always that depends on you. I've had a good time with it, more so than I've had with an RTS in a long time. Now, if you're simply allergic to real-time strategy, then Kohan should still be avoided. It is no panacea. It is what it is, and I can certainly appreciate the fact that some people just like their strategy off the clock. I personally hate speed chess, for example. It's offensive to me. However, Kohan is the most palatable manifestation of real-time strategy that I've yet encountered.

Before I forget - I want to throw out some quick kudos to Timegate for the following:

• using a single TCP/IP port for their multiplayer

• allowing AI in multiplayer

• including the ability to see all of the zones involved (zone of control, zone of supply, etc..)

• including random map generation

• breaking the mold!