King's Bounty: The Legend Editorial
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This doesn't stop from recommending the game to anyone: it's truly great for long enough to justify the purchase. Even once the ideas have run out, it slowly blossoms into something more tactical than before. Rapidly running out of money due to my constant need to reinforce, I instead concentrated on playing better. My spell choices were no longer simply a matter of which I had enough mana for, or which would deal out the most damage most quickly, but of arranging elaborate complementary combos. Nullify rather than attack the most dangerous enemies, calculate common units' greatest weaknesses, and even stuff as simple but crucial as arranging various obstacles between serious threats and my frail back-row support troops. Dropping a piece of rock onto a couple of hexes is hardly spectacular, but if that phalanx of 300 demons has to smash through it to move forwards, that's one turn in which they can't thump some of my guys to death.
In other words, I wasn't having quite as much fun as before, but I become an awful lot better at the game. Its difficulty is a black mark against the gme, but it became increasingly clear that it's not simply a case of Katauri Interactive being big meanies. Rather it's that they've made a game that's a whole lot more tactical than the cheerful, superdeformed art style implies. With my strategy hat on at last, I still lost of lot of good men, but generally I'd come out the other end of a fight with the bulk of my army still on their feet. I discovered recently that the British army had almost no concept of frontline medicine or barracks hygiene until the First World War. Even as late as the Crimean War, vastly more men died as a result of disease and malnutrition than did those on the battlefield. Basic ventilation and sanitation more or less ushered away the typhus and cholera that had gone hand in hand with warfare. Late in the game, I'd had a similar revelation a few astoundingly logical changes meant far fewer meaningless deaths. I was, at last, a worthy general.
