Sakae Wu wrote:I can't seem to find any estimated date for the finished product. One reviewer said it's already been 7 months in early access, which seems a little long.
I've seen games linger in Early Access for years (Prison Architect was there for three or so, I think), so it's not really too odd, I think.
I'm not sure what they mean by "300 official positions based on history" though. Is it like ranks in rotk?
20 unit classes sounds very interesting, and over 300 special abilities?!
There are ranks, yes. I am not sure what they mean by the 300 special abilities--there are in-battle tactics but nowhere near 300. The special abilities might be the feature where officers gain stat bonuses and access to special units when they reach certain requirements (usually enough Deeds).
There are a lot more unit types than Koei typically does--it uses the "three types" with cavalry, infantry, and bows, but there's a very large variety of each type. A lot of them are special units only certain cities can recruit or certain officers can use, though there's a "seal" systme you can use to give access to special units to your other officers, but I'm a little unsure on how it works, as I haven't unlocked any yet.
Certain officers have access to special units once you meet the requirements--the White Riders for Gongsun Zan, Gao Shun has special elite infantry, I believe Cao Chun has the Tiger Cavalry, and so on. Even Cao Bao gets one (I believe I've read he led a unit that's semi-famous in China).
Have you had any problems with it crashing Gray Riders? That seems to be the biggest complaint along with the Chinese only manual.
I've read that but haven't had crashes myself. However, I read one person mention the crashes mostly seem to be after battles, and I've only fought two battles so far.
Zyzyfer wrote:I'm curious to hear more about how the battles play out. I'll go poke around on Steam but feel free to write something if you want, Gray. I mainly more meant that the battles in XIII are so mundane and the AI tends to be easy to manipulate. These are classic Koei ROTK tropes I know, so I am curious if this one shows promise.
The ones I had seems like they'll work well enough once the AI is improved a bit--kamikaze charges with their commander was the main issue I saw. It has the standard unit tactics (two per unit class) and a much larger set of strategies like setting ambush (I believe it's the type where you place a unit in ambush and it springs when the enemy walks into it rather than a strategy you aim at a specific unit like in XI) or other various tricks.
I've sometimes had units use "join" attacks--it might require they're on the enemy units front and rear and won't work from the sides. Ranged units always seem to lend supporting fire to other ranged units.
Duels are pretty bad, unfortunately, and this complaint seems to come up a bit on the reviews and forums. You set five attacks up ahead of time, both go, then the duel ends. I just tell the game to auto assign and see what happens since when you're playing a blind bluff choosing myself probably won't make a huge difference unless I figure out the AI has a preferred pattern.
One big issue is the game doesn't have a tutorial/help file yet, and the manual isn't available in english. There are a lot of stats I'm not sure exactly how they work--duelling has "Combat", "Valor", "Horsemanship", "Archery", and there's a stat called "Capture" I think is used there, too. I can guess how some of them work, but not others.
Edit: The big stat variety leads to really nice touches, though. In Koei's games Mi Fang has cruddy pol; here he's quite good at raising commerce (being from a merchant family) but still pretty bad at the other development tasks.
Some of the stats are very odd, though. Huang Zu's a better unit leader than Huang Zhong!