First off – hello. I’m Mark Sutherns, I work at CA UK in the Studio Marketing department and hopefully, you’ll be seeing a lot more of me on this very blog and on the forum in the months ahead. Enough of the introduction though, let’s get down to business.
I wanted to make a post to follow up on some of the comments and threads I’ve read on the Medieval II forum since the announcement of Kingdoms. In particular, I wanted to post some more info on the heroes and special abilities feature to give you some more detail and perhaps put some people’s minds at rest. I would have posted on this before now, but I wanted to get some additional info from the dev team in Oz and with the time difference...well you know. Anyway, enough of the rambling excuses, here's the beef on heroes and abilities.
Firstly heroes have been added to Kingdoms in order to reflect the role that certain significant leaders played in battle. Up until now in Total War, you've developed your own Generals, their traits and command abilities but with Kingdoms we wanted to take that a step further by giving the player unique General characters that came equipped with improved abilities in battle. These special abilities reflect the influence that these great leaders of men had on their troops and their potential to turn the battle in the favour of their armies.
By giving these heroes increased abilities, it makes these particular Generals even more precious, therefore introducing new strategies concerning how these heroes are used in terms of where they are deployed on the campaign map and which battles they are thrown into.
The special abilities included in Kingdoms (we’ll reveal more detail on these in the weeks and months ahead) will be limited to one per hero and will be carefully balanced so, while they have an influence on the battle, they are not so powerful as to unbalance things dramatically. Typically these powers will be limited to morale effects on your own troops and in some cases, the morale of enemy troops. As you'll see when you get to play Kingdoms, these abilities make these heroes significant to the campaign game so that the player you’re driven to keep them alive and to use them strategically at the right time and in the right battles within the campaign.
To give you even more detail, Dan Lehtonen, a designer on Kingdoms from our studio in Brisbane, sent me this overnight:
“The one ability that seems to have spooked a lot of people is the Byzantine politics ability. This unfortunately prompted by an inaccurate translation from the Gamestar magazine preview in which it was thought that enemy units would be made to fight against other enemy units, when in fact they cause a ruckus throughout their own unit, causing a distraction and holding that unit up. This can provide many tactical opportunities on the battlefield with possible flanks being opened or vital units being held up by infighting.
Manuel’s ability represents the skill and cunning use of Byzantine agents’ provocateur. These men slip into an enemy army before battle and bribe greedy members of enemy units to start a ruckus when given a signal from the Byzantines. They do not kill anyone in their own unit! Because if they did and the battle is won by their army they would be strung up as murderers! Of course Manuel has promised through his agents that they will be spared if they lose… There is no magic at work here, just capitalizing on pure human greed.”
So there you go. I hope this sheds some more light on this particular feature. More will become clear when we reveal each of the heroes and their particular abilities in a month or so. In the meantime, keep the feedback coming and I’ll endeavour to keep you updated with extra snippets of information and detail up until release.
Medieval 2: Kingdoms - Expansion Discussion
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Originally Posted by Budwise
Lost my money.
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