Koei and more Koei: RTK8 and DW4 Empires
I’m still engrossed in RTK8. Most recently I’ve been inching my way up the east coast of China, up into Yuan Tan’s territory, and back down into Ma Teng’s territory. I’ve taken two or three cities of Ma Teng’s, and I’m about to take his recently-relocated capital.
I think I’ve executed too many officers who wouldn’t join me, because lately free officers and officers of other forces have begun turning me away at their doors, saying that they won’t meet with someone as nefarious as me. The game has a low tolerance for executions, it seems, and they inflate the hidden Infamy stat more than any other action you can take. I’ll probably end up getting a “tyrant” ending, but it’ll be fitting for a ruler that started out as a bandit pillaging villages.
I’ve finally got the hang of battles, so much so that I don’t feel like leaving them to the AI at all anymore. Yesterday during a battle in which the AI tactician had been captured, leaving control of the troops to me, I realized that all that’s required to win a battle is to defeat the enemy’s main attacking or defending force, and that any and all of an enemy’s reinforcements can be ignored. I don’t think the AI tacticians ever take this into account, and when battles are decided without the game visiting the actual battle screen (for instance, with battles between CPU players or battles that I choose not to view), I think the outcome is decided by raw statistics with a random element in there somewhere. Of course, winning a battle in RTK is 90% preparation, anyway (making sure a city has enough troops; using officers with high WAR/INT stats, who have varied and high-level skills, and who can command as many troops as possible), but adopting this tactic lets me be certain things will go in my favor. There are some battlefield techniques that I’ve picked up from watching battles, though, like not moving troops past their line of sight in a turn (so as to avoid surprise attacks), maintaining supply lines, and making sure to occupy outposts and keep them occupied.
I’m not sure if I’ll want to hop right back into another game of this after I finish this one, but next game I’ll definitely go for one of the more famous historical officers, rather than creating my own, because I’d like to see some of those officer-specific event scenes that I’ve been missing out on.
I finally sated my curiosity about that other Koei series with my purchase of Dynasty Warriors 4 Empires last week. The game is different from the mainline DW series in that the game’s framework takes place on map of China, divided into sections RTK-style, and the player takes control of a region on the map and attempts to expand his/her territory while other CPU-controlled rulers do the same. The gameflow is divided into turns, and each turn the player can choose from up to four pairs of actions that subordinate officers can take, such as hiring troops, promoting commerce that increases the player’s per-turn revenues, promoting technology for the development of items, and so on. When the player decides to invade a neighbor’s territory or defend against invasion, the battle is carried out on a standard DW-style playfield, complete with six-hit combos and kill-counts in the hundreds (or thousands). The game’s structure is all very simple, especially right after a game of RTK8, but it’s satisfying and gives the battles a great sense of purpose.
DW4E introduced a system for the actual battles that involves a network of bases on the level map that can be controlled by either the player or the enemy. The network dictates the flow of supplies and troops, and the more supply routes to a given base are controlled by the base’s owner, the stronger that base will be against attack. Controlling a map involves cutting off all of the enemy’s lines of supply. For instance, on a map where the win requirement is to defeat the enemy commander Cao Cao, if the player immediately runs to Cao Cao, he/she will be overwhelmed by troops. Not only will there be a huge number of troops guarding the commander, the troops will be more aggressive and will attack nearly constantly, not allowing the player to get any hits in. However, if the player surrounds and cuts off the enemy base camp, enemy morale will be very low and defense will be sparse, making the one-on-one battle much easier to manage.
Now, I know that the complaint most often levelled at this series is that it’s completely mindless. That’s the complaint that kept me away from the series for so long, but now I find it to be mostly not true. The combat is similar to arcade beat ’em ups, but there are two attack buttons, and different attack chains with different finishers can be brought out with different button sequences. The properties of the finishers are essential for crowd-clearing and for maintaining the advantage when fighting strong enemy generals, and different finishers are appropriate for different situations. Yes, there are overpowered characters (like Lu Bu) that let you win practically by just mashing the square button, but most characters take some dexterity with the command combos, and some are especially skill-oriented (like Zhuge Liang, who has relatively weak attacks, but strong spells activated by long chains). Plus, the supply-route system gives purpose to every crowd of troops you clear, and provides back-and-forth tension on each level.
It seems that DW’s core gameplay really is closer to the traditional arcade beat-em-up, than anything, except even stripped to the basics it’s more interesting than that in any arcade beater I’ve played (aside from maybe Advance Guardian Heroes), and with the strategic level structure added there’s really no contest for me. I hear DW5 uses the same supply-route system on its levels, so when I eventually pick it up, it’ll be interesting to play something with more structured levels on a per-character basis along with that system’s challenge.
And while the gaudiness and historical inaccuracies present in the DW series rub me the wrong way, it’s still fun to see some of the generals I’ve had working for me for years in RTK8 and have read about in Three Kingdoms really tear it up on the battlefield.