What this is about.

One of the great things about these feature series is that they give me license to reinstall games I hadn’t touched in a long time. I had to do some compatibility/patching nonsense to get Kohan: Immortal Sovereigns working (not quite perfectly, but functionally) and I’m glad that I did. But immediately after starting it, I realized just how isolated the Kohan series is.

See, in the intervening years I had forgotten how to play the game almost entirely. Told that a gold mine was out of my supply range, it took me a while to figure out what was going on. And which units are connected to which buildings? And why can’t I build a settlement there? A game that I truly loved and appreciated had wiped itself from my memory.

This is a testament to two things. First, it revealed the originality of Timegate’s design. I could not necessarily fall back on old habits to figure out just how everything fit together. Second, and more depressingly, it revealed that Kohan has had next to no influence on the direction of real time strategy games even as that genre changed dramatically over the decade.

This does not mean that features you find in Kohan don’t pop-up in other titles. It was one of the first in a wave of Hero Centered RTS designs, games that encouraged you to organize your armies around super units that gained experience as they fought. It was not only hero based, but squad based since each group of units could reinforce and repair itself if it was in supply range.

This latter feature is one reason why Kohan remains one of the most remarkable examples of how tactics and strategy work together in a traditional real time strategy game. Strategically, you were always much stronger closer to your own towns than you were to the enemy’s; given a breathing space, you could heal and reinforce damaged units. And you could only draw resources from mines and forests you were close enough to protect (none of this running to a distant gold mine and mining the hell out of it before the enemy notices like in Age of Empires.) So every battle became a matter of razing rival economic buildings to prevent new units from entering the field while also preventing the retreat of wounded enemy armies. You would want to target commanders and sometimes build squads that had ranged units to support front line infantry.

All this melded nearly perfectly into how the terrain of the maps matter. Yes, it had chokepoints – most RTSes do. But the forests also mattered for defensive purposes. If you could force a battle between squads on land that favored you, then you had a great chance of winning. Forced marches were commonplace, since they gave your foot soldiers a huge advantage in mobility with an equally huge penalty in combat. Even building upgrades had a crucial strategic and tactical component since you had choices of upgrades, each of which would emphasize a single aspect of your war effort.

And many of these great design aspects went nowhere beyond the 2004 Kohan sequel.

I totally understand why Kohan was a commercial bust, even though it was a critical success. It was a medieval fantasy RTS with no recognizable brand and no hook for gamers. Age of Kings had history, Battle for Middle Earth had Middle Earth. The name was actually quite descriptive but it describes things that mean nothing to you until you’ve initiated yourself in the mythology of Kohan and its immortal heroes. And it certainly didn’t help that the first Kohan was published by Strategy First in the middle of its “we’ll publish anything” meltdown.

But one hopes that commercial failures can still have legacies in other games. Game design is clearly weird, though. As Bruce noted in his essay on Combat Mission, even a brilliant and successful design can have a hard time breaking through a genre’s orthodoxy. Kohan‘s design would have probably have had a greater impact on RTSes if it had come five or six years later, in the heydey of Relic rewriting the rules or Ironclad expanding the scope of the traditional RTS.

It might have made no difference at all. The genre has, for the most part, moved to quicker and tighter experiences than Kohan provided, and that’s perfectly understandable. And though I’d love to return to Kohan‘s gameplay ethos, I can’t say I have any fondness for the world of Kohan. And maybe that was part of the problem with the game’s popularity – the campaign doesn’t give you any reason to feel connected to the magical world it creates – admittedly something that few strategy games have managed with original worlds. So you are left with a brilliant design document, and even if that’s probably enough for a lot of critics, it’s certainly not enough for a universe of gamers out there.

But now that this essay is done, I will go back to Kohan: Immortal Sovereigns. At least now that I remember how to play it.

Next up, Bruce Geryk reminisces about Rails Across America.