King's Bounty: Warriors of the North

A complete analysis of various aspects of King's Bounty: Warriors of the North.

Many of these posts start from the assumption you've read my posts on The Legend and Armored Princess, the prior entries in the series, largely covering what's changed relative to Armored Princess. If you want that context, you should start here for The Legend posts and then move on to here for the Armored Princess posts.

As with both of those games, I specifically play the Good Old Games release, so you may experience discrepancies if playing a different version.

Also, once again much thanks to Quaranyr in the comments for digging up more precise technical stuff; the Warriors of the North posts particularly benefitted from such digging.

In order;

Units


Vikings. Vikings are the new faction to Warriors of the North, and notably they push aside Humans as your early-game 'default' faction, so I cover them first for Warriors of the North. This page also covers broad mechanical changes of relevance to units, and covers the new Rune mechanic that Vikings make particularly heavy use of but is not actually exclusive to them.

Ice and Fire's Experience System. Ice and Fire is an expansion or DLC for Warriors of the North that adds new content, and one of the things it does is add an experience system for your units. This provides a general outline of how it works... with the caveat that a certain amount of this is guesswork.


Humans. Humans haven't changed much, though they finally have their own mono-racial Morale bonus.


Dwarves, Warriors of the North, or more precisely Ice and Fire, has the best implementation of Dwarves in the entire series, and I love it.


Elves. Elves contain some of the heaviest examples of lifting content from the Armored Princess mod Red Sands, and in particular doing so in a manner that is less powerful and interesting than the Red Sands version. That aside though not a lot has changed.


Orcs. Orcs have been made less overpowered, and also been made a bit simpler. It's a relief all-around.


Demons. They've got a racial gimmick all to themselves now, though it's not one that matters much if I'm honest.


Undead. Necro Energy is a nifty concept, though truth be told it's mostly the spontaneous Zlogn generation that changes how the Undead play.


Neutral Animals. There's a surprising number of little changes here, though they mostly don't add up enough to make up for how animals tend to be underwhelming.


Neutral Sapients. There's a lot of new Neutral units I stuffed into this part, and they're pretty nifty!


Lizardmen. This is actually Ice and Fire-exclusive content; in the base game, Lizardmen are nowhere to be found. Given there's a consistent game-crashing bug in the Lizardmen as-is, my suspicion is they were cut because they hadn't been adapted to the code refactoring in time for the base game's release.


Snow Elves. Probably my favorite faction in the entire series if I'm honest, Snow Elves are fun, interesting, and trend toward good-to-great.


Undead Lizardmen. I love the idea of Undead Lizardmen, but the execution could've used some work. I suspect Ice and Fire was a bit rushed, and Undead Lizardmen's wonky implementation is one of my bits of evidence.

Magic


Chaos. I also cover the overall changes to how Spells work in Warriors of the North in this page.


Order.


Distortion.


Rune. That's right, Warriors of the North adds a brand-new Spell sphere!

Hero


Rage. Warriors of the North has a much better Rage implementation than Armored Princess did, which was already a better implementation than The Legend's. It's pretty good! Though still flawed.


Companions. Warriors of the North dumps 'pick a Companion who adds Item slots and has a unique bonus' in favor of a new system that's... well, it could be worse, but honestly the Companion mechanics is one of Warriors of the North's weak points.


Medals. There's a couple of really irritating Medals in here, but the Medal concept is still fantastic.


Might. I don't really get what Warriors of the North was going for with the Viking.


Spirit. The Mind tree of prior games, renamed for whatever reason. It's a much better implementation than the prior games, in any event.


Magic. The Magic tree hasn't changed much. It hasn't needed to.

Misc


Bosses. Warriors of the North's Bosses are mostly recycled and poorly-tuned, unfortunately, but I've always felt Bosses were one of the least compelling elements of the series anyway, so whatever.

Damage types and Inititative tiers. Just a quick little reference for those.

Comments

  1. Is it possible that Eric was a reference to the historical figure Erik the Red? The whole deal with his title and being sent away because of his father's manslaughter (which is *not* what happens in WotN but the exile theme is apparent) is a bit indicative. Though all I did was an extremely quick internet search, going as far as connecting Tormund with the actual father Thorvald, so I would take that with a grain of salt.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. /shrug

      Erik as a viking name is so stereotypical at this point that it's impossible to be sure without dev confirmation or stronger secondary evidence.

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