Battle Realms

Battle Realms is a 2001 published in a Japanese-inspired fantasy scenario located somewhere real-time strategy of the US developer Liquid Entertainment , published by Ubisoft . The add-on Winter of the Wolf was released in 2002 .

In September 2012, both games were also available for download on GOG.com . Since December 2019, Battle Realms and the expansion have been available as an early access game on Steam . This is a game version that again allows multiplayer games without additional software such as Hamachi .

Overview

Battle Realms follows the principles of many other real-time strategy games. All factions or clans have similar buildings and workers with similar benefits. But unlike most other RTS games, these workers can evolve into military units. As a result, buildings are not used to “produce” units, but to “train” them.

Farmers are the only directly created units in the game, besides the Zen Masters , who are a kind of hero. Most of the buildings in the game are schools, where farmers can be trained in other units. These in turn can be trained to become improved fighters (level 2 units) in the other schools. The third stage makes the warriors of the dragon and snake clan to samurai or rōnin . The other two clans, Lotus and Wolf, can advance to a fourth level, even if they only have three barracks types in the usual sense. In addition to this training sequence, there is also the school for healers.

Another difference in unit training is that farmers are automatically created in peasant huts for free. The duration of this creation increases with each new unit. The unit limit is between 20 and 40 units.

Some buildings can give units special abilities in exchange for resources. These special abilities can also make rather weak units very effective against special opponents; so the archer can be equipped with either zen or fire arrows. Zen arrows reveal a small area, making the archer very useful for spying, fire arrows, on the other hand, cause great damage to buildings, not least because a fire in battle realms can also spread and, if built too tightly, an entire village into Can catch fire.

Another of the key elements in Battle Realms are yin and yang points , which are earned through battles. They are used to summon Zen Masters, upgrade units and do damage from heroes. There are also some clan-specific things that need yin / yang points, such as the dragon fire of the dragon clan, a kind of meteor shower that costs three yang points and the lives of four samurai. The further away the fighting units are from their base, the more yin or yang points can be gained through this fight.

The four clans are very different from units to special abilities to the higher parts of the technology tree. While Lotus and Wolf have their particularly strong level 4 units and the dragon clan causes great damage with its dragon fire, the snake clan can revive fallen soldiers into zombies with its necromancer. There are many other differences, which makes the individual clans very different to play.

Each of the four clans has its own backstory and special things that are metaphorical for these clans:

Dragon: fire, summer, east, flexibility, honor
Snake: water, autumn, west, ferocity, domination, thieving
Wolf: earth, spring, south, robustness, freedom
Lotus: air, winter, north, intelligence, corruption, wickedness

history

The story begins with a young traveler named Kenji, whose father was once the lord of the snake clan. Kenji tells of the events that lead to today's world.

The Horde, so to speak the absolute evil, destroyed everything on their way. Tarrant the Elder, the leader of the Dragon Clan and ancestor of Kenji, was forced to use the most sacred and powerful treasure of the Dragon Clan at that time, the Snake Eye. This was given to the clan by his totem , the dragon itself. In doing so, he saved his people from the Horde, albeit at a high price: the continent was divided in half and many other clans were affected. Traumatized by the events, his son, Tarrant the Younger, founded the snake clan, which focused more on survival than on honor. Meanwhile, the dragon clan led a life far from its original strength.

The Lotus Clan used to be a peaceful clan of nature followers, but there were many senior leaders in this clan who secretly learned the black magic of the forbidden path. Eventually they used this learned magic to change the once peaceful Lotus into a vicious clan that follows the Forbidden Path and uses its magic unscrupulously.

The wolf clan experienced destructive storms on its island due to the dragon's fury and was forced to use the clan's treasure, the skull of the white wolf, which it had received from its totem, the white wolf. The power of the skull led the clan to the land of the serpent clan, where they intended to live in peace again. But the Snake Clan had reached an agreement with the Lotus, allowing them to enslave the Wolf Clan, which required them to work in the Lotus Clan's slate mines.

Generations later, Kenji witnessed bandits raiding a farming village. Should Kenji join the people of his clan to send the farmers to their place? Or he could kill the bandits. Both possibilities open one of the two paths of history. Kenji could rejoin the Snake Clan to become its master, or he could bring back the long-forgotten Dragon Clan.

Game details

In contrast to most other real-time strategy games, all units have a melee attack. However, this is weaker with ranged fighters, which makes it extremely useful to involve enemy ranged combat units in close combat. Soldiers attacked in hand-to-hand combat ignore other commands, making this easy to do. The units are very detailed and have a lot of martial arts animations. If units run fast enough, they can dodge projectiles. These also have different speeds.

All units have different types of damage. There are cut, stab, stump, blast, magic, and fire, but the damage type of a ranged attack does not have to be the same as that of the melee attack. Each unit has resistance to individual types of damage and weaknesses to others. An example: A level 2 unit of the Wolf Clan, the Hammerbearers, can win in a duel against the Level 3 Berserker of the Wolf Clan, since the Berserker is very susceptible to blunt attacks. This ensures that the game is very well balanced and that the units from the beginning of the game are also important in order to win at the end. Although a melee usually defeats a ranged fighter, the ranged fighter can win if the ranged fighter is resistant to the melee's attack and the melee is not resistant to the ranged fighter's melee attack.

Generally speaking, the best combination is blunt and explosive weapons, or cutting and magical weapons, as hardly any unit is resistant to both. Usually each unit is weak against one or the other.

Most units have a special feature, such as the immunity of the spearman against height advantages or the area damage of the lotus infected. These can be supportive, such as an animation of the Kabuki warrior, which refreshes the stamina of farmers, or offensive, such as the animation of the Lotus Sword Disciple, with which he grinds his sword and thus causes more damage.

Each unit has two status bars, a green life bar and a blue stamina bar . Farmers also have a third, white bar when they are harvesting rice or scooping water, which shows how many raw materials they have with them. When the white bar is full, the farmers go back to the farmhouse with the rice or water to deliver them. Stamina is required for some special abilities such as healing by geishas (for snakes and dragons) and running, which makes a unit move faster until the stamina is used up. A damaged unit can (albeit slowly) regenerate its life points up to the green area (75% of the maximum value), the Wolf Clan even completely. Healing in Battle Realms works a little differently than most other real-time strategy games. Here the healers automatically heal units that fall into the yellow (50%) or red (20%) area. You are then completely healed immediately. You can also instruct them to heal units with health points in the green area. This makes healers very important in Battle Realms . When healing, dragon geishas use as much stamina as they renew their ally's life points, snake fan geishas need between a quarter and half of their stamina for such a healing, while lotus wing masters sacrifice one of their three ravens. In view of their fast regeneration rate (regenerate up to 100% before an improvement), the Wolf Clan does not use any healers. Instead, his druids can prevent enemies with roots from moving.

In Battle Realms , each player can only own four watchtowers. Furthermore, each tower does not have its own attack. Rather, they act as observation towers. To give them an attack, you have to occupy them with a unit. That unit then uses its own ranged attack, if it has one. A ranged fighter on a tower has a greater range due to the height advantage and also a damage bonus of 50%. The towers also have a special ability which costs them part of their tower energy and which varies depending on the clan. The dark lightning strike of the lotus causes great damage to enemies in an area, the wolf clan has a horn that drastically restricts the movement of enemies around the tower and does minimal damage, towers from the snake clan can blind opponents with lightning powder and their resistances as well as their range of vision Weaken drastically, and the dragon clan can use a gong, which temporarily paralyzes attackers.

Zen masters take on the role of heroes in Battle Realms . They are leaders of the clans that ensure its survival. They can be conjured up for a considerable amount of rice and water, as well as yin and yang. Their "fighting techniques" are unique and can often decide the luck of the battle in their own favor. In order to balance this out, in contrast to Warcraft III, for example, the heroes can only be summoned almost at the end of the technology tree. They usually take on the role of rulers, mercenaries, wizards, demigods, or even monsters. They are summoned in fortresses and for some clans in other places as well. For wolf and dragon clan monks are also listed, while snake and lotus are allowed to recruit ninjas (4 monks or ninjas are allowed per player, but the dragon clan Zen master Tao can recruit two additional monks).

In Battle Realms , the environment isn't just there to please the eye. Forests are not impassable, there are even advantages to moving through them, such as obstructing enemy vision. Furthermore, trees can hinder remote attacks until they are destroyed by them. In return, moving through a forest slows the running speed and in some trees there are birds that, startled, fly away as soon as a unit runs underneath. This will alert an opponent to the position of this unit. Cliffs, ditches, hills, and other elevated positions give units advantages in damage and defense. Melee fighters receive 25% additional damage, ranged fighters even 50%. Units can be slowed down by slopes and rain, apart from a few floating units. The rain also puts out fires and makes rice grow faster. Burning parts of buildings can even damage units.

In some game worlds ( maps ) there are also fire pits and moving boulders. The boulders can be pushed by a unit. These cause massive damage when they come into contact with buildings and units that they graze or roll over. If he encounters enemy units, for example, they usually die immediately. If they come into contact with buildings, they are severely damaged (especially if the rock rolls down a cliff). However, rocks that are bumped into a bump can roll back and kill the unit that bumped it.

If requested by the player, horses can also cavort in the world of Battle Realms . These can be caught by farmers. Farmers need two attempts for each horse to be caught, whereby the first always fails. All clans have different methods of capturing horses: the farmer of the Lotus clan hypnotizes the horses so that they will follow him, peasants of the dragon clan flatter them and peasants of the wolf clan hit them on the head so that they follow them dazed. Horses are used by all clans as mounts or farm animals for harvesting the rice fields or for carrying water. The only exception to this is the Wolf Clan: They feed the horses in their cave to wolves, which then surround the leader of the pack as computer-controlled units and attack enemies automatically. Horses in the Lotusclan are used as mounts, but the horses turn into shadow horses with burning hooves, which can also set buildings on fire with a fire breath.

Winter of the Wolf

The 2002 add-on Winter of the Wolf takes place seven years before the events of Battle Realms. In the new scenario “Grayback's Journey”, the chief of the Wolf Clan leads a rebellion against the Lotus Clan, which enslaved the Wolf.

In addition, the add-on introduces a new tech tree. For example, a snake maker can be trained as a soldier in the murderer's cave and a fan geisha is retrained to become a witch. However, it does not work the other way around.

In addition to these two new types of troops, each clan also receives another Zen master and its own option to defend itself against watchtowers. This possibility is always a combat skill of the new add-on-exclusive level 2 units:

Dragon: Maid of War

Energy transfer gives bonus damage to nearby allies while draining the tower's energy.

Snake: witch

Vampire Gaze gives nearby allies bonus health while draining the tower's energy.

Wolf: Dryad

Undermining Ritual gives nearby allies bonus resistances while draining the tower's energy.

Lotus: Overseer

Tower Corruption inflicts damage to nearby enemies by sucking up tower energy.

criticism

The original unpatched version of Battle Realms was mainly criticized for its extremely strong AI , which was hard to beat in some game levels. In addition to this, it seemed to some players that they had little control over their units, which combined with a strong AI creates battles that last a long time.

continuation

Ed Del Castillo, President of Liquid Entertainment, announced on the Liquid Entertainment homepage on March 26th, 2012 that ten years after the publication of Winter of the Wolf, work was being done on a remake of the old real-time strategy game Battle Realms. Liquid Entertainment aims to work closely with the Battle Realms community. These Castillo gave-mail address E announced its so fans (their proposals English feature requests ), bug reports and the like can contact Liquid Entertainment.

The next part of the game was officially announced in the weekly "Liquid Videocast". On the June 16, 2013 episode, Del Castillo also announced that a Kickstarter.com campaign would be launched to fund the project through crowdfunding . The game should be subtitled "Lair of the Lotus".

The sequel was canceled due to budget problems.

Web links

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↑ Battle Realms release on GOG.com

↑ Battle Realms on Steam as an Early Access game

↑ Open Call for Battle Realms Bugs ( Memento of the original from September 15, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2
↑ Battle Realms 2 officially announced.
Jump up ↑ Battle Realms 2: Lair of the Lotus. Retrieved September 24, 2018 .

[1] Battle Realms release on GOG.com

[2] Battle Realms on Steam as an Early Access game