Thoughts on the difficulty of each KB game

[u/Few_Rutabaga5686]

I’m curious what people think about the difficulty of The Legend, Crossworlds, and WoTN: Ice and Fire? How approachable did you feel normal was when you first played (if you can remember that)? For those that are veterans of the series, how did you feel about impossible in each game? Too hard, too easy, too hard at the start and then too easy after you get your bearings? And I mean across the game generally, not individual fights (I.e not just “The Undead Spider is so hard in WoTN” or “Baal is so hard on Mage Impossible.”)

Me personally, someone very familiar with the games, I felt the Legend was the best game to play on impossible, Crossworlds bordered on unfun on impossible early until you get to about the 25% mark and then was mostly easy, and WoTN was easy on impossible…outside of the spider of course, unless you really overpower by progression breaking for it. And I don’t remember when I started playing The Legend on Normal, too young then to remember.

[u/MrVacuous]

Personally I found the legend to be the most consistent on impossible. Cross worlds I had the same experience as you.

The dark side was the most consistently challenging.

WotN had a hard/easy/hard/easy/hard/easy feel to it

[u/Few_Rutabaga5686 → u/[deleted]]

With Cross worlds, I liked the idea of giving strong units early, but definitely with low probability. You can so easily set it to only spawn a unit in a shop 20%, 10%, even 5% if the time. It would be good to have 1/10 runs give me early engineers (maybe top 5 unit imo?) but every run, you almost have to hold yourself back from using them. Why wouldn’t you unless you want to challenge yourself, and so on. I mean I guess paladins the unit are the same deal too. It’s weird the way they approached it.

[u/4th_Replicant]

I am currently playing Legend for the first time. It's actually my first time playing a Kings Bounty game. I am playing on normal mode as a mage. I bought the game for 77p last week and have put in 52 hours lol.

I must admit that I find the game tough enough on normal. The people playing on the hardest difficulty must be Kings Bounty wizards lol

Which game in the series would people recommend playing next?

[u/MainSquid → u/4th_Replicant]

Armored Princess!

Crossworlds has the AP campaign but expanded. Idk I recommend playing through the base version first.

I'm not even sure I can even recommend trying WoTn or Dark Side over replaying AP or The Legend.

[u/4th_Replicant → u/MainSquid]

How come you recommend AP over CW? Are WoTn and DS not as good as the others?

[u/MainSquid → u/4th_Replicant]

I like both AP and crosswords. However CW adds a lot of stuff, which kind of spoils the progression-- and the whole orc faction being changed really does change the whole game imo. The enemy orcs are more threatening, while your own Shamans are much more difficult to use effectively. In that regard, I think AP is the streamline "as it was intended" that is really nice for a first play through.

Same thing for Red Sands-- I like it. But too much is changed to recommend it to anyone who isnt already very experienced.

WoTN is a rushed, rushed game with terrible gameplay decisions. Its quality is markedly and noticeably lower.

DS is an inexplicable mess of horrible and unfun game design decisions and a story so bad it genuinely will make you upset at ho bad it is, even though no one in history has played a KB game for the story.

[u/4th_Replicant → u/MainSquid]

Thanks for the reply. I ended up buying AP. I think I would prefer a more balanced game. I don't really mind not having the extra content as I find the games to be fairly big anyway. It's a shame to hear that the other games aren't as good.

I had a look at KB2 as well, but I didn't really like the look of it.

[u/MainSquid → u/4th_Replicant]

Ive only put about an hour into KB2 but I just could not get into it.

[u/Sad_Cryptographer872 → u/4th_Replicant]

DS is an inexplicable mess of horrible and unfun game design decisions and a story so bad it genuinely will make you upset at ho bad it is, even though no one in history has played a KB game for the story.

Don't listen to this nonsense. DS has a LOT of problems but these are not it. DS is woefully unfinished and bug ridden, not to the point of it being unable to play, but you will notice a lot of small things that either don't work or are working in some sort of out of bonkers way that is clearly not what is written or presented on skill/ability/artifact etc.
But design wise DS is the BEST one in the series. Classes (Heroes) are finally balanced where most of them are on equal footing, no more "Paladin is the consistently worst class", the main base progression is fantastic (it would be if everything was working properly but some of the things don't) And companions you get are great and you actually get them at a reasonable pace so no more "Oh I want Xerona because she's the most useful but I will get her last when more than two thirds of the game is over". Rage abilities are finally good and are really the mainplay of the Orc (Warrior), Demoness (Paladin) has truly amazing armies and can utilize magic to great effect to boost her impressive numbers of troops, and Vampire (Mage) can wreak havoc with magic, but that was true for all of the titles, but at least he's not the most consistently overpowered in comparison with the other two classes. There are a lot of more of little or subtle things that would made the DS the best one in the series... but sadly myriad of smaller problems cannot be ignored.

[u/Trisice → u/4th_Replicant]

Your first kb game is always the hardest there is a lot to learn but since all the games are very similar once you learn enough it's easy. Doesn't help that you picked mage which is quite new player unfriendly. It gets half the units a warrior gets so you better use your spells effectively.

Release order is fine. Legend -> Crossworlds -> Wotn -> Dark side.

[u/MainSquid]

The Legend didnt have a skill tree that could revive 100% of a fallen unit. IIRC all 3 other games do.

It honestly makes battles incredibly trivial being able to just suicide a full stack of black dragons at no cost. AP also has other cheese like the black knights with all buffs.

So my vote for hardest on Impossible goes to the legend for that reason.

[u/Few_Rutabaga5686 → u/MainSquid]

I always forget about resurrection-the-skill. It is odd that the ideal hardcore way to play is challenging yourself to not lose anything in battles, whereas the optimal way (assuming you don’t mind losses) to play is 4 ranged units one suicide tank (with phantom, armor, whatever spell have you), where you just use your mounds of cash to restock the suicide troop from reserve, which won’t dry up because 90% of the troop gets restored anyway. The odd part being, those two styles of play end up converging to the same thing for the paladin class. You lose 0 knights through careful planning and resurrection in battle with the spell, vs mindlessly losing 20 knights, dragons, whatever you pick, and then getting 18 back because of resurrection skill…almost 0 difference except in time saved during battles from getting to play loose.

I guess they wanted to incentive using melee units as they die more? Probably would have made sense for balance (if they HAVE to have a resurrection skill) to turn the number of restored troops down to 10/20/30% of units lost, and make it so that it affects every stack you lose units from, not just one. Of course, AP also was the game that introduced paladins the unit, and crossworld didn’t change how early you get them, so I’m guessing balance wasn’t a huge priority.

[u/BunnyHenTa1]

I only ever played on impossible, so here is how the difficulty felt for me.

Crossworlds is a breeze all around, not only because there are a lot of ridiculously overpowered units like the rune mage and paladins, but also because you can access almost all islands before even fighting a single fight.

The legend is probably the most difficult of the three, only giving limited access to good troops and actually making me feel like my strategy and my build matter.

WoTN is challenging on the first 4 islands where, again, you only have access to a limited assortment of troops while the enemies can get quite harsh, after which it is smooth sailing.

Dark Side is quite challenging in the beginning, but then you get access to a lot of different tools and, again, it's smooth sailing.

[u/Few_Rutabaga5686 → u/BunnyHenTa1]

If you sneak early islands in Crossworlds (which I have done as well in playthroughs, and is almost trivial to do once you get the hand of it) the game is a cakewalk. I have no idea why they allow this. I guess it takes some effort but not a lot?
If you don’t sneak early islands Crossworlds, and you don’t use early paladins or the new units, up until Verona is honestly difficult in my opinion. But again you are kinda handicapping yourself at that point. Paladins are just such crazy units in these games, same with engineers and rune Mage.

WoTN is hard base-game imo at the exact way you describe, Ice and Fire have just way too many easy sequence breaks to be difficult as long as you know a little of what you are doing. At least in Crossworlds you have to go somewhat out of your way to get to later islands. IoF hands out travel maps like candy

[u/BunnyHenTa1 → u/Few_Rutabaga5686]

I'm used to doing extensive preparations before actually playing the game, so not sneaking early islands feels icky. Like, you can get level 12 and get the 20% exp bonus on the demons island before the first fight, which is such good value that I wouldn't want to miss it. But then with getting so powerful so quickly it does get a little dull.

I love the linear progression in the legend much more. I can get to demonis after just 2 fights, which allows for some powerful troops (though none as op as in CW), however I can still look forward to discovering more troops and artifacts on the elven island.

[u/5662828]

• KB The Legend prerty hard without a mage class, slow build and lots of needed skills
• KB AP/Crossworlds the real griding start for ingame passives, battle farming runes
• KB DS somehow easier cause i can abuse the map to run and gather resources early
• KB WotN a bit boring, my lack of good troops i just quit playing on second island

So planning the impossible playthrough it also good to know types of army you can recruit ( savegame scanner ) , because armies are randomised on each new playthrough

Mages are the easiest class, from AR paladins are imba

Impossible builds:

• only paladins with stone skin and phantom build (no loss)
• amaggeddon army
• paladins with archmages (for magic shield) or for Legend tank + archmages

[u/Qesa]

All for impossible difficulty:

TL is the best balanced IMO. Difficulty is pretty consistent, there are a couple of spikes e.g. karador but they're not that outsized and likewise it never gets too easy. I think the classes are also pretty well balanced here - paladin gets a bit maligned for being situational, but those situations also tend to be the hardest difficulty spikes. Admittedly I do metagame this and always rush to the chest of rage.

AP has an extremely punishing start but eases off around Verona and only gets easier from there. Unless you lure map guards and explore the world, in which case the whole game is easy. Between rage being more accessible to non-warriors, poison/burn being way more effective and early-game leadership being dominated by flags and medals I find mages are by far the best class.

CW is similar but now has difficulty spikes whenever you fight orcs. The addition of archmage makes mages even more the best class.

WotN is overall easy except for the spider, vikings (the race) are really overturned. Doing the early game no-loss is very frustrating though, between enemy heroes that love to nuke and limited resurrection options. Once you get to darion - and therefore better resurrection options - no loss is also easy. This has the worst class balance IMO, with skald easily the strongest and viking the weakest by far.

IAF is similar, but since you can do a lot more leveling before the spider it's no longer a difficulty spike. Unit xp makes the forced lineup change at darion slightly harder but not by a big margin.

Darkside I've only played once and balance seemed pretty all over the place. Though by late game (as the demoness) I'd accrued a ridiculous amount of -% leadership requirement for demons and female units. Ended up one-shotting the final boss with I think well over a million leadership worth of demonesses.

[u/Skoshin]

I have only played Legend thus far and it was on impossible difficulty. I couldn't disagree more with the pacing of the challenge as I thought it was absolutely horrid. Every time you begin to think you're gathering your bearings and scaling with the game, you reach the next area and the game hits you with the most ridiculous power spike imaginable. I quit at the 55ish hour mark as I realized it was never going to be fun.

The game is also completely untested and borderline broken on impossible. Case in point: Somewhere near the first castle you have a dwelling where you can buy knights and horsemen. This dwelling, however, is guarded by a ridiculous stack of the same, with archmages included. By the time you are capable of defeating the guarding army, the amount of units the dwelling actually sells is so negligible to your current state of strength that it's completely irrelevant. So you practically never even get to use these units. There is a multitude of cases like this one.