I haven't played Disciples 2, but it may help to think out of the box, e.g. are you really supposed to fight those guys, at least early on?

Your message reminds me of playing certain Age of Empires (1) campaign mission where I kept hitting my head to the wall. The enemy started attacking my city early on, before I could set up good defenses or even nice defending army. It seemed they always were a tiny bit ahead of me, no matter how fast I tried to react.

At some point (restarting the mission for the 100th time) I said fuck it and gathered all my villagers and soldiers right at the start, and moved them to a completely different place on the map, leaving my starting city. And that fully worked. The enemies kept attacking my abandoned starting city while I was completely elsewhere building a new city, in a more secure place which was harder for the enemy to find, and to attack (the first town was in the middle where the enemy could attack from several directions, while the new town was in a corner that could be attacked only from one side.

By the time enemy had slowly destroyed my first town and eventually wandered around to my new town, I had already set up stone walls and archers to defend my town, so I could grow a big attacking army behind my turtle defense.

I used a similar tactic in one AoE3 mission which was similarly impossible at first. I am unsure if the meaning of the developers really was to abandon the starting city; I think it was not (because there were some other missions where you were specifically instructed to do so, flee the incoming enemies and set up a town elsewhere).


However, in the very last mission of KKND Extreme ("Hand of God", possibly the hardest and most stressful RTS mission I ever recall playing), it was the exact opposite. Before that, I had played almost all the mission with the old-skool "turtle defense, and attack later"-tactic. It simply wouldn't work on this mission, it was a losing fight if you tried to keep surviving in your starting base.

So I did something I rarely do in single-player RTS games: I started exploring and attacking any enemies as soon as possible, not really caring for my own defense at all. And that did work, I managed to find and cut the enemy supply lines early on and take one of the enemy bases down early, and work my way from there to the Final Victory, from here to eternity, and beyond!

In Disciples 2 I think the difficulty is close to constant all the way through, though definitely at a slightly downward angle. Mostly I think because spells are a bit overpowered in the game.
Regardless, the early game is definitely difficult for a newcomer, but I would argue in the case of D2 at least it contributes wonderfully to the game's atmosphere. The game portrays its universe as a hopelessly dark and deeply unforgiving place, which I feel would've been far less convincing had the early game been a stroll, like the atypical first level in most strategy games.

Reminds me of a level in the first Red Alert, where the main objective is to destroy a truck that drives out of your base during an enemy assault right at the start of the level. You're 'supposed' to defeat the assault, build up your base and go out and look for the truck.
After many failed attempts I gave up and just ordered every single unit I had to attack the truck at the start, thus ignoring the enemy assault. If memory serves all but one of my units got destroyed doing this, with a lone tank surviving on low health chasing after the truck, managing to land a kill shot before it reached an enemy base!

But KKND extreme? Granted you probably played on the most difficult setting (assuming the game has difficulty levels - can't remember), but I found the difficulty nose dives severely in later levels. I remember the game getting all the more difficult right up to the point where you can build snipers/crazy harrys. Those units simply wipe the floor with any other unit, to the extent that I thought the rest of the game was a cake walk or at worst a chore. You have to babysit them a bit true, especially in the last level with the sheer number of enemy units, but with a little bit of micro you have little to fear from the AI.

I think there was lots of variation in difficulty in KKND Extreme missions. Some were a cakewalk, some were very hard. Generally I recall the issue to be, also in that last mission, that you couldn't produce much of the most powerful untis as they were too big to go through some narrow passages and such (that was actually pretty cool for that game, ie. there was a clear disadvantage to the powerful units as well (besides their price), so in many cases smaller units also made sense as they could move more freely in the playfield, taking shortcuts etc.

The mission I am talking about ("Hand of God" was the name, IIRC) is not part of the main KKND campaign, but it is the last of those standalone extra missions that come with the "Extreme". While there were some other hard missions in KKND, that particular mission really cleared the table.

I don't recall if KKND Extreme had selectable difficulty levels, but if it did, I most probably played the hardest one. Somehow I feel it didn't have...

Hmm come to think of it, I don't think I played any of the extra levels. I finished the campaign for both survivors and evolved, but that was it from what I remember. The game's got a great atmosphere so probably I'll try it again at some point and remember to try out those levels.

Don't know if you've tried KKND2, but I found that to be a lot harder overall compared to the first game. And it's got a killer intro! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvgrjY4co90

Yeah I have finished also KKND2. I was expecting (fearing) it to be just as hard or even harder than the first game (especially as one of the missions was claimed to be so hard that the game publisher had to write a walkthrough for that specific mission), but I didn't find that to be the case at all.

Maybe I wouldn't call KKND2 an easy game, but I don't recall ever really getting frustrated by its difficulty or anything. Even that certain mission for which they wrote the walkthrough and some apparently complained to be "impossible".. psah! I didn't find it that hard. Afterwards when I tried KKND Extreme again, it still felt harder overall than KKND2, to me at least.

The worst thing about KKND2 is the "mission failed"-bug, ie. sometimes while you are playing a mission, the mission suddenly ends with "mission failed" even though you didn't fail it. I don't know what triggers them, IIRC they just sometime start appearing and you'll be constantly loading old savegames and re-saving them, trying to get past those mission failed errors.

I admit I was close to stop playing the game due to those errors, but somehow I persisted. Too bad about the bug because rest of the game is quite great. As far as I know, the bug is also in the original retail version of the game (not just the GOG version), and it doesn't seem to be caused by new PC hardware or OS because I tried playing the game also on my old single-core Pentium desktop PC running Windows XP, and the bug appeared there too.

The bug doesn't necessarily make it impossible to finish KKND2 (I can witness to that), but it sure can make it a real pain in the ass when it decides to hit you.

Oh yes I had to wrestle with that bug myself - I'm the one that created the "KKND2 : unexpected mission failures" thread in KKND's subforum :)
Weirdly though I only encountered the bug on something like 3 levels iirc, and each time I could get past it by saving just before the bug happened (seemed to happen at the exact same instant each time), restarting the game, loading the save, saving a 2nd time, restarting a 2nd time and then loading that save. Quite the chore :P But I only recall having to do it 2 or 3 times.

I suppose overall KKND2 wasn't that difficult either, especially compared to the pre-sniper levels of the first game, but I do recall struggling quite a bit with a few levels, in particular some of those no-base-building levels. I finished the game ultimately, but only with the survivor faciton.

All good things to know for sure, once you've been playing a bit. But not something a brand-new player should be expected to know, much less required to, when they've just started.

As a new player, I have no idea that some fights are deliberately harder than others. I have no idea about all these other tactics I could be using.The tutorial doesn't even go into those things. I'm new to the game, as far as I know at that point, what I'm experiencing is exactly what the game is about. I have level 1 characters, with next to nothing unlocked, and zero previous experience with the series. The game's early experience should be designed around that assumption.

If all of these things are seriously necessary to succeed at the very beginning, when a new player can not be reasonably expected to know they're even options... then that's a misstep on the designer's part. If a player can fail and have no clue or concept as to how or why they were defeated so badly, so early on in the game, because the game has offered up no clue or explanation of exactly what they could or should have done differently, that's not challenging gameplay. That's poor design.

As an analogy... You can't expect someone to "ask the right questions", if they have no idea that "the right questions" even exist, nevermind what they are. That's where Disciples 2 falls short (again, along with numerous other games).

I think you're over exaggerating. These are things that you always do in every strategy game, and I've always assumed they are natural, instinctive, actions. At least they have always been natural to me. If your level 1 party is damaged, you should heal up before you start another fight. If you fight a battle and the opponent turns out to be 2-3 levels over you, you should probably avoid the fight until you level up a bit. Bigger movement pools, better mobility. These might just be trappings of strategy games, but the more you play the easier it will be to recognize them in future games. Just keep at it, especially if you love something about the game. Personally I love turn-based games, I loved the art style in Disciples 1, and I love science fiction/fantasy. So Disciples 1&2 ended up being like crack for me.

That's where you fall short. You won't enjoy a lot of (older) games with this mindset. And this isn't the designers fault.

I can't think of too many games where you don't have to pick and choose what to fight when. Warcraft and when to fight NPC camps and when to launch an all-out attack. Even the early Zelda games had tough mobs you needed to level up to defeat.

You don't need all the above tactics to win. Just pick and choose your fights and as you level up, you can go back to the ones you previously weren't strong enough for. You'll learn the nuances on the way.

Personally, learning the ropes isn't unique to Disciples and I don't consider that poor design. In fact, I thought the levels were generally well-designed in terms of balance. It's not a cakewalk, but it shouldn't be either.

Edit: As an aside, the whole "mobility thing"...I'd never play the Ranger. I found the other heroes better for battle which I valued more. Both styles work fine though. None of the hero types wear an "I Win" button. They all have advantages and disadvantages. As to spells, from what i recall, you don't start with them. It really comes down to picking your fights wisely at first.

I'm not familiar with this sort of strategy games, but coming from a RPG perspective, I can think of a good way to give the game this sort of atmosphere without making the start of the game for new players. (One assumption about the game: You get stronger by killing enemies Without loss of generality, I'll assume a conventional level/XP system, but this argument works for other similar systems.)

At the start, there would be an area around the starting town where the enemies are weak. As long as you stay in this area, the game is easy, and you can slowly accumulate XP and GP (or whatever the game uses) and get stronger. Somebody in the starting town, when talked to, would advise you to stay close to town at the start, so beginners would be steered in this direction. One catch: You would not be able to reach high levels in a reasonable amount of time here.

If you start travelllng further away from the starting town, the enemies get stronger. The game gets more difficult, and you may need to make strategic use of the abilities learned by leveling up. In this way, the difficulty increases, but so do the rewards, as these enemies give significantly more XP and GP than the ones around the starting town. A player who wanders too far too early will likely encounter an enemy they can't defeat, at which point the only options are to run away (and come back when stronger) or die. (Of course, perhaps a clever player might find a way to get past them alive and reach a new town, but that is likely risky and unreliable.) This way, re ramp up the difficulty once the player gets tired of the easy enemies and their poor XP and GP yields.

As the player gets stronger, they gradually get to explore more of the game world. This allows for the dangerous atmosphere of the game to be maintained while gibing the player a good chance to get started.

The original Dragon Quest takes this sort of approach, and I think it actually works well (though the game does slow down later when your level is in the teens).

Not everyone playing the game has played strategy games before, and those who haven't haven't learned what strategies work and what don't, even when they're basic games. For that matter, even those who have learned the basics may run into a game where they don't apply. (RPG example: In Ultima 1, the strategy of staying near the starting town isn't a good way to start; instead, you should go into the nearest dungeon and fight there, so that you get some HP when you leave the dungeon.)

Edit: Also, leveling up, to my understanding, is not as common a mechanic in strategy games as it is in RPGs. Maybe the player hasn't played any strategy games with leveling, and hasn't played any RPGs either.

Actually, I can't think of a Zelda game where this is literally true.

In a Zelda game that isn't Zelda 2, you don't level up; instead, you get stronger as a result of exploration. (Note that this, while perfectly valid game design, feels different from something like Dragon Quest.)

Zelda 2 is actually pretty linear; you can't go far early in the game (if we assume that a player won't try to go through Jump Cave without a candle). By the time you reach the eastern continent, you are going to be strong enough to handle the enemies there, as you've already been through 3 palaces + Death Mountain; you can't reach the eastern continent before then.

This thread has inspired me to add Disciples 1 to the next to play list. Previously I thought this series was something completely different and I let it languish in the backlog but the descriptions here difficulty levels not withstanding piqued my interest.

You get stronger, need better items to fight through different areas. If you try to fight through an area when you are too weak, you lose. Yes, the games tend to be linear, but what makes many of them linear is that some of the mobs cannot be beaten until you are improved. It's a basic game design. Every game handles this "progression" in different ways. Some outright won't let you move to a different area until you can achieve a certain objective. That objective usually is tough enough that one needs to "level" or "equip" up to get there. You learn pretty quickly in Heroes of Might and Magic III that the mobs guarding artifacts are usually stronger. Part of what makes HoMM3 great is that strategy decision-making when you have to decide what mobs you can take and what are acceptable losses. HoMM3 certainly is not unique in this.

If you can name a game where anything you might encounter, you can always beat, doesn't that make that game way too easy and not a challenge at all? To me, THAT would be poor game design. Even Metroidvanias one usually needs to level/equip up before beating certain bosses.

Have you even played the Disciples games? On what basis are you claiming poor design without playing them yourself? Not to say I don't have a few gripes about balance here and there, but having to pick and choose mobs and healing up before fights is not a design flaw. It's common in many genres.

I have not played the Disciples games; I am claiming poor design simply due to the fact that, according to what other people say, the game starts out too hard. A game should start out relatively easy and grow in difficulty from there; there are way too many games that do the opposite.

Allowing the player to encounter strong enemies (that the new player can't defeat) early isn't, by itself, the issue. The issue comes when it's not clear how the player can get started in a game which they aren't familiar with. In the RPG example, having the townspeople clue the player into the fact that the enemies get stronger as you go away from town might help.

As for some other examples:
A game like Zelda where character growth is exploration-driven has a different dynamic than something like Dragon Quest. In Dragon Quest, you hang around town for a while, fighting weak enemies over and over again, until you feel you are strong enough to advance. In something like Zelda, you look for areas that are manageable and might have good treasures that will allow you to explore further. Thiere is a bit of a different dynamic in these two games.

As for games where you can beat anything you might encounter, that actually does happen:
* Games with no character growth are like this. See, for example, Mario games (but not the RPG-ish ones).
* Games with action elements allow a skilled player to deal with high level enemies at low levels, as a good player can simply avoid getting hit. This is not an option for RPGs, where there's no way for the player to dodge out of the way (RNG manipulation aside).
* Some games control what you can encounter at any given point in the game. This is true for most of the Final Fantasy series, if we exclude super bosses and the occasional side area that has strong enemies (something that happens in FF5 and FF9); even then, a good player might find a way to beat them. (Final Fantasy 5 can be beaten at single digit levels; the only reason FF7 can't be beaten at such low levels is that there's too much unavoidable XP).