The Dark Legions

The Dark Legions is a surprisingly polished RTS game developed from a "lone wolf" developer--Marcell Baranyai did almost everything, from its 3D engine to its graphics and sound design, a pretty amazing effort.

The legions under Theodoric’s command were striking a major blow, deep within enemy territory. As the guard tower disintegrated into a dust heap, the catapults began to creak toward the evil one’s keep. Suddenly, Theodoric sensed something wrong. He had left a stout garrison behind to guard his own keep and he could have sworn that no major force could have managed to sneak by him. Yet, as assuredly as he believed the current battle was his, something was wrong back “home.”

BLOOD DIFFUSION: The artificial opponent in Dark Legions is sneaky enough that, while the good guys made a foray into enemy territory, slaves built a barracks “behind the lines” on the site of this bloody melee.

The “something wrong” described in this after-battle report from Theodoric’s perspective was that a couple of slaves (deemed too unimportant to attack as they slipped through Theodoric’s heroic troops) managed to get past the main thrust of the attack and build a barracks behind the attack. By the time yours truly (Theodoric’s supposed alter ego) realized what was happening, that barracks behind my forces was churning out advanced troops that were decimating the large garrison I had left behind. I don’t ever remember experiencing anything like this. I remember finding structures I wasn’t expecting in Starcraft, but I don’t remember the AI overtly building “behind my lines.” Truth be told, Dark Legions became ever so much more interesting when I realized how diabolical my artificial opponent could be.

In all fairness, my preference is not toward so-called “real-time” strategy games. I consider them ill-named since they are certainly “compressed-time” strategy games where frenzied hordes come at you faster than “real-time” and I will be up-front that I tend to focus on one portion of the battle or scenario and forget to keep building and reinforcing while I’m pursuing my tactical objective.

So, I haven’t played a lot of them, but I made exceptions for Age of Empires (liked the color and animation), MechCommander (let’s face it, I love the BattleTech universe), Metal Fatigue (excellent play-balance), Homeworld (I was lousy at it, but found it fascinating), Starcraft (loved the single-player campaign),and (in my humble opinion) the best-designed of all of them Warlords: BattleCry (great variety in scenario design and objectives). I would be embarrassed to let anyone reading this watch my futile efforts at playing any of the games just cited, but I admired them as games and still try my hand from time to time.

Now, I have to add Dark Legions to this list of games I love to hate, but must admire. At first, I didn’t think it was very distinctive. The graphics don’t seem as crisp as those in AoE or WBC. The play balance and pacing doesn’t seem as outstanding as in MF or MC. Yet, once I started to get past the initial misunderstandings with the interface (caused by not playing through the tutorial properly) and technology tree, I began to notice the facets of this jewel begin to sparkle.

Since I’ve already confessed to being a rather limited RTS player, please forgive me if you’ve seen these supposedly new wrinkles before. But, I hadn’t seen the trick of sending slaves behind the lines to build new installations in other games that I’ve played. Once I realized this could happen, I was hooked. I was hooked, but I need to make one more disclosure before we continue. I make it a policy to finish games and be able to win before I review them. I simply can’t win at Dark Legions. At first, when playing individual battles, I thought the game was poorly balanced (Oh, sure. Blame the design team!). Then, when I began to play through the campaign (although I’ve only successfully made it through about half of the campaign with many restarts), I realized that the game is extremely well-balanced and I’m the one who is unbalanced.

Ride the Mild Serfs (Basic Gameplay)

That being revealed, Dark Legions has very typical one-on-one scenarios that require you to start from a keep, surrounded by three resource types (wood, stone, and gold). It contains a technology tree of sorts but it is, at least originally, disjointed in that various rungs of the ladder are found in different buildings. For example, the Keep is where you train slaves (I prefer the more euphemistic “serfs” but the game uses “slaves” for your basic peasant class.) and assign them the function of logging, quarrying, mining, or building. The Keep is also where the basic technological advances take place. You must research DIY (Do-It-Yourself) before you can build the Blacksmith or Barracks or move into Drafting (allows construction of the Alchemy [laboratory] and speeds building by 15%). At the same time as you are offered DIY, you’ll also be offered the discovery of the hatchet (to increase your percentage of logs harvested) or the backpack (to speed up your harvesting of all resources). Since wood is used to develop and pay for almost every advance in the game, it is tempting to research the hatchet (followed by the saw) ASAP. But the artificial opponent is very aggressive and without DIY, you can’t build your Barracks and start training archers and infantry (later, crossbowmen and light cavalry).

TECH ROOTS: The roots of the technology tree can be found in this early decision point. The player has already researched “Do-It-Yourself” but will need the extra wood associated with the hatchet and extra carrying capacity of the backpack before building the Alchemy

Since the purpose of the Blacksmith is to enhance the capabilities of your military units, you won’t want to build the Blacksmith until after you have some military units. Plus, it’s never safe to become complacent in this game. The artificial opponent can and will attack early in most games (the exception being some of the early scenarios in the campaign game where the opponent is constrained to wait for you). The Blacksmith allows the following advances:

Bolted Bow (provides +1 range for archers)
Iron-Ball (provides +1 attack bonus for cavalry units)
Iron-Blade (provides +1 attack bonus for infantry units)
Leather Armor (provides +5% defensive bonus in ranged attacks)
Sighting (provides +1 attack bonus for archers and crossbowmen)
Wooden Shield (provides 5% defensive bonus in melee attacks).

Now, as in any good strategy game, you will now find yourself torn between the desire to increase resource production and harvesting via the mine camp and barrow discoveries, the need to increase military units for the “national” defense, and the desire to advance up the technology tree by discovering Drafting and building the Alchemy [laboratory]. The Alchemy laboratory allows the discovery of Ballistics, Curved Shot, Engineering, and Pyrotechnics. The two former discoveries allow for 100% accuracy by archers/crossbowmen versus moving targets and the ability to shoot over intervening obstacles. The two latter discoveries branch even further.

Engineering allows for building these advanced buildings:

Castle (needed for building catapults, in particular)
Dock (needed for building transports and war galleys)
Monastery (needed for training priests)
Traps (creates obstacles versus invaders).

Pyrotechnics allows

Flaming Arrows (+2 for crossbowmen)
Heated Shot (+?
Priest Attacks (adds offensive capacity to clerical healing).

Of course, all of this sounds straightforward, but if you’re the kind of player who likes to husband your resources until you’ve created a massive expeditionary force to assault your opponent, you may not welcome the fairly regular incursions from the artificial opponent. The AOs simply aren’t going to let you build up without a fight. Plus, here’s something I’m not used to, the slaves from the AI will come over and start poaching your resources if you don’t constantly watch your border for them. In one of my first games, I was blithely building up my army when I realized that my stone inventory was being depleted. I looked over and realized that the slave who was busily engaged in mining it wasn’t my slave at all. He was wearing the red breeches of my artificial opponent.

Behind the Lines (Strengths and Weaknesses)

This resource raiding experience also describes a unique tactic I experienced in Dark Legions that I don’t recall encountering in other games (although Warlords: BattleCry does a great job of targeting resource producing centers). The artificial opponent will sometimes build masses of slaves and send them on an apparent suicide mission to raid your gold mines or rock quarries. These come like human waves and, unless you have a strong stomach for slaughtering tons of peasants, it can be surprisingly devastating. Frankly, it is surprises like this and the building of a barracks as a beachhead behind enemy lines that makes Dark Legions such a challenging game to play.

Also, though I didn’t think the animation of the individual units was as impressive as the detail that went into the military appearance and cultural flavor in Age of Empires and Empire Earth, it is very clear that the bulk of the artistic effort went into the environments to be settled and fought over. The islands look different from the mountains and the weather associated with them looks different, as well. The rain effect is haunting and the snowfall really adds something to the look and feel of some scenarios.

GALLEY MATES: The coastal terrain of this scenario where war galleys escort transport ships looks very different from the snowy mountain terrain of others and the rainy forest of still others.

SNOW WHITE: It's cold out here for a serf!

PRAYING MANTIC: The monk standing by the monastery can not only heal, but attack via fire when the Pyrotechnics advance is complete.

Further, though I earlier suggested that the game seemed too hard, I was pleasantly surprised to try the campaign and find that even I could maneuver through the early scenarios. The campaign is well-designed in that it has you gather troops and resources (as well as the standard “build everything from scratch”) in an early scenario. The campaign also has a solid balance between forcing you to attack and to defend. For example, in one early scenario, you have to locate catapults to destroy the enemy’s docks. But, you’ll inevitably be attacked on the way to recruit those siege engines. It’s a nice balance of avoidance, confrontation, and recruitment—sort of your own guerrilla warfare.

From “recruiting” units, you’ll have to move on to building them. Since you’ll need siege engines to be successful, one early scenario grants you the chance to find an abandoned castle where you can construct catapults. This is important because it takes a long time to build up to where you can construct a castle (prerequisite to building catapults). Again, you must play “cat and mouse” in this scenario because the enemy will have a war galley or two, even though you don’t.

Yet, although the campaign offers a nice variety of play/strategy while scaling upward very nicely, Dark Legions has the ability to underscore the deficiencies of players like me. You can’t bleed the AOs strength by guerrilla tactics because it tends to be more efficient at training slaves and units than most of us can be. It usually took a combination of judicious defense combined with one huge offensive thrust for me to win.

The most frustrating aspect of the campaign game was the behavior of Theodoric. Yes, your on-screen hero is every bit the champion you’d expect. In fact, he is such a champion that no matter what you order to him to attack or where you order him to move, he will jump in and attack the enemy—even when wounded and outnumbered. Therein, of course, is the rub. In the campaign game, you must keep Theodoric alive in order to win, but the brave little guy does everything in his power to get killed.

The game could also learn a few things from the established RTS stars out there. Most RTS games have a means for you to rotate the buildings so you can make sure their entrances are not blocked. In Dark Legions, I didn’t find that mechanism (It may be there, but it’s not obvious and it wasn’t in the first couple of tutorials that I played “after the fact” to see what I might have missed.) and, since the path-finding routine doesn’t work well in narrow places, I could have used that feature. Many times, even when you think you’ve left a nice lane or alley between the buildings, units (whether cavalry, heroes, or slaves) will get stuck in-between them. They also get stuck between buildings and trees, but a bit of logging will eventually free the captives.

Reviewer’s Overall Snapshot 7

Graphics 7 (liked seasons and environments)
Sound 6 (sound effects only)
AI 9 (most ruthless artificial opponents, yet)
Campaign Design 8 (nice variety and progression)
Replayability 5 (except for campaign, not enough variety)

Reviewer’s Bias 2 (seldom desire to play this style)