Just like the original
Kohan: Immortal Sovereigns, the best thing about
Kohan II is the complete lack of real micro-management. You don’t need 50 little drones to gather resources and create buildings. You don’t need to hover over a fight and tell your 200 units to attack one specific thing after another. The game lets you focus on the strategy. The game, at its core, works just like a billion other real-time strategy games out here. You build a city of some sort, and create units and go up a technology tree while defending that city, eventually expanding into a few other cities, and ultimately attacking the enemy city and wiping them out.
As I said before, while the idea is the same, the execution is pretty different. After you have set up a city, you don’t get to choose where to build buildings. Once you select a building, which is done inside the city’s menu, the building begins construction by itself and little workers come out of the city to build it. Likewise, while there are more types of resources than most games, resource gathering as a whole is less cumbersome overall. There are five types of resources: gold, stone, wood, iron, and mana. Gold works pretty much the same as in every other RTS; you spend it when you build just about anything. The method by which it is obtained is different though. Rather than having actual units that gather gold from a mine or what have you, your gold slowly rises by itself. The rate it does this depends on a number in parentheses that appears next to your gold total. The other five types work a little differently. You’re never "required" to have them, but if you do not have enough of them to support your current infrastructure, things will cost more gold.
Each of the buildings provides two or three of the following things: the ability to produce new types of units, the ability to do research to improve existing units, and increases in your resources. For example, a quarry gives you more stone, while a forge gives you more iron and allows you to research better health, attack, and defense for your infantry units. Most buildings can be upgraded in at least two different ways; this allows for a great deal of flexibility in how you build a particular city. One version gives you more of the resource the building was based on, and the other gives you more gold at a cost of one or all of the other 4 resources.
You can also find resource deposits around the map. If an engineering company builds a mine on the deposit, your cache of that resource, or the rate at which you accrue it in the case of gold, will go up.
