Crown Wars: The Black Prince - historical fantasy turn-based tactics from Naheulbeuk devs

[Hellraiser]

We wuz (black) princes and sheeeit.

 

[Pyrite Pachyderm]

Yeah, but unless they completely change the char creation/recruitment from how it worked in the demo, you can simply filter out all the stronk wahmins and niggers - all this retardation will likely be optional. In any case that isnt an excuse for having this shit in the game at all though...

You can filter your ranks, but there will be wombyn and nogs among hostile factions. Wasn't in the demo, but i saw it in the factions trailer.

Meaning you get to kill them?

 

[Infinitron]

 

[Parsimonious cook]

10/10 accents from the devs. Still not convinced about the game though.

 

[Infinitron]

Launch trailer:

 

[Lacrymas]

I am probably going to try the demo today and report my impressions.

 

[Infinitron]

Well, it's out:

 

[Tyranicon]

Not off to a great start :/

 

[Lacrymas]

It's mostly technical issues as far as I can see.

 

[Parsimonious cook]

Yeah... I will be waiting for a discount and few patches, that´s for sure.

 

[Lemming42]

The price tag on all these indie/low-budget tactical games is just too high. I appreciate that £35 is comparatively cheap given that AAA games cost insane amounts these days but it's still too much for something with low production values and the level of jank you'd expect from a small team, to the point where it probably hurts the game's sales. The Lamplighter's League is the most obvious example of recent times, there was just no way people were paying like £45 for that.

Played the demo of this one and thought it was a lot of fun, the usual nu-XCOM by the numbers stuff but that's what it's going for and it's very competent at it. The possibly-AI voice acting is a treat as well, "WE MUST PROTECT OUR DOCUMENTS". Waiting for a sale I suppose.

 

[Lacrymas]

I unexpectedly received guests yesterday and didn't have the time to properly get into the demo. Now I see it is no longer available. Shame.

 

[Nortar]

The price tag on all these indie/low-budget tactical games is just too high.

Welp, they already have a discounted bundle with Mutant: Year Zero of all things.

https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/41508/Mutants_and_Knights_TurnBased_Tactics_Bundle/

I liked MYZ, but I doubt that half-a-dozen years old game would be enough to serve as a crutch for sales.

 

[Fargus]

There are very few user reviews and mixed score. Guess this will be 50% off in a few months, i will pick it up then. Maybe lol

 

[Kruyurk]

It is already discounted at -23% on some legit stores https://isthereanydeal.com/game/crown-wars-the-black-prince/info/

So the full price on steam is to take advantage of people who don't know any better?

 

[Parsimonious cook]

What I find especially sad about this is that the release was pushed back several times (obviously because of the technical state of the game) and even so it apparently released in a shitty state that is getting the devs shit reviews. Doesnt speak well about their competence, tbh fam.

 

[mediocrepoet]

I played the first few missions since I had an order I forgot to cancel. So you're welcome as I take one for the team.

It's... ok. Sort of the definition of a 6-7/10 tactics game. The character graphics are sort of PS3/Solasta tier, but environments look nice enough.

The missions so far have been pretty small, generally 4 PCs vs. waves of 4-6 enemies, sometimes with the possibility of aggroing more than one group at a time. I think this may expand a bit later, but that's what the first few are like. As I recall, I think later you may get the ability to field 5-6 characters instead of only 4, but this could be me mixing up different games.

There are 5 classes with different trade offs and those are well done enough. The classes are Crusader (tank knight), Alchemist (basically archer/mages), Duellist (basically a medium armoured fighter that can swap between two weapon loadouts), Beast master (medium armoured fighter with a fighting pet), and ... I forgot what the last guy's called, it had a weird name. Basically a skirmisher/archer class.

There are characters of both genders and the game can be reasonably challenging at the highest difficulty levels, but depending on how this ramps up, may not be enough for some people's preferences. Each level up provides a choice of two skills that will change how the character plays. There are also a variety of weapon choices that have various bonuses (improvements to defense vs. accuracy, armour piercing, armour shredding, etc.) and each weapon type and armour type is upgraded separately.

A significant part of the gameplay seems to revolve around improving your base and your gear and the presentation is pretty much as described elsewhere (medieval nuXCom).

Other than that, the setting is a low(?) fantasy riff on the 100 Years War which I understand is reasonably historically accurate though with fantastical leanings into the occult and alchemy.

Probably worth it somewhere around 40-60% off, depending on your preferences and whether the setting appeals to you.

I should add that I've had no performance issues, but also that with how this thing looks, it probably delivers fewer frames than I'd expect with my hardware, so YMMV.

 

[Lacrymas]

It is already discounted at -23% on some legit stores https://isthereanydeal.com/game/crown-wars-the-black-prince/info/

So the full price on steam is to take advantage of people who don't know any better?

This is normal for releases and I've taken advantage of it many times. I don't know exactly how legit third party retailers work, but I'm assuming they don't take the 30% cut Steam does, so devs can afford having surprisingly high discounts on such sites, especially releases. This is true even for major games like Total War Warhammer 3. It doesn't mean the game is underperforming or anything.

 

[Elttharion]

It is already discounted at -23% on some legit stores https://isthereanydeal.com/game/crown-wars-the-black-prince/info/

So the full price on steam is to take advantage of people who don't know any better?

This is normal for releases and I've taken advantage of it many times. I don't know exactly how legit third party retailers work, but I'm assuming they don't take the 30% cut Steam does, so devs can afford having surprisingly high discounts on such sites, especially releases. This is true even for major games like Total War Warhammer 3. It doesn't mean the game is underperforming or anything.

My mind is a bit foggy but afaik places like greenmangaming still take a 30% cut of every sale. IIRC the difference is that they negotiate with publishers to offer biggers discounts at the cost of their own profits/their cut of the money. The publisher still gets 70% but GMG will get like 15% or less depending on the discount they are offering. Basically they eat the difference to bring more traffic and users to their site.

 

[Trash Player]

The price tag on all these indie/low-budget tactical games is just too high. I appreciate that £35 is comparatively cheap given that AAA games cost insane amounts these days but it's still too much for something with low production values and the level of jank you'd expect from a small team, to the point where it probably hurts the game's sales. The Lamplighter's League is the most obvious example of recent times, there was just no way people were paying like £45 for that.

There are big differences between AA and shoestring indie. The Lamplighters League actually has a budget of 30m USD. Smaller AA can still cost a couple at least. They have to charge that much. Whether they have enough audiences to support them is a different matter.
It is the ages old AA conundrum. Not as many audiences as AAA but much bigger cost than a skeleton crew. Only the luckiest few hit big like Larian. Even the ones who simply survives to another project are considered lucky.

 

[Galdred]

The price tag on all these indie/low-budget tactical games is just too high. I appreciate that £35 is comparatively cheap given that AAA games cost insane amounts these days but it's still too much for something with low production values and the level of jank you'd expect from a small team, to the point where it probably hurts the game's sales. The Lamplighter's League is the most obvious example of recent times, there was just no way people were paying like £45 for that.

Played the demo of this one and thought it was a lot of fun, the usual nu-XCOM by the numbers stuff but that's what it's going for and it's very competent at it. The possibly-AI voice acting is a treat as well, "WE MUST PROTECT OUR DOCUMENTS". Waiting for a sale I suppose.

The thing is, from my game developer perspective, the niche itself is a bit small to begin with (I was actually in the process of finding a right price for mine), and a lower price is unlikely to sway people who require AAA fidelity in the first place.
Most games in the niche are priced 29.99€-39.99€ (Wartales, Battle Brothers, Xenonauts 2, King Arthur: Knight's Tale, Chaos Gate).
Also, a lower price of entry won't change the fact that most players will still wait for a discount to buy anyway (many games end up being 50% off in less than a year).
The issues with CW:TBP are more that the game would have needed a few more stability balancing/updates, but that would still be an issue at 19.99.

 

[mediocrepoet]

One thing that this game does that actually is an incline is it has a permadeath mechanic based on difficulty that you can't actually get out of.

Basically, if a unit goes down during a battle, it receives an injury and cannot be fielded again unless you pay for it to recover in the chapel. Also, any hp damage it has needs to heal over time. However, the number of times the unit has been injured is permanent and if it has a certain number of injuries, the unit dies permanently if it goes down again. The hardest difficulty allows 1 injury, the regular difficulty allows 2. I think easy allows 3, but it may allow more, I'd have to check since I didn't pay attention to what that difficulty did.

Where this is interesting is that quests have timers that they expire under so if you want to do one, you need to be able to field a team to it before it disappears. Meanwhile, consumables to heal units, etc. are more expensive than hiring new units and they are around the same price as permanent upgrades. So you have to juggle consumables against permanent upgrades against just grinding through green units as opposed to trying to have more powerful experienced units.

I'm not sure if MQs eventually are under timers, right now it's just side missions that have timers and the MQs have all been permanently standing. I assume they must start expiring further in because not only can you take your time doing side quests but you also receive tithes over time, so if the MQs don't put any time pressure on you, you could literally just sit around accumulating resources to stat everything up before hitting the MQ. If the MQs do start expiring, you'll have to weigh things out and could actually hit a death spiral due to lack of resources.

It's not actually apparent at first but it makes the gameplay more compelling and adds some stakes and considerations to everything. Depending on how this campaign progresses, I might actually start over just to take more care in the earlier missions to not have units go down.

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

The price tag on all these indie/low-budget tactical games is just too high. I appreciate that £35 is comparatively cheap given that AAA games cost insane amounts these days but it's still too much for something with low production values and the level of jank you'd expect from a small team, to the point where it probably hurts the game's sales. The Lamplighter's League is the most obvious example of recent times, there was just no way people were paying like £45 for that.

The value of a game to the player should be determined by the combination of the game's quality and duration, not by the budget spent or the "production values", and Codexers should be especially cognizant of this.

All too many people are willing to pay $60-70 for AAA games while insisting that an indie game should cost perhaps $15-20, even if the indie game provides better quality for a similar length of time as AAA games. Indie games are intrinsically aimed at a narrower, niche audience, but a good indie game will provide this target audience with the quality it seeks in a manner that cannot be found in AAA games that appeal to a broader, lowest-common-denominator audience.

Meanwhile, digital storefronts have become dominated by deep discounts, training consumers to purchase games ever more cheaply, except for the occasional just-released AAA full-price purchase. This is compensated for only to a limited extent by the tendency of gamers to amass a digital backlog of games, since the backlog consists largely of games purchased at an extreme discount, when they had their price temporarily slashed during a sale or with a price permanently plunged to almost nothing. Moreover, the accumulation of a backlog simply results in gamers becoming even less willing to pay full price for indie games, instead waiting until a new release is similarly discounted nearly to nothing.

 

[Lemming42]

My main concern is just that I literally don't have the money to spend on this at the moment. Again I appreciate that the price of everything - including games - has inflated, and that Crown Wars is moderately priced by today's standards, but a lot of these smaller and more niche titles are pricing themselves out of the market. I still haven't gotten round to playing The Lamplighter's League because I simply don't have like £45 to spend. These sort of games should be the type that you can pick up cheaply throughout the year while saving up for the bigger AAA releases that tend to pop up around August and September.

Also by "production values" I mean the lower budget (relative to AAA games) and the resultant issues you'd expect - jankiness, lack of polish, glitches, gamebreaking tech issues, etc, all of which are the key points being raised in Steam user reviews, which are still sitting at "Mixed" as a consequence. A game breaking apart at the seams and needing several months of patches and sometimes crashing or softlocking and generally having a lesser level of playtesting and polishing is fine if you paid £19.99 for it, less so if you paid over £30. They're asking for an investment from the player that it doesn't seem like, in the game's current state, they're able to offer a payoff for.

In other words:

(adjust for inflation)

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

(adjust for inflation)