The Kohan series has been released on steam a couple a days ago and I got the "Warchest" which is all three of the Kohan games for $18 until August 31st. (Kohan: Immortal Sovereigns, Kohan:Ahriman's Gift, and Kohan II. Separately they are $9 each). TL;DR at the bottom as always. Screenshots are of Kohan II because I couldn't get it to take screenshots of the other games.
The Kohan series has a unique resource management system in which you don't gather the resources. You construct buildings that produce a certain amount of a resource (There is gold, stone, wood, iron, and mana). These buildings also allow different units to be recruited in the city they are built. So you don't have an amount of each resource (except gold) just an income. So a lumbermill will produce 5 wood and a unit of archers would have an upkeep of 3 wood and you would end up with +2 wood. When a resource is in the negative the only thing it affects is your gold income. Gold is the only resource that can be stockpiled and therefor it is the most important. It's a different resource management system than most RTS's but it's not bad. It allows players to focus more on the combat and military strategy rather than protecting workers and gathering resources.
The strategy is more in depth and complicated in the first game and expansion. The tutorial will make it seem more complicated than it actually is by explaining all the different zones which you really don't need to pay too much attention to. The cities in the first games are just static and only change in appearance when you upgrade them (they look bigger). The graphics aren't fantastic but that's because it was released 10 years ago.
Kohan is a real time strategy game that focuses on macro (general strategy) as opposed to micro (detailed unit control). It's an older game but that doesn't mean it's not worth your time. When it came out it was doing something very different with its style and people received it well. It is heavy on strategy and light on resource management and economy. The unit formations do useful things (like change the speed and combat effectiveness of units), the terrain affects your strategy, and many other interesting features. I wanted it back when it came out but couldn't get my hands on it. When I saw it on steam I grabbed it quick and played a few solid hours of each of the games.
The Kohan series has a unique resource management system in which you don't gather the resources. You construct buildings that produce a certain amount of a resource (There is gold, stone, wood, iron, and mana). These buildings also allow different units to be recruited in the city they are built. So you don't have an amount of each resource (except gold) just an income. So a lumbermill will produce 5 wood and a unit of archers would have an upkeep of 3 wood and you would end up with +2 wood. When a resource is in the negative the only thing it affects is your gold income. Gold is the only resource that can be stockpiled and therefor it is the most important. It's a different resource management system than most RTS's but it's not bad. It allows players to focus more on the combat and military strategy rather than protecting workers and gathering resources.The units in the game are squad based in a sense. There are 4 "frontline" units which head into combat first. There are also two separate slots for support units. These support units can be powerful mages or clerics. Often times they have a unique ability. There's also a "captain" slot for the squad which is filled automatically by a default captain unit unless you choose to place a hero in it. The second game adds 2 extra unit slots to a squad. Each squad is completely customizable because you can choose what unit goes in each of these slots. There are also several different factions and they each produce different units and have different benefits.
The strategy is more in depth and complicated in the first game and expansion. The tutorial will make it seem more complicated than it actually is by explaining all the different zones which you really don't need to pay too much attention to. The cities in the first games are just static and only change in appearance when you upgrade them (they look bigger). The graphics aren't fantastic but that's because it was released 10 years ago.Kohan 2 is slightly simplified. I don't want you to confuse simplified with dumbed down though because they just removed much of the unnecessary things from Kohan that bogged down the game. It still has the same focus on strategy without all of the slow base building and resource gathering. The big thing about Kohan 2 is the upgraded graphics. It really does help the gameplay to be honest. This one is 3D and much prettier. The buildings you construct in your city actually show up there, your mages are throwing fireballs at the enemy, and a lot of other cool graphics that couldn't be done in 2D.
The cities in Kohan 2 are actually very different. As soon as you upgrade them the first time they get walls. Within these walls your buildings are built and your militia defend the city. Your cities can also be besieged and will lose their supply zone along with becoming unable to recruit new units or build buildings. To take the city you have to nearly destroy the town center. Just like in the first games, capturing a city from a different faction will allow you to recruit that factions units. This adds more depth to the strategy that was already pretty deep to begin with.
While both games didn't have a particularly strong story for the single player portion the story in the first was certainly told in a better way (I actually don't know how active the multiplayer community is because I always get crushed in RTS multiplayer so I just don't do it). For the first there would be dialogue throughout the different missions and the voice over wasn't too bad and the story itself was also well written. The second game, however, did not have a good story at all. The in game cinematics were boring and coupled with pretty bad voice acting. Not to mention you would only see these cinematics at the beginning and end of a mission so you would completely forget about the story during that mission. The story itself was boring and unoriginal but then add the bad dialogue and it was practically unbearable. But the gameplay was still very solid as long as you skip the cutscenes.
Overall I liked Kohan 2 better than the first game and it's expansion. This doesn't mean it's the better game it just means that it's better for me. Kohan 1 had old school graphics (which appeal to many people) and a very in depth and complicated systems that augmented the strategy of the game. Kohan 2 had better graphics and a slightly simpler strategy component while still focusing on general strategy. Unfortunately the story for the single player campaign was very lackluster and I couldn't get into it. They were both great games and I would recommend the warchest if you're into real-time strategy games.
TL;DR
The Kohan series is certainly older but it is a good series. It focuses on general strategy as opposed to resource management unlike most real-time strategies. You actually don't even stockpile any of the five resources except gold. Kohan: Immortal Sovereigns and it's expansion were more old school and had a better story while Kohan 2 was prettier and had a crap story. Both games are really good in their own right and I recommend the warchest if you are into RTS games.
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