Konung: Legends of the North (Windows, 2000)

In Europe, this game is known as Konung: Legends of the North (legends plural). In the US, it is known as Legend of the North (singular) with Konung as a sort of subtitle. Konung is the Swedish equivalent of the Russian Князь (Knyaz), a title that is translated as king, duke, and sometimes prince.

RPG/RTS hybrids have become increasingly popular in the Millennium. Most of them have are lean to the RTS side and just have some RPG elements like levelling units: Battle Realms, SpellForce, The Legend. With Konung, it's the other way round. It is basically an RPG, but with several RTS elements:

Nearly any character in the game can join your party, which can number up to ten, depending on your charisma. Exceptions are only those who give you quests and the starosts (village elders).
A main game element is gaining control over the settlements. This can usually be done by fulfilling a quest, or by battle. Once you have gained control, the village will pay you a tribute and you can use its various functions like blacksmith and healer for free.
If you build barracks, you can appoint a warchief who will then slowly raise the inhabitants of the village up to his stats, as far as the rather odd class system allows (see details below).

Konung is closer to reality than most RPGs. While there are some mythical creatures, there is no magic, and the setting is historical: instead of dwarves and elves there are Vikings, Slavs and Byzantines in northern Europe in the 7th century.

Hints and Strategies

The following hints are based on a game with Eric as the character. Most of them will be valid for Wolf as well, but not necessarily for Konstantin. I have little experience playing Konstantin. Also note that my personal copy of the game is in German, so the English terms may not always be 100% correct. This is a work in progress.

General

Walking around the edges of a map you can often avoid the monsters. Especially for Eric there are two easy early quests that require travelling to another settlement. Besides, you find most of the loot there.
You can raise your healing skill by creating oil out of peanuts. Every bottle will increase it by two points.
If you cannot or do not want to pay for a team member to join, tell the blacksmith or healer to train an apprentice. Then, add the apprentice to your party. For Constantine, this is the only way to get party members right away.
The merchants in the villages have only two slots for artefacts (that is, non-equipable items like scrolls). Once money is no longer an object, it's a good idea to buy both of them at every visit to every village, regardless of whether you need them or not, to make place for new ones.
Jewelry that enhances dexterity seems to be less common than the other types.
Competent blacksmiths are of high importance. An incompetent blacksmith will ruin items he tries to repair, that is, their maximum durability will be significantly reduced. The same happens with the equipments of NPCs that are left for a longer time in a village with an incompetent blacksmith. It seems that otherwise items do not decay.

The Heros

There are three heros to choose from: Eric, the Viking; Wolf, the Slav; and Konstantin, the Byzantine. Interesting enough, the names in the Russian original are quite different: Eric is called Dragomir there, Konstantin Michail, Wolf Volk. (The pics above were taken from a character creation screen where Eric was selected. That's why Wolf and Konstantin are so pale.)

The manual tells you that Eric is easiest to play, Konstantin most difficult, and Wolf somewhere in-between. Actually I found little difference in difficulty between Eric and Wolf, just some difference in the character of the game. With Eric, the stress is more on adventuring, with Wolf, on getting and building up villages.

The difficulty level of Konstantin however is grotesque. He does not even own his own camp, thus not getting tribute and free services. He does not get a free companion. The blacksmith in his camp has a skill level of zero and will thus ruin equipment instead of repairing it. All this pushes the difficulty bar so high that I found the game no longer enjoyable and thus have never really played Konstantin.

The Classes

The Leader

The Leader is a good choice for the player character, the best I think, for two reasons:

You can have a larger party right from the start, which is fun.
The party will be more balanced this way.

If you play a leader, it is usually a good tactic to let your companions do most of the fighting, since they will be better armed and stronger. Since the main character is the only one to get experience from solving quests, all the party members will tend to be about the same level.

Good starting stats for a leader are 21-10-8-12. 21 charisma is the minimum amount that allows a party of three, the other stats are the requirements for the basic armor items, which you usually find very early in the game.

As party members, leaders (called something like braves in this case) are completely useless.

The Merchant

The defining stat of the merchant is vitality. They can carry more stuff than any other class and can wear the heaviest armor. Their weapon of choice is the axe. Merchants are the tanks and the mules of Konung. The high attack power of the axe somewhat offsets their lower strength as well. I have found them the most useful party members.

The Warrior

Warriors have more attack power than merchants. This gets especially relevant late in the game, if you raise the vitality of your level 13 warriors high enough with the help of the warchief system that they can wield axes, the strongest weapon in the game.

The Hunter

If there's one thing that's implemented real bad in the game, it's archery. And since, obviously, archery is the strength of the hunter, this class is not all too useful, except for raising the dexterity of your level 13 warriors and merchants with the warchief system.

The Warchief System

Contrary to what you read elsewhere, when you approach the starost and pick the line I have brought you a warchief…, he does not pick the strongest member of your party, but simply the first with a level higher than 1.

The warchief will then slowly raise the stats of the inhabitants of the settlements until they match his own—as far as the class system allows. If, for example, the warchief is a maxed out level 7 warrior (74 strength, 30 in all other stats), then that is what the warriors in the village will become. The merchants will only reach level 4. But should the warchief have only 29 vitality, they will only reach level 3!

The warchief will not only raise the stats of the village men, he will also raise the two fighting skills. This works a lot slower, and it works in both direction: If the warchief's skills are lower than those of a town NPC, the town NPC's skills will go down.

The warchief system gets especially interesting when your characters get to level 13. Now, the cap on secondary stats is practically removed (actually, it's 150 on primary and 120 on secondary stats). With clever cross-training, you can have characters with 100+ in all relevant stats.

The warchief system is an essential feature of the game. Use it!

Konung

Legends of the North