Legends of Eisenwald announced

Aterdux Entertainment, an indie development studio based in Belarus, announced a new game last week by the name of Legends of Eisenwald. They describe it as a spiritual successor to the original King’s Bounty (and much more direct successor to their earlier title Discord Times).

LoE features “an original mix of RPG and strategy, with tactical turn based battles and a simple economic model.” You play as a sort of knight errant, gathering a small army of upgradeable units and questing, leaving castle garrisons in your wake. The devs recently summed things up in an interview with the RPG Codex:

[The player’s] main business is internecine wars, fulfilling the will of his suzerain and battle campaigns to find glory and wealth.

The game’s history is divided into separate scenarios that are connected within a large campaign where a player will have to solve different tasks: sometimes to conquer all enemy castles, sometimes to find a large amount of gold in a short period of time, sometimes to earn the loyalty of a certain faction, etc. Moreover in every scenario there are side quests that we aim to do as diverse as possible.

Castles play an important role in our game because they help to maintain your army. The more castles you conquer the bigger army you can afford. Moreover, you can collect tribute from villages surrounding your castle. The situation is complicated by the fact that surrounding feudal lords know about that too, so it’s dangerous to leave your castle without defense. But it’s not easy to defend it since the recruits for your garrison often are inexperienced units that are of no big help when they are attacked by a strong army. And to make a strong unit from a raw recruit takes time. So, a player will often face a choice – which units to leave to protect a castle and which ones to lead into a fight.

The remainder of that interview can be found here.

Aterdux are already more than 2 years into development, and are holding a Kickstarter to raise funds for completing the game. (They tell me they’ll finish the game even if they don’t hit their goal–the fundraising is there mainly to help them stay independent of the interference of publishers, it seems.)

The game has a Kickstarter-focused trailer, but they’ve just released a far more illuminating video showing the game’s combat system in action:

Also, here are some screenshots, in case that didn’t do it for you:

The engine is awfully impressive-looking, and I have high hopes for the gameplay as well, even if I do find myself raising an eyebrow or two at their assertion that tactical positioning in turn-based combat is “boring.” [Edit: Alexander tells me that they actually meant something more along the lines of “slow-paced,” not “boring”–they’ve updated their Kickstarter page with the better phrasing.]