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[Aguirre]

This review is little inaccurate. KOEI wasn't founded in 1988 - it was american branch of the company. KOEI itself was established many years before '88 (in 1978, to be precise). Also, user interface wasn't that revolutionary - remember about Nobunaga's Ambition, Romance of the Three Kingdoms and Genghis Khan, all three developed earlier than Bandit Kings.
All in all, the game is very good, although quite hard. That's why KOEI gave up this title and never released the sequel.

Good old game, there's a trick to get infinite money in the game but takes forever to do it

I had the old Nintendo version of this game. It was one of my favs.

Suggestions for new players:

1. Play an early scenario, and try to expand in the west, where few people have claimed prefectures. Unless you want to be attacked, always stay at least one prefecture away from Gao Qui's territory. The imperial forces never try to take empty areas; their domain only expands if they decide to attack a bandit-controlled area.

2. Don't be too picky about sworn brothers early on. You need them to allow you to issue commands in prefectures where your chieftain is away from. A sworn brother with low integrity can be good for throwing Feasts... (Golden Lotus as the sworn sister of Hairy Priest is just wrong... k: )

3. Don't bother with duels, especially if you're the attacker. Your body points will probably be too low to win by the time you reach your opponent...

[Borodin]

Duels are a pain in the behind. I suggest avoiding duels unless a nearby opponent general has a low body value at the moment. Unfortunately, it's impossible to avoid accepting a duel, because it's entirely up to your challenged general. And I"ve been in situations where some of my healthiest and finest generals were challenged, and lost.

Some tips of my own (sorry for any problems reading that, my home language is german):

If you start in 1101 and take Li Chong:

Move to the upper RIGHT province (#5 i think), it has a weapon smite inside! Settle and start increasing the wealth or other things ... also go hunting to have at least 200-300 food ... also use rest to have at least 40-50 power! In December give ALL your food to the local population to increase their happyness to over 50 ...

In january you will have some food / gold, immedeately move into town and recruit every hero wanna follow you, in february take about ~200 gold and most of all the food with you and move over to prafecture #6 (to the south), leaving the recruited guys alone in your home country!

The thing is: the pc can perform MUCH better in increasing the wealth, recruiting guys, train your troops, increase hero happyness etc. ALONE! The pc can do those things in one month, you can only do one thing in a time!

Move on with this strategy move over #8 to #9 and #11! Province 7 and 10 are hold buy other PC guys (working also against Gao Qiu, but not very well, #7 has very low heros, so you can crush #7 later on get a well build up province, and #10's leader isn't very well, he 'll have about 7-8 heros inside his province but are below 40 population happyness!

Keep in mind your own heros will only stay in countrys when they are below 3 heros or have no free countrys to move to!

So send one of your crappiest heros to #4, move him without any money/food to prevent him from coming over province happyness 40! Collect spare heros in province #6 (has also smite), but every time WITHOUT your main guy!!!

Your pc heros will train troops only if theres another strong enemy beneath so if you want to lets say crush #7 to have a peaceful back, you will have to move your mainguy li chong (or a brother of yours) to your #6 province, train them up, build weapons in town and attack (and crush) #7

Some additional tips:

IF there is a strong enemy beneath you (mostly some of the evil guys) which have mostly an abundant mass of heros, and you need new ones use these tactics:

Defend one of your countrys with no more than 700 men and at least your main guy or a brother, if he wanna attack you to early bevor you're ready pay the money the want, you will have enough money very soon in the game! So if he attacks, the evil guy only have 30 turns to crush your whole army!

So here we go: lets say your province has 4 castles ... so you put 4 armys into your castles and hold 3 armies as reinforcements not in battle! The evil armies will rush on and attacking your castles, as your forces where smaller in size bevor the war, the evil armies will mostly have absolutely no training and are easy to wipe!

But you stay in your castles and let him come ... if you are short to get captured (one of your heroes, you let him run into one of your other provinces. sooner or later one of the evil guys has very less peoples left or no peoples left (the red number shown instead of the white!) than about ~ 30-40 (his hero power he try to escape (run away)), you attack him and bring him down to power zero!

If the enemy is too strong you come in with reinforcements and move around hiding before the evil guys ... after battle you will have about 3-7 heros captured and about 80% of them will join your ranks, immedeately after move out with your mainguy/brother to let the pc reinforce the armies, give money to the new heroes in only 2-3 turns ...

Thats all, the others told also good tips also use them!

Mydgard

This is a favorite game of mine as well. Its based on a classic Chinese story. One translation is called Outlaws of the Marsh, it pretty good. The full version is something like 105 chapters. Very lengthy.

Geez, I thought I was the only one who loved this game...Guess not! The only game I've played countlessly and it's never the same game twice, I love it.

Just thought I'd give a tip from a "professional" player...yeah right! I have passed the game with every single hero on NES. First off, River Dragon Sucks! The only way to win in the time limit is to flee to 39 and 40 and build from there. Second of all, I've heard no one mention the fact that Faceless in the NES version in preficture #2 is able to be recruited right away while your still in exile! He's by far the best person hands down to recruit and brother, the only thing is though you have to make it to preficture 2 before March of the first year, otherwise he flees to 3, 12, or 1! After you recruit him, rest the entire year in preficture 2 until Feb. of the next year. Then settle in #2 in February, then you can hunt for food in march, sell it in in may, and give to Faceless in June. Follow those three simple suggestions and you'll be off to the best start.

NES version facts:
1. People come and go but only at the change of the seasons. i.e. spring, summer, winter and fall. So don't rush to recruit someone when they first appear, unless you have nothing better to do.
2. The best prefictures to settle in when you begin the game are: 2,13,22,39/40 all of these have the ability to buy arms, ships or both. This is critical in building your armies.
3. Waiting for people to come to you is impossible. After you make your fisrt brother go on a recruiting spree with your main charecter. Travel to all the empty prefictures you can get to and try to recruit some heroes. Just recruit, give to em, and move to the next one. Rumoring in the downtown will point you in the correct path when recruiting. Multiple rumoring will yield different people who want to join you and where they are located.
4. Fighting beast builds your "heart" and gains you popularity in recruiting. Do it as much as possible.

Battle hints:
1. When your being attacked, only place the number of heroes on the field equal to the castles you have. When one goes, just reinforce (in the castle of coarse). This will maximize the damage you do and the minimize your casualties.
2. To weaken Gao Qiu, build an army in a adjacent preficture. Make sure you have 100 training and arms, and then move enough heroes out to make yourself appear weak. i.e. Keep 4-6 heroes in the preficture to defend (5 is usually perfect). If Gao Qiu has superior numbers (not strength) he will threaten and attack. Then wipe the floor with him (using the first hint) and capture all the heroes that you can. I once captured all 10 of his heroes while only losing less than 100 men.
3. Set him up! If you can capture the leader of the battle you capture all of his heroes and men that are still on the battle field. Think of way to lure the captain in and swarm him with all you got...be cautious though. If you don't capture him in one attempt he will flee! This may be done by reinforcing your troops not adjacent to, but within charging distance of the captain. i.e. 1-2 squares away.

Anything else you wanna know I could probably tell you cuz I know the game inside out. Also, saving before a battle is the best way to cheat to victory. If you lose, RESET!!! And try again, or don't repeat the same stupid mistake twice.

Originally posted by Christian IV@Jun 16 2005, 03:50 PM
:bye: :bye:
This does sound like an intriguing game, it was a fascinating
time in Ancient Chinese History, the warring kingdoms,
what a universe of history all its own, thanks for getting
this one for us......will be intriguing.

k:

The background of Bandit King is actually not really a time of warring states. The game is based on Shuihu Chuan, a.k.a. Outlaws of the Marsh, a long, epic Chinese novel about, well, bandits. Sort of a Robin Hood type of story, if you will.

[Borodin]

Originally posted by Sean@Oct 20 2005, 03:27 PM
This is a favorite game of mine as well. Its based on a classic Chinese story. One translation is called Outlaws of the Marsh, it pretty good. The full version is something like 105 chapters. Very lengthy.

Yeah, but it's an extremely easy read. It's more like a series of linked short stories than a novel.

Five things (1-3 on game play, 4-5 on setup/documents)

1) The two most important territories in the game are #10 and #20 (Jun and Ji). It takes a while, but you need to take them over. When you occupy them both and have support in them high enough you create a special mountain lair. This makes your popularity sky rocket.

2) If you don't know who would make a good brother and who wouldn't, the easiest way to find good people is to use the people that you can select from when you start the game. They tend to lead their own territories. Corner them, capture them, imprison them, and then recruit them. One time I decided that I wanted to hold onto wizards, so I made them all brothers. It didn't work very well...especially since you bothers tend to do more work than other people and you need wizards to have "body" left in battles.

3) Invite to lair is a great command... it costs money and you have to have enough space in your castle to except everyone, but it works well. Zhu Wu (the spelling might be wrong on that) is probably the most likely to accept an invitation early on. You do need to have several territories and some popularity, but you can probably invite him to join you before you could even recruit any other wizard. It also works to invite people who would be good brothers. You get their people and a good brother out of it. Well worth the few hundred it costs to make the offer and the few thousand to get them over.

4) If you can't get it to work, go to the dosbox tutorial on Abandonia. http://www.abandonia.com/main.php?nav=index&FAQ=1 It shows step by step everything you need to do. If you don't have the emulator set up correctly, it won't work. Their are a few different executables. The file you need to run is Koei.exe.

5) If you want the instruction book, map, files that work etc. Go get get 'em: http://www.abandonia.com/games/502/downloa...ncientChina.htm. Just follow the links. I find that replacementdocs.com is very slow. Right click on the link you want to download and click "save to disk." Trying to view them online doesn't seem to work for me.