King’s Bounty II: Beginner’s guide — Characters, combat, and starter tips

Combat mechanics in King’s Bounty II

During quests or while exploring the world, you can engage hostiles in turn-based tactical battles. Your chosen character doesn’t actually fight foes directly. Instead, King’s Bounty II has you moving your units on a hex-based grid, taking turns based on their initiative stat.

Leadership, unit recruitment, ideals, and spending gold

In King’s Bounty II, you’ll see single-entity units (i.e., the larger and beefier monsters), but most squads are comprised of troops. Each unit also has a specific leadership value. Your character’s own leadership stat (increased when leveling up, wearing certain gear pieces, having the Glory talent, or interacting with specific shrines) determines how many of a particular unit can join your army.

Moreover, units themselves are part of ideal groupings (i.e., Order, Anarchy, Finesse, and Power). If you have units of opposing or different ideals, then that leads to a drop in morale. If you have units from the same category, however, then you’ll gain a morale bonus (an increased chance to have an additional turn during combat).

Note 1: Units are predominantly purchased from recruiter NPCs by spending gold. Still, there are a few instances when you’d gain new troops thanks to quests. Personally, I would hold off on buying too many units that you won’t use as that’s just a waste of gold. To be fair, you’d really have to mess up badly to reach a point where you won’t have enough gold to get decent units to win future battles. But, it’s always better to have extra resources.

Note 2: In my case, I stuck with Order-type units such as Spearmen, Dogs of War, Healers, and Archers early in the game. Later, I switched to Crossbowmen, Knights, Royal Mages, and Disciples. You can learn more in our King’s Bounty II units guide.

Combat tactics

Apart from their regular attacks, units have several passive traits and actions/abilities. A unit can also “wait” until everyone else has finished their turns (maybe you’d be in a more advantageous position), or “defend” to nullify a bit of damage.

There are also some important caveats:

• Taunt – Only the unit that cast this can be attacked. This can mess up your engagement since you won’t be able to damage other threats until the effect has dissipated.
• Fear/level – A unit with this debuff won’t be able to attack those at a higher tier or level.
• Haste/speed – The speed stat refers to the movement range in hexes. You can cast buffs to help troops move across the battlefield easily.
• Attacks of opportunity – These occur when an enemy unit that’s adjacent to you attempts to move away to another hex.
• Counterattacks – When a unit is engaged for the first time, it’ll deal damage to the attacker. This can only happen once per round unless you have the Rampage talent.

• Line of sight – For ranged units, mousing over a hex might show you an eye icon with a bar. This means a target isn’t in your line of sight. However, this is sometimes glitchy (i.e., it could say that the target can’t be hit even though you’d be able to).
• Ranged unit when in melee – Ranged units won’t be able to attack targets that are further away if an enemy is adjacent to them.
• Special actions – Some special actions such as buffs or dispels use up your movement point instead of your action, allowing you to attack within the same turn.
• Morale – As mentioned earlier, having units that follow the same ideal grant a morale bonus so they can trigger an extra turn. Some items and talents can also help with this mechanic.

Note: If you’re not ready for a battle, you can press the escape key or reload the last autosave. This places you in front of the encounter area, so you can plan ahead before proceeding.

Using magic

Magic in King’s Bounty II uses mana as a resource (which is gained from mana crystal shrines, loot, and quest rewards). The mana that you see while exploring represents your total. This lets you learn spells via scrolls, or upgrade the ones you already have. Meanwhile, the mana you see in battles is dependent on your Arcane Knowledge stat. The higher it is, the larger the mana pool so you can cast more spells during a fight.

Lastly, there’s a tab in your spellbook (“B”) for Wayfaring Magic. These are activated via scrolls and they last for a few battles. Examples include increased experience point gains, more gold/mana rewards, or higher unit morale.

Note: You can take a look at our King’s Bounty II magic guide to learn more about spells.

Healing, resurrection, and replenishment from reserves

As a squad takes damage, you could attempt to heal those who are wounded. But, the healing threshold is only up to how many troops are left (denoted by pips on the health bar). If a squad took too much damage and lost several soldiers, a regular healing spell won’t bring back the dead. You do have the following options:

• Use the Resurrection spell (Light and Life category) during a battle.
• Have the Phantasmal Guardian talent (28 Order points) which instantly revives the first unit that dies during a battle.
• A post-battle command that lets you hold “H” to revive everyone, or press “H” to fully restore each troop separately. This action costs gold, but you won’t need to go back to recruiters often. Unfortunately, this wouldn’t work on units affected by Lethal Wounds, Execution, Blight, or other insta-kill debuffs from Hollowed units.
• You can recruit extra troops of a particular type so they can get added to your reserves. Then, open the army tab (“Y”) to replenish soldiers from your reserves.

Anyway, let’s go to the next part of our King’s Bounty II beginner’s guide to discuss the initial areas of Fort Crucis, New Tyrene, and various sidequests.