After you’ve taken care of business, you’re presented with a world map showing you where you’ve been and what lies ahead. Heroes also have a separate leveling up scheme whereby there are three branches of skills that you can assign your points to including your combat and commanding abilities. Heroes can equip and purchase various items to gives themselves more protection, make them quicker, and frankly more effective on the battlefield. As a unit does battle, it can level up to level three, and you can also outfit units with battle flags, new armor and other small items that will keep doing their best. In between missions, you can replenish your troops by purchasing new units or replacing missing unit members with gold you’ve found in battle. You can have several Hero characters in battle at once, and often will, however all of them draw from the same pool of magic, so keeping a check on that is key.
It’s also helpful to assign your Hero character to a unit to help their morale and give them other power ups, like a temporary boost in the chance to hit their enemy or make the enemy miss, or several other helpful ways. It is important to align your long range units in the back of your close up units so that they can provide support from a distance. You can have your men form up in certain formations and easily turn to face certain directions. In both Mark of Chaos and the Battle March expansion, controlling your units in battle and deciding what to do with them in between battles is about as strategic as it gets. I think this method does reduce both the micromanagement and strategy load on the player, and ultimately simplifies gameplay which for RTS newcomers or people who want to just gather a force and dive into battle is fine, but for those who like more strategic based battles, it’s unsatisfying. That is, instead of starting off with x amount of funds and resources, and deploying and creating buildings and vehicles and soldiers, you purchase and select forces to take into battle before battle begins, and you march through the battle field to hopeful victory. If you don’t know, as I didn’t before I played it, Mark of Chaos and its expansion are more similar to Total War than to a more traditional RTS game like Command & Conquer.
Once installed, I spent some time with the first chapter of Mark of Chaos, “The Call To War” to familiarize myself with the mechanics of this particular RTS. Both the PC and the Xbox 360 release come complete with the original Mark of Chaos game and of course Battle March.
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