King's Bounty: The Legend Progress Report

The editors at IGN have taken a closer look at the current state of Katauri Interactive's King's Bounty: The Legend.
I engaged in several battles to get a feel for The Legend's combat system. This is a turn-based mode that's not unlike the one found in Heroes of Might & Magic. Your units line up on the battlefield, facing the enemy, and unit stacks take turns to move or attack. A stack consists of a number of the same type of unit, so I had hundreds of pitchfork-armed peasants in one stack, a smaller number of archers in another, and three stacks of different types of spellcasters. They battled skeletons, necromancers, ace throwers, and more.

The battlefield is divided in a hexagonal grid, which means that units can move in one of six directions. One thing I noticed is how the battlefield can be cluttered with terrain; an outcropping of rocks for example might block off a portion of the map. This creates a perfect choke point, as you can station melee units above and below the outcropping and place your ranged units directly behind it. If any enemy stack wants to engage in close combat with your ranged units, they'll have to get around the obstacle and your units. But there's certainly a benefit to getting a melee unit directly adjacent to a ranged one, as the latter has to engage in direct combat with the melee unit next to it; it cannot attack distant units while it's vulnerable to close attack.