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DevDiary 15 - Evolution of Gameplay


THQN Brad

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  • THQ Nordic

Hello friends, and welcome to 15th DevDiary for “Knights of Honor II: Sovereign”! For this one we have chosen to take quite a different approach and tell you about changes in gameplay features we’ve already presented. The idea behind this is to keep you up to date in regards to the features, but more importantly, to let you in on how we iterate over the game, what kinds of reasons make us add, scrap or rework stuff, and overall give you a better look at the development process.

Let’s start with one of the major features that we covered many months ago – the Armies (DevDiary5). When we presented it, the default number of squads a non-marshal knight could lead was 6, marshals could lead 9 and there were additional bonuses on top of that as well – for kings, crusaders, pagans (depending on traditions they follow), etc. The absolute maximum was 18 or 21 in different versions of the game, and we should have in mind that often two knights per each side participate in a battle.

However, we decided to reduce the number of squads to 5 non-marshal / 8 marshal and these numbers being the maximal ones. Why? Well, first of all, by playtesting we found out that players usually use 1-2 unit types per army and having too many squads didn’t lead to actual gameplay variety. Also, we found that 12 or more squad was trickier to handle – the UI was busy and it required a lot of micromanagement to check your troops – e.g., how many exactly are healthy, wounded, dead; to merge or abandon some squads, to refill them, to check out their experience and levels. As we want our tactical battles to also be a bit more dynamic, compared to other grand-strategy games, controlling 20 squads in a battle (or even more if you have garrison or other additional troops) felt too burdening.

Having less squads makes the choice and handling for each one more significant. Of course, we didn’t want to lose gameplay features, so instead of the “additional squads” bonus, there are now bonuses on “units per squad” and on army morale. The gameplay choices are just as interesting, but everything is neater and tidier and easier for the players to grasp and control. As of now, one squad can vary quite a lot – depending heavily on the province the army leader governs (how many “levies” it has), his skills, kingdom’s traditions and other factors, you can double or even triple your squad size.

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Moving on to DevDiary7: Rebellions. We iterated a lot over the rebel features over the course of development and when we presented them, we felt that they were quite good. Since then, we’ve made several changes, though. One of the bigger changes was determining Rebellion zone, and allowing rebel armies to cross borders and affecting nearby kingdoms. It felt quite reasonable as an effect, and depending on other gameplay features, sometimes it felt fun too. However, players started complaining about rebels more over time, though, and for mostly two reasons. First, it doesn’t feel fair. You make great efforts to keep your citizens calm, you maintain high Opinions, crown authority, take care of religious and cultural assimilation and in the end – rebels are still coming, because your neighbors are chaotic. Is it realistic? Kind of, it is not unimaginable that some rebels and bandits will date cross in the other kingdom and pillage whatever they can there. “Life isn’t fair”, you might say, but in the end, this is a game and user experience and fun is what leads us (one of our pillars we talked about in DD1, if you can remember). The second reason is that this feature didn’t scale too well. Rebel spawn in neighboring kingdoms, which you cannot control, is still manageable for small or medium sized kingdoms and it creates interesting situations, but do you know what happens if you control 150 provinces and have 50 neighbors? We assure you that the rebel swarm could get very, very ugly.

We didn’t totally scrap this behavior, though. We made it more rare, exclusive to “famous rebels” and we might include it to some extent as an element for higher difficulty settings for players, that want more challenging experience.

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So, saving the big one for last… let’s go back to something we talked about in DevDiary4, Invasions. Here we basically scrapped the “occupation” state, which had a connection to diplomacy, pacing of the game and the way wars are led in general. At first everything about it looked very in-depth and interesting, but (as with number of squads) the numerous stages of overtaking a province seemed confusing for some players and (as in rebels crossing borders) it didn’t scale too well, getting a bit tiresome after you do it 50 times in a single game.

The process had three stages – taking political control (in the end of a war or before it), dealing with the disorder state of the locals and then the long process of cultural conversion. Of course, we didn’t want just to dumb it down, so we tried to simplify it, without losing essence.

Without having the “occupied” state, we moved some effects to the “disorder” state. Forceful establishing of order by an army now has a political effect and it can be harder to achieve the peaceful establishment of order while the war continues, unless the local population was loyal to you in the first place. In a way, the disorder state behaves as “occupation” while wars last and like the previous disorder state after they are over. The kingdoms that owned these provinces can also demand you to return their lands as a part of a peace treaty or even at some point later in time, and thus we represented that they still have a claim of ownership and the diplomatic part is well preserved.

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Of course, changes like these three are just the tip of the iceberg – surely, we change smaller stuff every day and make much more drastic changes for features we haven’t yet presented. Naturally, we are trying to make blogs and streams for the “finalized” ones and yes, this is one dirty word in the industry. Our policy is to rework something as much as it needs to be reworked, allowing the time for features to mature and grow to create the best experience we can craft. At Black Sea Games we believe that this is the right path for making really great games. However, we are getting close with KoH2:S and are very satisfied with how most of the things work as they are now.           

We will talk more about the evolution of the gameplay systems and the dynamics of developing and iterating over them in our DevStream on Thursday, February 11th, @ 4:00 PM GMT / 11:00 AM EST. The Twitch stream will be hosted on the THQ Nordic channel: http://twitch.tv/thqnordic and we’ll be grabbing responses from this post as well as answering questions live during the stream.

Next time we will talk about one of the main goals of the game – Prestige – how do you gain and lose it and the effects it has in the course of the game and in its end. Until then, we bid thee farewell. Go forth and conquer!


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A very interesting insight at how development is done at Black Sea Games!

I think I asked those questions already in the first dev-diary back then but as far as I'm aware, they are still unanswered, so maybe I'm in luck this thursday:

  • How will the crossing of major rivers work? In the last image of todays dev-diary you can clearly see that the army is about to cross a river but how will it actually work? Is there absolutley no gameplay-mechanic planned for that and the army will just turn into boats vor some seconds and turn back? Or do you maybe already have some mechanic in place?
  • How is modding coming along? Do you still plan to have vast modding capabilities at release?

Thanks and I can't wait for the DevStream 😄

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3 hours ago, THQN Brad said:

We made it more rare, exclusive to “famous rebels” and we might include it to some extent as an element for higher difficulty settings for players, that want more challenging experience.

I didn't have a problem with rebels crossing borders.  It was believable and forced me to not ignore provinces that I had conquered.  It also required me to deal with rebels rather than let them spread their chaos.

But I am willing to accept the compromise as long as they are an option in higher difficulties.

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Yeah  new things are really important ..believe me...and  i couldnt see anything pictures and i fos about Ottoman Empire and  anotolian Turkics..i want say again example we should see special diplomatic ranks and political ranks for some Empires..Example :Magister militium and Magister officorium for Eastern Roman Empire and Grand vizier and Janisarry commander ranks for Ottoman empire...and if you want make really good game these are really importants...i think i will tell this again)))i hope you hear us Blacksea studio.

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8 hours ago, THQN Brad said:

by playtesting we found out that players usually use 1-2 unit types per army

Did you do focus groups for this playtesting with people who haven't played the game so far, or how did this work?

 

For the different army sizes depending on the hiring province: Could you elaborate this more in the stream? What I am concerned with: What if I move a large host to a poorer province with less food production, can I still maintain the upkeep for it? Or may large armies eat faster than provisions can be supplied, basically? 😄 In KoH 1 you had some provinces with slow food production and small food storage bottlenecking the recovery of armies (hiring new troops and supplywise).

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3 hours ago, ahmetol said:

.......  hope you hear us Blacksea studio.

Don't want to be disrespectful, but by US you only mean you? Cuz I haven't seen anyone else complain about this exept you.

3 hours ago, ahmetol said:

...and if you want make really good game these are really importants..

And again, no i don't think these are IMPORTANT. Balance between simple and complicated is the key. And I don't think that ranks (or whatever you want to be added) tick the box  in that regard. They just complicate things without any benefit, since we already have skills and stars to differentiate between rookie and veteran generals, clerics, etc....

Again, no disrespect ment ...

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7 hours ago, DoVlaLegend said:

Don't want to be disrespectful, but by US you only mean you? Cuz I haven't seen anyone else complain about this exept you.

And again, no i don't think these are IMPORTANT. Balance between simple and complicated is the key. And I don't think that ranks (or whatever you want to be added) tick the box  in that regard. They just complicate things without any benefit, since we already have skills and stars to differentiate between rookie and veteran generals, clerics, etc....

Again, no disrespect ment ...

I  didnt ask your ideas ..i wanted tell my wishes to the Blacksea studio ...already Knights of Honor game used some ranks last game..and they can use again more details for ranks in second game...i wanted only tell .

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7 hours ago, DoVlaLegend said:

Don't want to be disrespectful, but by US you only mean you? Cuz I haven't seen anyone else complain about this exept you.

And again, no i don't think these are IMPORTANT. Balance between simple and complicated is the key. And I don't think that ranks (or whatever you want to be added) tick the box  in that regard. They just complicate things without any benefit, since we already have skills and stars to differentiate between rookie and veteran generals, clerics, etc....

Again, no disrespect ment ...

And yes i wanted mean my ide...but i wrote us..this is wrong word..sorry

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please don't over simplify the battles. I understand that you want to make the game accessible to casual/new players, but most people buying the game will probably have some experience playing rts/strategy games. 

I think testing the rts battles in a (closed) beta version with your actual playerbase will be the best way to find the amount of squads people prefer.

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21 hours ago, ahmetol said:

we should see special diplomatic ranks and political ranks for some Empires..Example :Magister militium and Magister officorium for Eastern Roman Empire and Grand vizier and Janisarry commander ranks for Ottoman empire...and if you want make really good game these are really importants..

I don't think those are important at all, except maybe a slightly different game when selecting different kingdoms.

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  • 4 weeks later...

please don't oversimplify the number of units. One of the advantages of the game is the ability to feel like a commander of a huge army. I was very pleased with the news when I learned that the number of units is reaching 21. And now this is pretty sad news. It doesn't matter what variety of troops the player uses. One of the important aspects of the game is a huge army.

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  • 2 weeks later...
On 3/7/2021 at 8:31 PM, Janei said:

please don't oversimplify the number of units. One of the advantages of the game is the ability to feel like a commander of a huge army. I was very pleased with the news when I learned that the number of units is reaching 21. And now this is pretty sad news. It doesn't matter what variety of troops the player uses. One of the important aspects of the game is a huge army.

I agree completely. The other games like this have 20 units on the battlefield from one side and they can have 4 sides on tha battle, so it means a player can control up to 40 units at once. Compared to this here a player control a maximum of 16-24 units at once? Why? You cannot compete with those games if you dumb down a main part of the game, the battles. I totally lost  all hope with this game.

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On 3/18/2021 at 10:20 AM, lukri said:

I agree completely. The other games like this have 20 units on the battlefield from one side and they can have 4 sides on tha battle, so it means a player can control up to 40 units at once. Compared to this here a player control a maximum of 16-24 units at once? Why? You cannot compete with those games if you dumb down a main part of the game, the battles. I totally lost  all hope with this game.

This is not a Total War like game. The focus is way more on a grand strategy rather than rts unit management. Moreover, in order to have a multiplayer on a grand map with a lot of people at once, you have to completely remove manual unit control because grand map can't wait for 2 people to direct manage a battle for half an hour.

So, it appears that the army composition is way more important and there are few unit slots per army but a variable size of solders per unit slot. Which means you don't have to have a lot of separate units to make up a grand army of the same type of soldiers. 

No one really saw any gameplay of tactical or grand battles, but so it seems from the info released. It is very unfortunate that dev blogs are so vague on describing the army mechanics so far. 

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Please don't simplify the game!

I played the KoH 1 a lot during the past 10 years and to me the campaign auto-fights were must-have at the early stage of the game - but later when the computer also had stronger army it's a lot more fun to have more units and test out strategies when playing the battle.

1 idea to deliver happiness to both unskilled and skilled army commanders is to have a feature (hard option) to have bigger army slot - unlocking the old features for 6-9 armies on marshals. And this can be turned at campaign start => thus resolving any complains about army and battle scale.


Currently on different games (example TotalWar) up to 4 marshals can group in an attack and if you cant lead all armies there is option for AI assistance, but my point is 4 x 20 is a lot but you order them in groups(20 sec pause phase to know the environment) and the large scale battle is there + you have 7-8 groups and management is the same as having 5-8 armies in total BUT with exception that you can change one unit from the back line to round the enemy if they let you => this brings diversity and deeper game strategy feeling. Having only 8 units and attacking with solo marshal (if someone quickly expands on many fronts) will lead to no large battles and the scales of them in the ages were quite big.

Hope you find anything useful and keep up the good work!

I think many people will agree that mildly-higher difficulty won't harm the newcomers to the genre and the old KoH had big complexity for it's time. Replay value suffers if the game is more straightforward and simple.

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The random neighbor rebel is a good option in my opinion - it remind people to never go will all troops on campaign and let their kingdom undefended!

When someone leave his house/car he locks it and it's considered safe - but can you lock a kingdom? (without pandemic :D )

+ when famous rebels fight for a newer territory/influence/prestige - who can tell them what they can do or cannot? Founding a kingdom takes lands and if you let them they take it.
Possible answer to the complains - if rebels detect large army force and will suffer too many casualties thus resulting in losing scenario for them - they can raid only outer territory or just camp for the night(a while) and decide to go back to the less likely losing scenario. (they can go in and out without raiding only once => resulting in facing the problem of coming back when you don't have an army (-like Heroes 3 AI xD))

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Hello. I have a suggestion: for a more realistic game, all the court members should be affected by the time passing (spies, merchants, clerics, etc). The Marshalls can die in battle, the kings die because of age, but it is a bit unrealistic to have the same merchant from the begining to the end of the game.

Thanx and sorry if this idea was debated already.

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1 hour ago, Arcturus said:

Hello. I have a suggestion: for a more realistic game, all the court members should be affected by the time passing (spies, merchants, clerics, etc). The Marshalls can die in battle, the kings die because of age, but it is a bit unrealistic to have the same merchant from the begining to the end of the game.

Thanx and sorry if this idea was debated already.

The lead game designer (frujin) confirmed this to be an option in the comments of Dev Diary 9 (see 

)

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