DevDiary 26 - Goods and Advantages

[THQN Brad]

Hello friends and welcome to the 26^th DevDiary for “Knights of Honor II: Sovereign”! In “DevDiary 17 - Settlements and Province Features” we started talking about the economy-related features of provinces. If you haven’t checked it out, it is a good place to start on that topic so that you can grasp the whole concept of these related features. In this DevDiary we’ll continue with a more in-depth view on how goods are acquired and what benefits they provide to a kingdom.

Goods production is done in Buildings and Upgrades and usually have a province feature as a prerequisite. For more advanced ones, usually more basic Upgrades and goods are also required. For example, glass (one of the 64 goods) can be produced in the “Glassworks” upgrade of the “Woodworking” building, which requires the “Deep forests” province feature. Additionally, for that upgrade “Colliers Kiln” must be built first and minerals are also required.

 

There are much harder goods to produce, like navigational maps, compasses, cannons… - these require whole production chains and multiple goods, which in terms require multiple province features. The good news is that goods production counts for the entire kingdom, so the “puzzle” is not solved province by province, but on a global level.

Goods can also be imported by Merchants (for details, check out “DevDiary 11 - Merchants and Trading” , but that requires upkeep both in gold and commerce and, depending on their rarity, importance and how complex it is to craft them, that upkeep can be quite high. Few social classes/professions like Bourgeoisie and Scholars, for example, are also under the “goods” category and are “produced” by Upgrades, but naturally, they cannot be imported.

Some of the Upgrades, that require goods, can provide huge benefits in one direction or another and they can also enable recruitment of advanced troops. So, if players want their kingdoms to have elite armies, then they must make sure they produce or import goods like iron, horses and leather.

Besides a requirement for kingdom development in general, goods have another usage. When players collect specific sets, they unlock kingdom advantages – a feature from the first game that we wanted to preserve in KoH2:S, as it created an interesting conquest “puzzle”. There are 7 common kingdom advantages each kingdom can develop – Abundance, Mercantilism, Masonry, Progress, Age of Discovery, Age of War and Age of Prosperity. The eight one depends on a kingdom’s religion, as it is related to culture and the cultural advantages of Christians, Muslims and Pagans simply cannot have the same goods required and effects.

Although no advantage is easy to achieve, we can say that the first four are easier than the last four. As advantages are usually achievable during the end-game phase, having the required goods is more of a measurement of success than a path to such. However, depending on players’ starting province features and those of near-by provinces, sometimes development of an advantage rather early on can be a good strategy.

When players develop all advantages, they are able to Claim victory – one of the three major ways to win the game. In result, a province’s features and what goods are provided by it become a crucial consideration when planning both conquest and defense, as goods are needed both for standard development, kingdom advantages and in the end – they can be the path to victory relying on expansion and economy, rather than prestige and diplomacy. Unlike in “Emperor of the World”, if a player claims victory by developing all advantages, no one has a say against that.

It will be nice to hear your thoughts on goods production and effects. Do you think that the system looks too complex, or maybe too simple, as we ignore the difficult to manage “logistics” part of the resources? Which path to victory sounds most fun to you and if you have played the first KoH game, did you have a favorite strategy to achieve it?

We’ll talk more about Goods and Advantages in our DevStream on Thursday, March 24^th, @ 3:00 PM GMT / 11:00 AM EST. Without you, our dearest fans of the game, our kingdom’s most important advantages will never be complete, so join in our conversation. 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’ll will talk more about armies – recruitment, manpower and supplies. Until then, we bid thee farewell. Go forth and conquer!

 

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[Anton]

It looks great! Definitely don't simplify it.

[William Blake]

Well, I'll start from minor issues this time )

Kingdom Advantage Names:

Very inconsistent naming of kingdom advantages, some are just horrible - "Mercantilism", "Progress". Sound like a lame machine translation. Consider changing names:

"Abundance" -> "Crop Rotation" (as agricultural term specific to the time period)

"Mercantilism" -> "Foreign Trade" or "Merchant guilds" (mercantilism is a very scientific term for game)

"Progress" - > "Renaissance" or "Enlightenment" (progress sounds very meaningless)

"Age of War" -> "Standing army"  (war is too broad, it is not an achievement or a tech, war is going on all the time)

 

64 Goods is a lot:

Not going to argue about it, it will take too much effort to change it. But 64 goods is a lot. It is way way too much. Just listing names, which have too be meaningful is brrr.... It will be fine for a hardcore players, but new an casuals will be lost in all that. 

I look at the icons on your screenshots, I see 3 icons for horses which is manageable. But you also have 7 (seven!) icons of some men, probably specialists or whatever. 7 tiny square icons with men is practically creating player confusion on purpose. Moreover  everything else is a bunch of completely obscure generic icons of things...

But we are not changing that. So, I strongly suggest to split 64 goods types into 3-5 tiers.  Depending on rarity/required other goods. Make tier II icons with green border and tier III icons with blue or whatever and so on.  This should apply to all views a goods icons are displayed to a player.

 

Advise player on how to get a specific trade good right now:

You need a easy way for a player to figure out how to get missing trade good. Since goods are derivatives of province resources plus building upgrade, it is not obvious for a regular player with a limited game knowledge to get through this puzzle. So you need "an advisor" view or something, which would allow a player to find options to get a trade good like "select trade good M -> message "you produce M at province P" or "you don't have access to M" - > "find provinces which can produce this M" gives a list of provinces. -> "find trade" gives a list of other kingdoms which now can trade M.

 

"Upgrade N is now available in every B in our kingdom":

I don't understand this mechanic. It sounds as if suddenly you can build glassworks in other provinces which don't have natural resources. Eh.. why? If I build glassworks in other provinces, but I later lose the province with natural resources to the glassworks what will happen with all other glassworks I've built?

Or if you insists on a mechanics that only first upgrade of a specific type has a cost to a player, but after the first one all other provinces can get this upgrade for free (as I suspect from "barracks upgrade" discussion we had before), I can't understand the logic behind it. Why would you put a pay wall on a first upgrade of a type, but a more advanced kingdom can just build upgrades easily. If you lose all the provinces with a specific upgrade, but you've built an upgrade before, is it still "available" for your new provinces? I don't get it.

Probably at least consider re-phrasing the help text.

 

Overall dynamics of kingdom advantages:

Ok, this is my main issue. But I have to speculate here.

Based on original KoH, which had probably the same system with way less goods, I expect a very unhealthy dynamics:

• In a beginning of a game, you have too little choice of resources and goods produced, based on your local starting conditions. This means that you can't reasonable choose anything so neither kingdom advantages mechanics and trade good are practically irrelevant for a player.
• In a middle game, player again has little to no choice in potential trade goods, it is all defined by very few REASONABLE options to capture or develop based on your local environment.
• When suddenly there is an explosion of trade good available due to much faster expansion of your kingdom, much more advanced trade (with all other kingdoms suddenly developing trade goods), way more stronger diplomacy (you have power and gold to make diplomatic relations and now can reach practically all other kingdoms on the map) and trade is using teleporting so goods are instantly available across a map. As a result, your start floating in available trade goods and your kingdom advantages start filling way too fast, giving you even more bonuses and making this situation even worse.

All I see in the dev blog, will only reinforce this unhealthy dynamic from the original game. Goods are too many, the more you have to acquire for an kingdom advantage, the less you can do at a start. Since you require more trade goods per kingdom advantage and possible resource options per province are way too many, the less chances are that you will have reasonable access to specific good you are missing in a mid game. Yet at the end game suddenly you will have a flood of available things and all the puzzle parts will fill in almost with no effort.

I don't know how to fix this. Maybe you should not be able to trade a good if you or the other kingdoms is "using it" for a kingdom advantage. At least it will solve a problem of "one province on a map, starts making N and everyone else suddenly gets it from trade and everyone get a missing piece of a puzzle".

 

Conclusion:

We'll see how it will work out. Although most of it is more or less clear in my head, the actual gameplay may be different, so I'm just speculating here. Overall, I'm skeptical about current design to be both too complex and too irrelevant for early-mid game, while being too trivial at end game.

However, some changes to names, visual separation of trade goods by tier and UI flow to advice a player on how to get a specific trade good would be good enough to make the current system into a final game with as little pain as possible.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[USArmyMan1982]

One of my favorite parts of the game! Good!

[BC Knight]

6 hours ago, Anton said:

It looks great! Definitely don't simplify it.

This!

[Yavor]

Hello there, Dear Devs,

Could you, please, show us some of the new tactical battle screenshots? They will be greatly appreciated!

Kind Regards!

[Riccardo]

3 hours ago, Yavor said:

Hello there, Dear Devs,

Could you, please, show us some of the new tactical battle screenshots? They will be greatly appreciated!

Kind Regards!

They're still balancing the game...

[Zaza]

In my opinion, the system SHOULD NOT be simpler than KoH 1, but more complex.

I liked that in KoH 1, the resources were randomly assigned to provinces and that not every province could make any goods. That game some provinces a uniqueness and strategic importance.

Also that kept the game fresh.

If I understood right, now all the resources in the kingdom are put in a pool and any province can make any goods

[Ivory Knight]

William Blake brings up some good points of issue, and I agree basically with all of them, especially the too many goods point. I think William has tried to stick with the kingdom advantages being a mechanic part of the game and offer adjustments to maintain it. However, I will take a controversial point here, and say, that I think we should remove this Kingdom Advantages.

Firstly as a victory condition, since it does not make much sense that acquiring goods some how makes u economically the dominator over Europe. Though in replace another economic victory condition should be implemented. Possibly Vassalage domination, or some sort of Trade domination. 

Next, this falls under Williams comment that boosting the player for accruing trade goods unless balanced well, can lead to exploding snow balls. This obviously needs to be handled well. 

Instead I propose something else. Trade goods are existent on the map just as they are now, but they flow between adjacent kingdoms naturally. You can upgrade your trade good province to generate more goods and this will generate more money (or bonuses) as more goods flow out of your provinces and are consumed by Kingdoms which demand it. That is the easy part. Here is the tricky but fun part. You can cancel the demand and/or the supply for a trade good not only within your own Kingdom but also upon another in the form of enforcement. If another nation refuses your enforcement this gives you justifications for war. This is just a general outline and to make it work smoother, enforcement could involve not only threats of war, but promises of lump sum money or monthly money, to make up for the trade lost, or diplomatic pacts of defense ect... Carrot and stick should both be incorporated. 

This seems much more real and tangible, and say you enforced trade conditions on all the nations in europe, then I would say you economically control europe, and that could be a real win condition that would make sense.   

Regardless of what is decided in the end I conclude by saying the way the kingdom advantages are laid out currently ( the same they were in KOH 1) seem like a boring game mechanic that brings little to the experience of the game. Just because it was in KOH 1 doesnt mean it needs to be in KOH 2.... at least not in the exact form. 

 

[William Blake]

20 minutes ago, Ivory Knight said:

You can cancel the demand and/or the supply for a trade good not only within your own Kingdom but also upon another in the form of enforcement. If another nation refuses your enforcement this gives you justifications for war.

 

Well, lets run with this idea for a bit.

So you need basically a screen with all goods and "allow/deny" checkboxes for each other kingdoms? And you need also a reverse view - what a particular kingdom produces and allows/denies to you? You also need diplomacy flow to demand or deny a trade good? 

If you want to make this a diplomacy tool it needs to be more... hm... lets say restrictive or exclusive. Lets say you can only trade a good to a single other kingdom. So if you make a rare good and all of Europe wants it you have to choose which kingdom gets the export and deny all others. This would make it way more valuable carrot/stick. Maybe. Can't say. Having an unlimited resource you can allow to everyone and get benefits from everyone for same cost of a single province and upgrade sounds kinda fishy. 

Economy is a very simplified in KoH2 or so it seems, so kingdom advantages and trade goods are not a bad way to expand into economy side of kingdom life. But we don't know how it feels and plays especially early mid game. It can become just irrelevant hustle. If you make exclusive trade to a single foreign power it can bring trade goods more to the diplomacy system. Maybe.

The more I think about it though... If you had way more kingdom advantages with less goods required for a single one, that would be better. Because it could allow you to get smaller but ARCHIVABLE bonuses early mid game. So lets say, a kingdoms achievement is 3-4 goods and it gives smaller bonus and we have say 20 of them. Like a tech tree basically. When I look at one of the 6 current ones - they require too much to think about it. If I could have a viable early goals of 2-3-4 goods for a small but realistic bonus it could be way more engaging. Also, if a next achievement is a question of 2 goods I have + 1 I need, it would make diplomacy for that +1 good very attractive and exclusive trade would make it ever better.

So ok, sorry to thinking aloud, I should be way more brief:

 

• Make trade good available to producer kingdom + 1 another kingdom as an exclusive trade
• Keep current 6 advantages (just to save effort), but split each of them into 3 smaller advantages with small bonuses. 
• 3 small advantages (inside current 6) should require very few goods 2 or 3 but give smaller bonuses
• Once you get 3 small together the big advantage bonuses kick in

 

In this case you can keep most of the things you have already. So new balancing of goods production/rarity/location is not required. Since your new small advantages are already inside the existing 6 ones you already have strategic progression figured out. Just make more sub bonuses and make exclusive 1 trade to lock down unlimited supply to everyone from a single place. This will make it relevant to early game and makes an exclusive trade of an important good to be a major diplomacy factor.

 

[Vednor]

Goods and Advantages are parts that I enjoyed from KoH. But the problem is I was literally the only person doing it during the gameplay. I mean, no AI King pays attention to this or even sends any request for trading for items. So this whole concept feels very static. Getting all kingdom advantages is simply a way to win a campaign. There's just not much fun in it. So please make it more complicated this time. Have AI nations giving us some competition in the race of kingdom advantages. Also, it feels unnecessary that we need to conquer a port city to import an exotic item for kingdom advantage. Why can't we import multiple from a single port? Perhaps 3 from a single port. 

For Goods, I must mention that having a merchant trading a particular item that I don't produce in my lands is a waste of his talent. He should be able to trade both gold and goods. Since the number of seats at the council is limited, multitasking ability should be introduced.

[Zerg]

Just one simple question from me for the stream tomorrow (and I can't believe no one took the hint yet and asked the question):

• "Cannons" is a produced good. So we can savely assume that there will be a gunpowser-based unit, right?

[William Blake]

18 minutes ago, Zerg said:

Just one simple question from me for the stream tomorrow (and I can't believe no one took the hint yet and asked the question):

• "Cannons" is a produced good. So we can savely assume that there will be a gunpowser-based unit, right?

No, I can bet you that "they need cannons to outfit galleons to sail far away to acquire exotic goods". So far as land military combat goes - there are no gunpowder units we know of. As naval combat go - it is even more simplistic, you don't have ships as a separate units, you just board a land army to become a fleet.

Sorry )

Edited March 23, 2022 by William Blake

[Ivory Knight]

I agree with you William that, making a tech tree of Kingdom Advantages with further advantages requiring more resources seems like a great way to solve and maintain the current system. It even might make 64 goods feel like a lot less, since you are never worried about all of them at once, but only a few at a time. 

Although I am still not sold on the idea that accruing all the advantages should be a victory condition, as Vednor points out, the Ai never trully competes with you in KOH 1. Whats the solution? Have the AI compete in KOH 2? The idea of racing to find trade goods (effectively through war, since thats the only way to get more) just doesnt seem fun. I am ok with there being some big bonus once getting all of the advantages or no bonus at all, but being a victory condition just doesnt sit right to me. Unless you bring something deeper to the trade mechanic which unifies economic diplomacy and war together so that through the acquisition of the advantages you impose you rule onto other kingdoms in some form or another. Beating those kingdoms and taking some of their territory to produce a trade good so you have all the kingdom advantages doesnt mean you rule europe, it just means you won some wars and got some territory. 

 

[William Blake]

2 minutes ago, Ivory Knight said:

the Ai never trully competes with you in KOH 1. Whats the solution? Have the AI compete in KOH 2? The idea of racing to find trade goods (effectively through war, since thats the only way to get more) just doesnt seem fun. I am ok with there being some big bonus once getting all of the advantages or no bonus at all, but being a victory condition just doesnt sit right to me. Unless you bring something deeper to the trade mechanic which unifies economic diplomacy and war together so that through the acquisition of the advantages you impose you rule onto other kingdoms in some form or another. Beating those kingdoms and taking some of their territory to produce a trade good so you have all the kingdom advantages doesnt mean you rule europe, it just means you won some wars and got some territory. 

 

True, but if you make AI aware of kingdom advantages victory, I fear it will make AI too strong, because AI can calculate required goods and sources much better and diplomacy between AI kingdoms and their trade are not real (I suspect it is not real). So AI would probably be rushing kingdom advantages and put too much pressure on a player to compete ONLY for kingdom advantages victory.

To make this even viable, I suggest an exclusive trade mechanic, so a any kingdom with a rare resource cannot possibly supply all AI kingdoms, just 1 exclusive foreign trade for this good type. So you could make this a condition/demand in diplomacy and yet you can track it - who is the single exporter of a good type. You could also potentially lock down trade good from others by having exclusive import yourself. So at least you can indirectly stop AI from rushing to victory with trade goods.

Now, I also do agree that pure trading victory through kingdom advantages is a bit odd for a "medieval kingdoms setting", this is not a "Merchants of Honor: global trade EU" game. But the map is huge, the game can last forever and you need an option to dominate through economy before taking every single province on a map and an escape option to still win even if AI is military way too strong and aims for political (vote) victory. Needs to be an alternative option for a player.

 

[Ivory Knight]

"Now, I also do agree that pure trading victory through kingdom advantages is a bit odd for a "medieval kingdoms setting", this is not a "Merchants of Honor: global trade EU" game. But the map is huge, the game can last forever and you need an option to dominate through economy before taking every single province on a map and an escape option to still win even if AI is military way too strong and aims for political (vote) victory. Needs to be an alternative option for a player."

I agree, but having the kingdom advanatages being a game victory in the form it is I do not think is the answer. 

 

[William Blake]

10 minutes ago, Ivory Knight said:

I agree, but having the kingdom advanatages being a game victory in the form it is I do not think is the answer. 

 

I doubt they will change that at this point. It is possibly an option for a game setup so you can disable it.

Black Sea seems to be very relaxed with "feel of dark ages" part of the game. You can see "Age of Enlightenment" and admiralty icon with a XVI century ship and cannons on ships. So trade victory is more or less in line with that. It is probably a potential victory condition for a very long games anyway, so I doubt most of us will play a single game long enough to have this problem.

 

[William Blake]

Meaningful screens from the dev stream:

 

Effects and descriptions:

 

 

From the effects and amount of goods required, we can clearly see that all of these are mid to end game things. Bonuses in percentages are only significant for a large empires. Most effects are obviously not worth the cost and effort and won't be a factor in most short to mid games.

For the purpose of a multiplayer all this is close to totally irrelevant - too long to archive, too hard to get a required set based on your preferred starting location. Time is an issue, so the longer you drag the game the more is the chance that people would just leave unable to play anymore.

This means that the only meaningful trade goods for early to mid game (and all of multiplayer) are the basic ones that unlock military units and such. If these are easy and abundant they do not matter (everyone can get them easily) if these are very rare or located in a specific areas of the map - then we have too much problem with different starting locations being unfair.

Also this implies that the dev stream talk about "strategically cutting of enemy from some trade good" is a mute point. Since most of the 64 are going towards kingdom advantages which most of the players in a multiplayer won't live long enough to see. Basic ones for units will probably be too abundant to cut anyone off. There will be ton of AI kingdoms making these and you can trade with a good deal of them instantly giving you access to a trade good again. Localization and trade route safety is not an issue and the amount of AI kingdoms is huge to have anything close to real trade good blockades. 

 

PS

List of all 64 goods with green mark on goods required for kingdom advantages:

 

 

So about 1/3 of goods are NOT used for kingdom advantages, but is probably required as prerequisites for more advanced goods production. As I said before, it would be really great to have color coding on trade goods tiers to show that.

 

[ruzen]

I won't write pages and pages.

64 goods are a lot. This feature will make so many controversies so all the other aspects of the game will be left forgotten and many won't be playing the game or refunding it.

64 good doesn’t fit the theme too. It’s a medieval game, not an industrial age game.

I would argue most of the goods are already doing the same thing but acts as option locking tools for different regions and their research or civic options to be unique to their respective regions.

So why bother making it? Let ironwork same on every region or paper or glass… You don’t need to make it sound complex in order to give empty goods which make the same things.

Last thing before I conclude. Production chains should just be a sidekick, not the main thing.

 

P.S.I doubt the ai will be sufficient at it eighter

Edited March 26, 2022 by ruzen

[William Blake]

14 hours ago, ruzen said:

So why bother making it? Let ironwork same on every region or paper or glass… You don’t need to make it sound complex in order to give empty goods which make the same things.

Well, it appears that the main logic was initially to create a situation where a small kingdom cannot possibly produce even a basic set of all resources thus enforcing trade and diplomacy. From this starting point and giving an average size of a kingdom to be 2-4 provinces they came to probably 10-20 essential goods.

But due to the size of the map, this was repeating too much in all regions and created too many potential trade opportunities for the same smaller set of goods. So a decision was made to make a lot of diverse region specific goods. An alternative would be an additional complexity into trade mechanics, probably logistics and storage considerations to make local and close by trade substantially more efficient and cut off far away markets from inflating supply. But Black Seas does not want this complexity in mechanics and expects simpler mechanics with more goods types to provide better gameplay overall.

 

PS

In fact there are 24 province features in the game, defining resources available per province. The following is a view of provinces with 1 selected province feature (horses) in green.

 

 

And compare this to Camels in Africa:

 

 

We can see the this is practically the same distribution per number of provinces. But, it would be first very questionable to have so many horses in Africa and so few in Europe. It would also make horses as a single trade good on a global market to double, making it significantly less dependent on a good diplomacy for any given kingdom.

Edited March 27, 2022 by William Blake

[Lighthope]

Why would glassworks need woodworking and deep forests?  My chemistry isn't that good, but I do know glass is not made from wood.

I hope Kingdom Advantage victory is something you can toggle off.  Never once in my history of playing have I ever taken that victory.

[William Blake]

52 minutes ago, Lighthope said:

Why would glassworks need woodworking and deep forests?

Ha, that's an interesting complication. In short, they have 8 building slots per province. Purely because of the screen estate issues. So they fitted 8 big slots on a screen with a nice icons:

 

 

But they need a lot more "buildings" for all the things they want to lock by a building. So they moved a lot of buildings into "upgrades" of a "base" building. Just like you have barracks as a main building and you have fletchers and swordsmith as an upgrade.

 

 

So buildings are these square things and upgrades are round sub icons for each building. There are a lot of them, just to make 64 goods you need to shuffle 64 upgrades to existing buildings somewhere. For instance look at Artisans, it can have 4 upgrades to produce 4 trade goods:

 

 

 

But if was not enough to fit everything, so some trade goods are produced by a special new type buildings like Salt Trade at the bottom, which does not have upgrades and exists as a separate building, taking a whole slot out of 8 available.

 

 

So back to your question, the main building happens to be Woodworking, but it has Glassworks as an upgrade:

 

Well, because you need to fit it somewhere and it is not important enough to have it is own dedicated building like Salt Trade. 

And I'm afraid this is only to answer "how it happened to be", but I don't know "why". Best guess is "well because you need to fit 64 somewhere and upgrades are only 6 per base building or it won't fit on a screen" ))

 

 

 

[Calliope]

Reading at all this... I wonder if I really like the current buildings system. I mean, the one in the original game really satisfied me, but I can understand the team wants to make and play on a polished, new version, maybe more balanced, I don't know.

About trade goods, the pictures right above my comment makes me a bit suspicious. The first implies, in order to have salt, that you absolutely need to have barrels before producing salt. But I totally disagree with this kind of setting. Don't get me wrong, this is logical IF you wanna trade salt abroad, or if you send salt to other provinces in your realm. But what about local goods? If a province had salt mines, it would exploit that resource, and stock it in an administrative center, right? But it wouldn't necesary need barrels to be transported in some near location, it would need only carts. Let's imagine you have a town about 5 km distant to salt mines. Would you really need barrels that much if you only had to stock them in some building? But barrels would be needed for long distances, transport, for global, or even provincial trade. I think this lack of accuracy gives a flaw to the game, because it prevents a province from making salt, even if it doesn't have barrels. That's my opinion.

Just like the Deep Forests needed for making glass, I don't really get the idea behind needing minerals, in order to produce glassworks. The description of the building itself is very thin and leaves the player in the blur. I know it might still be on works but... hey, I'm not really satisfied with it. Am I the only one here? 😅

[William Blake]

2 hours ago, Calliope said:

The first implies, in order to have salt, that you absolutely need to have barrels before producing salt. 

Yes, you have to get barrels before producing salt. Moreover, even you built salt trade but after that lose barrels (production or import) your salt trade should also stop working. At least this is how I understand the production chains.

 

 

[abduel]

I definitely like the complexity and unlock-able/ hidden knights. the pope or the king spy was one of the most interesting things in the game. The original game became also very easy when you got used to it so complexity is very welcome.

I would like to see more Easter egg special features. kingdom special units or buildings or forming new kingdoms was very interesting. more special charachters would be welcome. Keep up the good work.