DevDiary 26 - Goods and Advantages
Hello friends and welcome to the 26th 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 24th, @ 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!
-
7
-
1
By THQN Brad
Recommended Comments
Join the conversation
You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.