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  • DevDiary 32 - Modding Improvements

    Hello friends and welcome to the second post-release DevDiary for “Knights of Honor II: Sovereign”! We hope you’ve had fun with your campaigns and exploring the game. This time, we will be focusing on a topic that’s been mentioned several times in the past, and one that’s very much important for the game – modding.

    Needless to say, modding is an incredible tool when it comes to allowing players’ creativity to go wild, as it can enhance a game greatly in the most unexpected ways. Many of us have dabbled in this process ourselves and enjoy seeing what people create, so we really want to provide the right tools for those of you who would like to get creative and shape KoH2:S the way they want to.

    With that being said, we are happy to reveal that the upcoming patch will introduce some much-needed changes and improvements to the way modding works in our game.

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    First and foremost, we will be adding basic Steam Workshop support. This means we will provide a tool for mod creators to upload their mods to Steam Workshop and an in-game link to the Workshop page where players can browse and subscribe to mods.

    At the same time, we are fundamentally changing the way mods are made. Instead of copying complete folders from the original game files and then changing some lines here and there the mods will now contain only the changes. In other words, if a mod only changes a single value in the game, using the new system, the mod will essentially consist of a single line of text (excluding some "service" information describing the mod itself).

    This will solve two major problems with the old system:

    1. Mods will no longer be invalidated every time developers release a patch (starting from the next one).
    2. It will be possible to have more than one mod active at a time, assuming they don't "conflict" with each other (i.e. they don't try to change the same thing differently).

    Unfortunately, as a result of these changes, all existing mods will have to be re-done by the mod creators once more, hopefully for the last time.

    Note that the new system is not 100% fool proof - for example if the developers decide to double the attack rate of longbowmen (and it somehow makes it through all stages of the approval process for new patches), while you have a mod also affecting the attack rate of longbowmen - then your mod will take precedence over the changes coming from the patch. This may or may not be the desired effect, there is no definitive answer. For example, let's imagine the developers are not completely crazy and they also halved the damage done by longbowmen, so the average DPS stays the same. If your mod only changes the attack rate, but not the damage of longbowmen, the results will probably be way off balance.

    But all other mods, which have nothing to do with the attack rate or the damage of longbowmen, will continue to work just fine.

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    We will provide more information on the exact syntax to do this and how to generate a mod for Steam Workshop when the patch goes live, both in its release notes and in the game files.

    With this upcoming update hopefully providing a much improved groundwork, we hope to improve the modding capabilities of KoH2:S even more in the future. We can’t promise anything yet, but features like being able to add or change portraits and models, more QoL upgrades to make and use mods, as well as providing better tools for adjusting terrain and elements of the map are definitely on the table.

    We would also be interested in hearing more from you. What types of mods do you enjoy the most – ones focused on simple cheats, visual changes, quality-of-life improvements or massive system and setting overhauls? Is there anything that you’d like to see modded in KoH2:S specifically? If you yourself are a modder, what types of tools would you like to have?

    Join us in our DevStream on the 26th of January @ 4 PM GMT / 11 AM EST and feel free to modify our conversation with your questions. We hope to see you there and until then – go forth and conquer!


    • Like 6
    THQN Brad



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    Hooray for Black Sea Games and THQ Nordic! You're the Best! I'll play Knights of Honor 2: Sovereign, until I grow old and tell stories to my children how I conquered Europe with Cumania 🙂
    Can't wait to see you in Thursday, guys!

    Edited by Yavor
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    Hey guys, I certainly did not expect an update on modding that fast after release but I am not one to complain :classic_biggrin:

    As a modder I was wondering how you plan to communicate with the modding community regarding technical requests? As an example, I'm planning to add a building/upgrade called 'Imperial Roads', which should only increase the speed of armies in the province with that building. There is currently no variable in the definitions with which I could accomplish that as speed_modifications cannot be changed for roads only.

    As for tools I'd like to see, I'm personally already happy if we get command line tools to generate the binaries for maps and assets. Doesn't need to have fancy UI.

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    There is not enough historical/gameplay weight in elements throughout the game that should be moddable:

    1. Make cities moddable - cities are all alike, they need to be able to be modded to have unique buildings, either buildable only in a specific city like Constantinople or non-destructible in a city so the importance of taking certain cities is markedly and memorably higher than others.

    2. Make cultures moddable - faction differences are not pronounced, muslim factions need to be able to have multiple spouses, be able to have scripted events like christians having heresy based rebellions and unrest different from the paganism spreading, heresies should be moddable to be an influence bridge between factions that is between religion and culture. Culture should affect combat given climate conditions.

    3. Make armies moddable - generals, even level 15 dont survive past a few battles, and units dont matter, an army lead by a talented leader should be able to survive in a somewhat good shape after ten and more battles, so unit experience begins to matter and you get attached to you army, general. Even more so for crusade moddability, multiple factions and generals should be able to join a crusade, or at least bolster it with money and units so the crusade is more impactful to the game as a whole, same for jihads.

    4. Make learning moddable - Marshals should only be able to progress in their leveling up only to a certain point with books, after which the system from KoH1 should apply, allow modders to add skills modifying temporarily the map like making temporary camps, harassment/delay fortifications, bridges. Knights should be able to be moddable to gain skills based on successes/failures be it marshals improving an archery skill when winning many battles leading archers or clerics fulfilling missions.

    5. Make navigation moddable - mountains have to be able to slow armies, seasons need to affect armies, a modder should be able to restrict an army building ships to only shipyards to strengthen chokepoints like Gibraltar or the Bosphorus and to only building ships outside harbors if the general has the navigation skill at a certain level, a modder should be able to enforce river crossing penalties to armies in both battles around rivers and movement slowdown to enforce natural river boundaries.

    6. Make weather moddable - both cyclical seasonal weather, scriptable weather events(diseases?) and regional weather should be able to be modded to affect building outputs (eg. farms in Sweden), armies and battles.

    Edited by ebearsson
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    On 1/24/2023 at 11:55 PM, ebearsson said:

    There is not enough historical/gameplay weight in elements throughout the game that should be moddable:

    1. Make cities moddable - cities are all alike, they need to be able to be modded to have unique buildings, either buildable only in a specific city like Constantinople or non-destructible in a city so the importance of taking certain cities is markedly and memorably higher than others.

    2. Make cultures moddable - faction differences are not pronounced, muslim factions need to be able to have multiple spouses, be able to have scripted events like christians having heresy based rebellions and unrest different from the paganism spreading, heresies should be moddable to be an influence bridge between factions that is between religion and culture. Culture should affect combat given climate conditions.

    3. Make armies moddable - generals, even level 15 dont survive past a few battles, and units dont matter, an army lead by a talented leader should be able to survive in a somewhat good shape after ten and more battles, so unit experience begins to matter and you get attached to you army, general. Even more so for crusade moddability, multiple factions and generals should be able to join a crusade, or at least bolster it with money and units so the crusade is more impactful to the game as a whole, same for jihads.

    4. Make learning moddable - Marshals should only be able to progress in their leveling up only to a certain point with books, after which the system from KoH1 should apply, allow modders to add skills modifying temporarily the map like making temporary camps, harassment/delay fortifications, bridges. Knights should be able to be moddable to gain skills based on successes/failures be it marshals improving an archery skill when winning many battles leading archers or clerics fulfilling missions.

    5. Make navigation moddable - mountains have to be able to slow armies, seasons need to affect armies, a modder should be able to restrict an army building ships to only shipyards to strengthen chokepoints like Gibraltar or the Bosphorus and to only building ships outside harbors if the general has the navigation skill at a certain level, a modder should be able to enforce river crossing penalties to armies in both battles around rivers and movement slowdown to enforce natural river boundaries.

    6. Make weather moddable - both cyclical seasonal weather, scriptable weather events(diseases?) and regional weather should be able to be modded to affect building outputs (eg. farms in Sweden), armies and battles.

    Totally agree - the historical weight needs to be heavily touched. For this reason totally support those 6 points.

    To add some additional aspects on:
    1) Make cities moddable - I actually miss having the opportunity to modify the city defenses. Specifically, the towers, catapults, gate cauldrons, etc. Also, indeed cities like Constantinople, Rome, etc must always have certain type of buildings that are undestructable, like cathedrals, universities, etc. Thats what makes them special to conquer as well.
    4) Make learning moddable - this suggestion would be highly valued not only for marshals, but for the other types as well. Imagine we have a cleric that converted 3 or more provinces to your religion - he should be a prime candidate for a Pope or a Merchant with expeditions to have the possibility to add estate or something that adds additional bonuses to the province.
    6) Make weather moddable - having multiple resources or farms in certain regions like Sahara or Scandinavia is unrealistic. There should be boundaries there that will make you conquer new lands, just like the Vikings raided the south and the Arabs Europe. 

    Some additional points:
    7) Upgradable units - units that are already purchased and are Light, would be nice if they can be upgraded to Heavy.
    8. Summarised news - worsen or improved relationship as an effect from a certain action, is coming up as separate messages. It will be better if they are summed up in 1 message
    9) Peace offerings - it will be nice if it is given an option to make certain negotiations or demands when the opponent is asking for peace

    Other than that... Love the game

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    I just realized the recording of the last dev stream hasn't been uploaded to youtube yet (THQ Nordic Inside)...can we request for that to be uploaded? (and in the future, soon after the stream ends?)

    I think having them available would make it easier to refer to others when they're hungry for more information that isn't included in these blog posts. I also listen to them occasionally like a podcast between my daily work, and I think it's wonderful that you uploaded them the first place. Thank you!

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    I like the game. After 60 hours of playing, I found a problem with this game: a large country cannot withstand the attacks of three small countries simultaneously (the number of territories of this large country is more than the sum of these three small countries), not because of a lack of war resources but due to a restriction on the number of generals. Please allow generals not to occupy the knight slots above, for example, they can be recruited directly in cities, and these generals can have a separate interface for quickly locating the position of the army. I know that it is possible to modify the upper limit of the number of knights, but due to UI restrictions, I cannot find knights that exceed the number of slots above. My English is not very good, I hope you can understand what I mean, thank you.

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