Valek

I enjoyed achieving all victory types in this game, Kingdom Advantages, Conquest and the most difficult Emperor of the World, as this last one demands the players to put all of their game mechanics knowledge to practice. My interest in the game since has dwindled but I keep coming back from time to time to see what's going on with the game and the community. In one of the recent patch notes, I noticed they added "Extra zoom out" for tactical battles. I'm talking about a new setting that can be enabled by going to Settings > Graphics > Extra zoom out. Make sure to scroll down, as there is a scrollbar in the Settings tabs that is easy to miss. And boy this setting is a game changer. I went through couple of battles and finally felt like I wasn't losing to the "camera", and was in control of my units. I actually think that the devs were a bit conservative with the zoom out range, i.e. They could have allowed the player to zoom out even more, but I can see how there could be problems with how units will appear on the screen. Understandable that they decided to go for a healthy compromise. I wish I could experience more battles with this new setting. Sadly, I don't feel like I'm ready to replay the campaign again, at least not yet. PLEASE bring back the quick battle option from KoH 1, so we can engage with the combat aspect of this great game at our own leisure. This is also potentially a mis opportunity for KoH 2, as you could turn this modality into a thriving PvP (1v1 or 2v2) community.

I'll kind of reply to myself here, as I don't want to edit the post for historical reasons. Thing is I just learned that they're some other avenues to increase your chances to become a caliphate. Getting a diplomat king with some religious abilities increased my chances by +10. Also, ruling over Muslim holy lands went from +30 to +60, I'm not particularly sure why. I still have the same provinces as before maybe added 2 or 3 more that aren't even in Muslim territory. Might be because I got a scholar to govern over the province of Mecca? Anyways, I still think that some of my points from above still stand true, such a small kingdom shouldn't be able to call themselves a caliphate anymore. And by the way, I was able to become a caliphate and I love it. It gives you a sense of authority and responsibility to help all your Muslim brethren to take over the world. I can now call those dreadful jihad upon the enemies of Islam. I'm convinced now, playing as a Muslim kingdom is much more enjoyable, and the crusade should be revamped.

My first thought was that this feature should be made only available through mods. But come to think of it, I'm cool with being added to the core game as well, but making it as less intrusive as possible, so anyone who doesn't want to engage with this mechanic can just ignore it.

Thoughts about caliphates. After 100%ing the game with a Catholic kingdom, I wanted to do the same but from a Muslim kingdom perspective. From the religious warfare point of view, I have to say that I enjoyed the jihad mechanic more than I enjoyed the crusade mechanic. In theory, the Jihad is way more powerful. From the aggressor perspective, whenever I saw the military mobilization caused by a jihad, my only thought was I never want to get one of these called on me. More importantly, when a jihad is call on a kingdom, you know they mean business. In one occasion, it was pretty exciting to see multiple Muslim kingdoms sending all their armies across the Mediterranean and Black Sea simultaneously. There were so many armies in the target kingdom that the AI didn't even know what to plunder given all the settlements were already occupied. Jihad comparisons with a crusade: My first gripe with the crusade is that I have to give up a fully functional army that I might be pressed to keep around for the moment. You know, "kinda" useful to have an army handy for when the bully with 30 provinces next door comes on knocking. Because of this, most of the time I kept declining requests for my marshal to lead a crusade, obviously that came with a penalty in the form of the deterioration of the Clergy's opinions which for me went down and below the -5 points due to the constant flood of requests to lead crusades I was rejecting. Finally, I was determined to end the bullying, so I destroyed the Papal States. And this is the main difference, compared to the crusade, there's no penalty in joining a Jihad. First of all, most of the Muslim kingdoms are far from the Catholic kingdoms, hence most of the time you can accept the request to join the Jihad from the Caliphate without fearing any consequence. More importantly, your relationship with the kingdom that call for the jihad will increase, and your scholars (Clergy) opinions will increase as well. Also, because your allies AIs rarely first attacks the province fortification, instead start plundering settlements, sieging castles and dealing with enemy armies, if you have a decent couple of armies you can easily grab some provinces in the process. BUT, this is nothing compared to the collateral effect of a jihad which is that kingdoms' relationships improve. Of course, this game is very random, but in the instance I was playing the block of all Muslim Kingdoms in part of Asia, part of the Middle East and part of North Africa had all their relationships always in the positive range. And I suspect this is a side effect of the jihad mechanics. To summarize, given the geographical location of Muslim kingdoms, when it comes to joining a jihad is all pros, no cons. You will rarely have a reason not to join a jihad as far as I can tell. While in the opposite side, you may have many reasons not to join a crusade, and get penalized for not doing so. You may want to keep your marshal, your cleric might be important to you. Crusades, as opposed to a jihad don't feel like a team effort. All the opposite, crusades feels more like shenanigans and bullying from the Papal States with their constant requests for top money, and their constant demands for your most useful units. I also have to mention that a jihad wasn't so OP in KoH legacy. As a refresher, in KoH v1 a jihad was more like a panic button to defend a province momentarily. If there were several enemy marshals destroying your province, and you didn't have enough man power available to defend, you would call for a jihad, and these small armies (much alike rebels) started to pop up from your settlements and attacked the invaders, you had no control over these armies, and eventually they banished. They were really strong though, so the jihad was a good defensive tool. If you ask me, given how OP the KoH v2 jihad can be at unifying multiple kingdoms, I'd prefer to go back to the KoH v1 jihad. NOW, I really enjoyed the KoH v2 jihad mechanic, so I'd rather prefer for the team to work on improving the issues I mentioned about crusades above, to bring them up to pair to the KoH v2 jihad. Perhaps, make the crusades more similar to the jihad, in the sense that multiple Catholic kingdoms could participate in the crusade. But that's almost an idea for KoH v3. Now, the following is something more "not wishful thinking" that I'd like to be reviewed for KoH v2. Early in the game, Seljuks right bottom corner, Abbasids (purple/selected) and Fatimids center bottom claimed the caliphate. Then I (Hajrah) started to grow meteorically to mostly fill the right side of the map, and that's when I thought I should be in the big boys club. Unfortunately, it's almost impossible for me to claim the caliphate given that each existent caliphate reduces your chances by 20%. With 3 existing caliphates, that's -60%. Given all the resources I have I could struggle with the RNG in hopes to get it eventually, or I could destroy Abbasids completely, but what it doesn't make any sense to me is that Abbasids (purple) is a caliphate but I can't be one. How does that make any sense? Not trying to be rude, but IMHO the formula has to be more complex than that. Yes, consider the count of existent caliphates, but also consider their size and kingdom rankings. For example, instead of using a flat -20% value per existent caliphate, the -20% per kingdom should only be the maximum (minimum) value. If the existent caliphate has the same fame as me as per the kingdom rankings, then that should be a -20% chance, and that penalty should start going down linearly with my excess of fame over the current caliphate. If my kingdom has double the fame than the existing caliphate, then that number should be a -0% penalty. I'm not saying this is the best way, but it's a way to do it. And ah, perhaps limit the number of total caliphates to 3, in that case one of the caliphates will lose its status once a new caliphate ascend. By the way, this map above is the same instance where all of the Muslim kingdoms relationships were green, now not so much, as after my kingdom grew, I've been pouring resources into breaking them apart.

This is a very interesting point. I don't know how the whole "young, adult, old, venerable" age groups transition work. My perception is that some kings transition age groups slower/faster than others. Or, maybe that's just me? Displaying the actual age would help to mitigate that confusion. But my hunch is that age groups is a game design mechanic meant to hide those details from us, make the game less predictable. I don't really have an strong opinion either way.

That's a loaded question, let me try to see if I understand. If you marry your princess to kingdom B. And kingdom B claims inheritance when your king dies. If you forfeit the land, that's the end of the story. If you don't forfeit the land, they'll declare war on you. Seems you want to know if the result of that action will affect the Clergy's opinion as well, even when both kingdoms are catholic. I haven't paid much attention to it, honestly. With some luck, someone who knows the answer see this thread and can get your answer. I certainly will be paying attention to it for the next time said situation happens. Though I wouldn't be too worried about that. Worst case scenario you lose 2 points and keep your provinces. + the benefits you get from having your princess married, i.e. Improved chances of success of own spies in that kingdom the princess is in. Improved espionage defense against spies from the kingdom the princess is in, plus a percentage of the fame the kingdom the princess is in. Now, I don't marry my princesses with kingdoms that are more powerful than me, in case I have to face the consequences.

I enjoyed reading this review as I felt each one of the OP frustrations and passion. Some of them not a game's fault but the OP own short comings. Some very valid. Some left me wondering as I didn't have the same experience. I will try to address some of them, and hopefully bring some clarification. First, this game is kind of random, if you're very new to the game, try to start in a place of the map where you're surrounded by less enemies. Some kingdom in the top left corner can be a good first experience. You specially don't want to start as the enemy to a super power that controls 30 provinces, while your kingdom only has 1 one. At least, not from a beginner perspective. To me, being in such situations is actually fun. You may want to hire some diplomats, and get them to work right away. The next thing you want to get in check is kingdom stability in the top left corner, hover over the number to understand why your number is in negative and try to remediate it. War exhaustion is particularly bad, so try to make peace and stay like that until it goes away. Also , if you click each province, you will notice a red or green number which represents the province stability. This is what controls the chances for a rebel army to appear. In your first provinces aim to build some buildings that help with kingdom happiness. In my particular play style, for my initial provinces, I aim to get gold income, population size, kingdom happiness. Also once you start conquering provinces, slow down from time to time, wait for war exhaustion to reduce, use your cleric to adopt the population and convert the provinces to your kingdom's religion, wait a little bit until the provinces become loyal to you and adopt your culture (There's an option in the mini map to easily view this), also some times if you're closed to a big empire, you won't even be able to get the culture to change. Read the help section for culture in the Royal Library for more details. 4 to 5 marshals should be enough. Long story short, rebels are not a random occurrence, and you can reduce the number of times they appear. 1) The initiative. I also thought it was strange that I as a defender am supposed to take the initiative. All the opposite, I should sit quietly behind my walls. 2) Joining the battle at any point. That's not feasible to implement from a development perspective. Or, at the very least, it'd require lot of creativity to come up with a viable way to set this up. 3) Underpower rebels trying to occupy the castles. I'm not sure if that depends in the difficulty level on which you're playing. I sometimes have seen the rebels pillaging smaller settlements until they get to a considerable size to assault a major settlement, i.e. Castle. But I also have seen underpower rebels going straight to their death. So, I'm not sure if this is tight to difficulty level. I agree that this can be improved. 4) The control point. This feature wasn't present in the original game. But in the original game, it was annoying to chase the enemies when they ran to the 4 corners of the scenario. I remember spending minutes chasing the enemy marshal around the screen, when I had already won the battle. My thought is that they introduced the control point to avoid said situation. And I disagree with you in this one. Assaulting the enemy camp was always considered a strategical part of warfare as per historical records, after all, if the enemy burned your food supply you would become a sitting duck. 5) Archers. This is a polarizing topic in the game, and the game has gotten bad reviews in regards to the Battle View. I just wanted to point that I had a different situation than yours, where I was getting frustrated because my horse archers were waiting to get in formation before shooting. 6) Locking the squads in battle. That's a very interesting idea. +1 to that. 7) Retreating in battle. The high effort you put into leveling those units shouldn't guarantee their survivability. The opposite is just trivializing the game. Also, there should be a penalty for retreating, I read from some historical accounts that sometimes it was even required to leave full squads behind to contain the enemy until the main army retreats. Talk about taking one for the team. 8) Defender advantage. I agree there should be some advantages to being in top/behind of a wall. 9) Honorable AI. It also happened to me that I sent gold to an ally to declare war, and they sat on it. One thing we ought to understand is that there isn't a sentient being controlling a kingdom. And the "AI" just doesn't understand the connection of actions very well. So, the AI will use some heuristics to determine how much currency to ask for declaring war and counter offer. And then upon receiving the currency, declare war. Unfortunately, that's where the AI transaction with you ended. The AI will continue to operate based on its set of assumptions of what's the best next move available, and that sometimes might not be attacking the kingdom it was just paid to declare war too. I've seen other situations where I paid the AI to declare war, and it got to work right away. Now, to be devil's advocate, you're just paying to declare war, not to attack. Having a war declaration itself can pressure the enemy into reconsidering their options and retreat. It'd be nice if the AI was smarter though. 10) Dishonorable AI. There are a set of things you need to take into account before accepting a request to declare war. First, you need to find whether you have a Non-aggression pact with the target kingdom, in that case you should not declare war, or you will lose kingdom power and relations with other kingdoms will suffer. If you have a trade agreement with the target kingdom, you will lose kingdom power and the merchants' opinion will reduce. In fact, trade agreements are a very powerful diplomatic tool, so use wisely. You might also get some penalties for deciding not to declare war, for example, if the target kingdom is a different religion, the clerics' opinion may suffer a bit, but occasionally you have to pick your poison, because not declaring war might still be the best choice. Also, make sure that your ally is really at war with the enemy, sometimes the AI just wants to get you to those its bidding, and there isn't anything wrong with that. Also, I think you're looking at this in the wrong way, the kingdom who is asking you to go to war is not really your ally. In the context of the game, an ally is someone that shares a defensive pact with you. 11) Music pausing for too long. Yeah, I've noticed this too. I don't have an strong opinion though. Hopefully some of these tips are useful, or not...

Archers were so OP that the Catholic church issued a ban on them. The effectiveness for sheer slaughter of missile weapons, as per those times standard, made the Church want to take the moral high ground. At some point bows/cross bows were probably the equivalent to what biological or nuclear weapons are today. Also in another note, longbow archers skeletons are very easy to identify due to the fact that they're deformed and one side of the upper skeleton looks way more developed and bigger than the other. Just some fun facts! I've enjoyed medieval RTS so much, that I even picked up archery as a hobby, and boy, has archery been a fulfilling activity for me. So, maybe the game depiction of archers is not so bad. But it's a common complain for medieval RTS games, and it usually goes like this: Swordsmen composed the core of medieval armies, but they aren't viable in game, hence producing archers becomes the meta. I think this game depicts somewhat precisely how archers were used in battle. A somewhat accurate unit that when amassed in large numbers can be useful to decimate stationary pack of enemies grouped together in an area, but that is very weak when enemies are too closed. There was a bug fix for some archer units that were doing double damage, not sure if that's the problem you saw. To me the Battle View as it is right now is something sad to behold, as I can see the great potential that it has, but controlling, planning the battles is so difficult.

Some of these are very cool ideas, but I don't think they belong in the current game. The game is already giving us "enough" about the royal family role in the context of RTS. I fear that if we get too granular, that will only increase the initial learning curve for new players. Now, if what we want is an "even more" complex game, with very granular mechanics that just an "even more" cultish fanbase will play. Sign me UP for that!

Oh yeah, like the player offers a Royal Marriage in exchange for some gold and/or declaring war to some kingdom in a single transaction. That'd be nice too. Which is something that the AI does as well. So, the negotiations in this game are a bit one sided at this point. In order, to not confuse the 2 suggestions in case someone in the dev team ever reads this: Add ability to counter offer the AI. Add ability to demand while making an offer.

Same I don't marry my princesses, I agree this mechanic should be reworked, what's good about a mechanic that the player won't engage. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ To be honest, I engage in the mechanic and marry my princesses, but just for the giggles, only when the foreign kingdom presents no threat whatsoever to me. Anyways, reworking the mechanic won't fix the unbalance issue. Think about it. If in the whole of Europe, part of Asia, part of the Middle East and part of North Africa, there isn't a single princess available, but a multitude of princes available. That just means one thing, there are too many princes compared to the number of princesses. Or vice versa. I remember reading once that both Spotify and Apple had to adjust the random song shuffle feature in their music players, so that it was "less" random, because users kept complaining that it wasn't random at all. Even Steve Jobs had to speak about the subject. After all, in a real random environment, it could be possible for the songs to be played in the same order from time to time. Their solution was to make the music player less random by constraining the next output based on play history. I do think that the KoH 2 team should do something similar here, globally monitor the prince/princess count, and produce the next global royal family member sex based on that count. That would give us a map that would look more like a mesh of pinks and blues, rather than a full blue of full pink map. Fun fact: For most countries, there are around 105 males per 100 female births. That looks pretty balanced. So, is mother nature random at all?

Managing colony in Assume this line to 10429 are fictional names as can't find them. lol. Your software might be just throwing an error, and you're serializing said error and displaying it in the label. For reference as to what I think triggered this error, my merchant had already been in an expedition and was controlling a colony. Then to my surprise, the option for a new expedition popped up again which I found strange. As in, should the merchant be able to go into multiple expeditions? IMO this should be limited to 1 expedition/1 colony. Anyways, the second expedition was successful, but the text was crooked as you can see below.

+1 to increasing the zoom out range. In the Battle View is so difficult to read the battle given that everything looks too closed. I can't even see what my archers are shooting at with everything being so closed.

But the more provinces you control, the easier the game becomes. Then, why would you need more royal court members at that point? It's true that you will have to choose a playstyle as there isn't that many royal court slots. For example, with 5 marshals, 2 merchants, 1 diplomat and 1 cleric, I beat the game every time. I could probably replace 1 of my marshals with a spy to add more dimension/fun to the game, but this setup is what I find efficient. 4 marshals should be enough as long as you optimize the order on which you conquer provinces, and you pace your conquest making sure that the religion and loyalty of your provinces is under control.

I partially agree here. Partially, because for once, IRL sometimes people can't just produce offspring, and I like to have that variable as part of the game. Having said that... I think that to preserve the bloodline, the Royal Court members that are part of the royal bloodline should be given preference over the ones that were only hired. Now, it was good to see that KoH 2 improved on this, and the siblings of the current king stay in the royal court and will take over the king role if the king doesn't produce any offspring. But I'd still like to think that any royal court member that came from the royal family, maybe couple of generations ago, have a higher claim to the title than someone that was just hired from the streets.

Sometimes when you offer a deal to a kingdom, the kingdom will reply back with a counter offer. For example: The Player (you) offers a Royal Wedding to Kingdom B, and Kingdom B will counter offer by adding that they will agree to your proposal if you send them X amount of gold or declare war on Kingdom C. Now, in the other direction, Kingdom B offers the player a Royal Wedding, and the player can only accept or reject the offer. The player should be able to counter offer too, asking Kingdom B for some gold or demanding Kingdom B to declare war to Kingdom C in order for us (the player) to accept their offer. IMO this will make the game more engaging and will make the player feel like they have some leverage in the outcome. To me, this is the one feature that feels like it should be 100% in the game (feels like missing), and it just feels that someone just forgot to implement it. It was missing in the original game, and sadly, it is also missing in this one.

When the "Emperor of the World" election starts, the 2 main great powers are selected as the candidates. Vassals should never be selected as candidate for this election. 1) It's just counter intuitive that you can be the emperor of the world and a servant at the same time. 2) This would add more dynamism to the game as the vassal will feel the pressure to claim its independence as soon as possible.

In KoH 1 was possible to select multiple Marshals by holding the SHIFT key and clicking the marshals. Please consider adding this feature to KoH 2.

Yes, IMO they should make this less random, and add some sort of deterministic counter balance. It just doesn't make any sense. By the way, couple of hours later it flipped into being all princesses which "somewhat" discredit the second part of your comment.

Sir, you're right, thank you. To be more specific in case anyone else comes looking. The kingdom advantage "Age of Enlightment" gives a +1000 books capacity in kingdom. Nevertheless, I'd still like to see being added to the correspondent help section in the Royal Library.

I started with a Book capacity of 1000. Eventually, it went to 2000 capacity, and I don't understand how. I also didn't find any detail about books capacity in the Royal Library: Kingdom's Books section. My question is how to increase book capacity? And also to request for this info to be added to the Royal Library: Kingdom's Books section.

Please consider adding the Quick Battle option that was available in KoH 1. This option allowed for a quick balanced skirmish useful for practice purpose, and an exclusive combat experience. This mode was enjoyable on its own; without the need to engage in the political, economic mechanics of the main game. Also, the main game doesn't produce easy access to balanced battles. In the main game, usually marshals are at different levels, lead cheaper or expensive armies, and kingdoms may already have some kingdom advantages that sways the odds in their favor. By providing, the quick battle mode, players can enjoy combat on its most balanced form.

Exactly what the title says. With so much content, a Search feature is almost mandatory.

Out control over Rome... This is a typo. It should read Our control over Rome...

I don't know if this is by the design, but the ratio of princes to princesses seems unbalanced. Any thoughts?