Tempest

Anyone remember this? OMG, the font shadow... what was I thinking? Anyway, nice to find some of the old names in here.

I'm overall very pleased with the German localization with the game, a lot of care and attention has obviously been put into it. But it's not perfect. :) Here are some issues I found. "Fremden Kaufmann meiden" is a misleading translation for "Shun foreign merchant". This one has already been reported by @monsterfurby, so I'm just listing it here for completeness. It's one of the first things I noticed as well. I love @monsterfurby's suggestion of "anschwärzen", which is both fitting and in style for the game, IMO. "Weiter zu" for "Go to". Really? I mean... really? I would have understood "Gehe zu", which also would be very unelegant but at least not wrong. The first KoH just went with "Zeigen" ("Show"), which would be a good option for KoH2:S as well. Oh by the way... "So sei es" is so much cooler and stylish than "Ok"... I guess it just shows what a weird slip up this is. The last one is actually the most serious one as it has gameplay implications: This is a list of kingdoms that is displayed when you need to choose a destination for a diplomat, spy, etc. As you can see, it is not sorted alphabetically. On second look, the reason is obvious: The offenders are names that were spelled with C in the original English, but are spelled with K in German. So the sorting is done before applying the translation layer, while obviously, it should be the other way around. Thanks for reading and I hope you can improve these.

My first go at the game was actually quite frustrating. The fact that I have played KoH before actually worked against me I think, for I played it exactly the same way and did not generate any gold at all. I thought they had nerfed the merchants and just made the game incredibly more difficult by that, while in fact the main problems were that I did not assign governors to my provinces and did not build the right buildings first. What added a lot to my anger was the game constantly spamming me with requests to build more stuff and sending my knights on missions, something I could not afford at all and which I did not see the benefit of. This is actually a complaint that I still have even after getting more familiar with the game: There really should be a customizable "spam filter" for all these "opportunities", especially those that you can't even afford when they come up. Another thing that I still find frustrating is some of the quirky interface. For example, all the knight options, overlays and menus have a nasty way of getting in the way of each other. Pathfinding for marshals is weird, especially on water (mostly they just try to get back on land ASAP, even if it means huge detours). And I find switching between the political map and the "main map" (3D terrain) extremely clunky. I generally like the game now, but there's definitely still room for improvement.

I find this interesting because this was my first reaction as well. I changed my mind after playing for some more time, but I agree that some things have probably been "over-engineered" compared to the much leaner first KoH.

Well, at the time KoH was published, games were still sold on CDs in cardboard boxes, and there was an awesome colored booklet (more of a book, actually) and a poster with a map of Europe one one side and the tech tree on the other. While I miss the style of those items, I actually cannot say that they have ever been very useful to me. I mostly learned the game through playing it, and also, there was this awesome ingame encyclopedia (I think "Royal Library" is the term) which was much quicker to use than thumbing through the printed manual. I guess what I'm saying is, I don't mind the lack of a manual with KoH2:S - what I do mind is the missing search function in the "Royal Library". That is a really strange oversight, IMO.

I agree that crusades are a bit...weird. As far as I can tell so far, the mechanics haven't changed much between KoH and KoH2:S, but as far as I can tell, the influence you have on them as a player has actually decreased. I have only done a crusade once so far (the Pope has the nasty habit to always ask at the most inconvenient of times ), so this may not be representative. I was playing as the Teutonic Knights and the crusade was against Yemen. So my guy walks then sails all across the map to the southeast, lays siege to a town (Ascalon) and even wins without me sending any additional troops to help (this rarely happened in KoH because crusader forces were almost always too weak on their own). Now what would have happened in KoH, if memory serves, is that the game would ask me if I wanted to create a vassal state, and then the crusade would have been over. What happened here is, my marshal did not ask me what I wanted to do, he just gifted the town and province to another (!) muslim (!) state (Akkon), then went on his merry way to the next town, where, with his now much diminished forces, he got his butt handed to him. I was... suprised.

Name/Handle: Tempest Country: Germany Games I like to play: I'm actually not much into gaming any more these days, as you can probably tell by how late I am to this particular party right here. :) I very much like retro stuff, so I'm always thrilled to see remakes and/or sequels to games I used to love when I was younger. KoH is definitely amongst them. Interesting to see some familiar names here, like Frujin, Angryminer and Graf Laudan. Reminds me of the old KoH forum. I even made a small tool back then to view and edit the games' ressources (KoH PakMan). Pets: None