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William Blake

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William Blake last won the day on September 25 2022

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  1. No, multiplayer is up to 6 people in the same game.
  2. Some bugs cannot be found unless hardware is stressed for resources.
  3. It is more valuable to test on a low spec machine. On a top level hardware everything will run anyway, so there is no point in testing it to begin with )
  4. This question was talked over many times. They want multiplayer to be many people at once. The game is very long. There are a lot of battles. If each time 2 out of a six people want to have a 15-20 minutes battle the rest will have to wait and do nothing. It would take too much time and too much idle time for everyone else to have tactical battles in a multiplayer. They could not find a way to do it given the strategic game whey want this to be.
  5. While I totally agree with you on principle ("Knights" is the major keyword), both original and KoH2 specifically are CLEARLY not focused on direct combat. Everything we seen from very beginning of KoH2 was always focused on a strategic gameplay and it appears to be the intention to have a game about long running strategic kingdom management rather than direct military/combat game. We don't know if this strategic gameplay on itself is rich and engaging enough to make a player "forget" or should I rather say "accept" very indirect involvement in battle and war. It might be the case. However from a standpoint of "setting" and "player expectations" it is very hard to step away from personal "knight takes up arms to lead the battle" idea. In fact I think there is a MAJOR issue with the way the game is presented. Just look at the official trailer: this creates ALL the impression that in fact this is a game where your diplomacy, economy, large scale problems of a kingdom are secondary annoyances while PERSONAL honor and direct involvement in combat are the Sovereign (can't escape this pun). While it is amazingly strong and very attractive message on itself, it appears to be exactly the opposite from the intention of KoH2 to be strategic, calm and calculated long lasting game of global dominance. Was it always the case or the game focus shifted during development since the trailer. We don't know. In fact I don't even know which would be the better game to be honest.
  6. You can probably rename the intro video files somewhere in the game directory. This usually removes all the videos all together. Or it might in some cases.
  7. Is "initiative" a resource or something? Is it calculated or runs out can I player see that on UI? I'm not sure if this is just a figure of speech or a vague description of a mechanic? Speaking of mechanics, we know from original, that there were a lot of hidden mechanics in tactical battles. Mostly morale from things like "enemy on my flank" or "enemy is all around us" and so on. However a player would had no awareness of all these and no UI or even a tutorial explanation of potential effects available. Looking at the screens right now, I don't see any indication that this is fixed. I would need to see icons or messages about ALL dynamic modifiers happening to be able to actually meaningfully lead a battle. If there is a debuff on units which move alone - I need to see that. If there is a bonus to archers on a hill - show me that. If there is a buff or debuff on units in a specific formation or against a specific enemy - a player NEEDS to be aware.
  8. Pope is nothing special to claim a world victory for the given area and time period. For instance at the time Armenian Christians didn't give a damn about all that Papacy because they were Apostolic church independent even from Constantinople since 554. Same as Georgian Church for that matter, independent from Antioch even earlier. Moreover in 1054 all Eastern Orthodox broke off from Rome and won't give a damn about any claims of Pope in Rome - because all considered Catholics to be heretics. And these are just Christian side of the story. If you look at the map of KoH2 more kingdoms are not Catholics and have zero reason to submit to Pope. From 711 to 1492 half of Spain was under Umayyad Caliphate by the way. Moreover, even for parts of the game map always under Catholic control Pope was not an ultimate power. Between years 1378 and 1417 there were 2 Popes elected at once and from 1410 to 1415 even 3 Popes at once. And Pope didn't rule Papacy all the time, from 1309 - 1377 is know as Babylonian Captivity of the Papacy. During this period 7 Popes had to reside in Avignon, France and not in Vatican. It was not historically a significant independent power all above even half of Europe you can claim to be a victory condition for the whole game.
  9. As a Pagan I'm very furious about whole idea and as an Orthodox I laugh about all these heretics trying to lead the world. The point is, that this cannot possibly be a religious victory based on a huge area and all religions present in the game. It has to be a political victory of political power projected by a player. If you don't think this is fitting your playstyle or your own story you create in-game, then there are other victory conditions you should focus on.
  10. Well, this is large old expensive franchise, they have to aim at bigger and bigger casual audience. Anything with depth and immersion limits potential playerbase.
  11. What did Total War do wrong for you to lose interest?
  12. Problem with marshal skills is that they cost books now. If you are rich and powerful it is not a problem, so I don't even consider these scenarios. What I care about is recovery and come back options in case of near game loss and strategic warfare options with indirect combat. First, if engineering skill makes you siege machines and you happen to lose a marshal, all your new marshals are very weak against enemy cities unless you spend books to get required engineering skill. Since we can expect mid to end game provinces to be very well build up, it basically means that you have an extra required cost in books on any new marshal to be even somewhat dangerous to enemy cities. Makes it harder to come back from a marshal loss and I don't like "required" skills. Second, if we make advanced siege machines to be unlock on a kingdom level with a trade good "engineers" we can both have a curious gameplay around "trading this resource" like horses and can lock away powerful siege machines behind complex production chain. If engineers are not a skill, but an army equipment, then you basically will buy it as soon as you get gold and that could be very early on, making most early-mid game fortifications useless. If you make the price of this "equipment" high, it would mean that most poor kingdoms won't be able to compete or create danger to rich build up cities and also (see first point) will make it very hard to come back from a loss of an expensive army with expensive engineers upgrade. In my mind, the best gameplay is a narrow balance between an assured victory and a certain loss. It is way better to present a player with a risky situation if you have a known recovery strategy in case it fails. As such I'd rather see a kingdom level progress through trade good "specialists" unlocking engineering rather than an expensive upgrade into a single army which can lose and bury all hope for a recovery because you cannot afford to invest into a new one.
  13. Not exactly. You need horses as a trade good, you don't have to have a province producing it as you can import horses. Then once you have unlocked horses you can build War Stable as an upgrade to blacksmith (I think). Then you can build cavalry units in any province with blacksmith. But if at any point in time you lose horses trade good unlock ( from import or your own produced) then war stable goes "off line" mode and you cannot make horse units anymore. So funny enough, the system is both way more complex and yet way more simplistic because you don't care where or how horses are produced. You could make camel cavalry in Scotland if your kingdom has this special unit and you happen to control a province in Scotland, but your global kingdom at the same time might have zero provinces producing camels, you just need to trade it. On that note, we don't really know if trade goods are required for all advanced units. Camels and horses for sure, but if you need steel trade good or something else for other unit type is not clear to me at the time. Totally agree. Siege machine should not be marching with an army, they should be buildable on a spot for a cost of army supplies and time. This makes significant difference in my mind, because it is commitment of time and resource each time separately. So you need to think each time if you want to start a siege and if you can afford a siege with a given state of the army supplies. If siege machines are just upgrades they make this army ready for sieges all the time and make not sieging a waste. Moreover, on a strategic level, if ANY army is potentially dangerous to my province I need to do something about them, but if the siege machines are upgrades I can disregard all enemy armies without machines if my cities are strong enough. I'm also very much against "engineering" as a marshal skill and think it should be some tech unlock on a kingdom level. In original KoH this skill was just basically "have to select it" in late game. I think it is very limiting to have skills which are required essentially and I think that any army big enough and supplied enough should be a significant threat to any city, no matter how skilled or not the marshal is. This allows come back gameplay after all or most skilled marshals were lost in previous battles but you need to push enemy city now with a new marshal. From what I understand there are "specialist" trade goods, these "people icons", I think these would be perfect vehicle for unlocking more and more powerful siege machines to be built by an army on a spot.
  14. Yes I do. My motivation is very simple - this is Knights of Honor game, this is not "Merchants of Honor" nor "Spy of Honor" nor "Marriage Sim". Military aspect is the major driver for the game. And it cannot be lame, shallow and boring, because at the end of the day this has to be a game of military conflict and "medieval power through sword" type of thing. However, what we see so far, well for several years actually, is a bit lacking. First, RTS direct combat has never been shown, talked about in terms of foundation of the gameplay and wont be available in a multiplayer. Meaning it is not a main venue for military action. And it is not a bad thing on itself, far from it. If this is a grand strategy game you don't have to rely on direct unit control. You can look at steam charts and see that Hearts of Iron IV is amazingly popular, second only to Civ VI in top 25 as strategy games, and it has zero RTS combat mechanics. While for instance Stronghold Warlords has all the classic RTS unit control elements and still is a pathetic failure of a game even as a well known franchise cannot attract players. So a strategy game, even a pure military game can be very attractive for a lot of people without any direct RTS elements, agreed. Having said that, I'm not content with the global military gameplay we have been shown. The game goes into more and more confusing and misleading things like: "Manpower" rating for Light Infantry is 300, manpower rating for Teutonic Knight Infantry is 200. This is what you will see over the marshal head on a global map. But from all other stats Knights are like 7 to 10 times more actual power than Lights, so manpower especially combined manpower of an army is meaningless number. Yet it is shown as the main indicator of army power on the map. 300 manpower unit of Lights eat 1 food upkeep. While 200 manpower Knights eat 5 food. So you can't even estimate upkeep based on manpower numbers. Somehow units transferred from a garrison into a marshal army will get instantly boosted with %-tage manpower due to skills and equipment, but for an average player... Hell, I look at it for a half a year and I cannot figure out what power with what bonuses is better or worse, especially against a given opponents! And I study gameplay footage frame by frame time to time. At the same time you transfer units back to garrison and the same unit drops in upkeep and manpower instantly. So the game tells you different number of food upkeep of marshal units and garrison units separately. And somehow can move units from marshal and back and change food required for the same overall army. Now they tell us that you can in fact run a negative food supply for a short time. But I fail to even understand how a player can use that or moreover why would you even need that mechanics of negative food supply when you are already limited by number of marshals, slots, levies, province population and gold to make more units. I don't even see how it helps to have global levies AND local province population to be used for new units, you either take levies to be soldiers or you take common villagers from the province. Too many mechanics for the same thing. But fine, we'll manage to understand all that complexity with some in-game experience. And then, I look at the end result - actual battle and military play. And I see blobs moving with the same speed with very little options to counter play against any stronger opponents. I see zero control over a given battle on a global map, well you can run away, true, but it is not meaningful control. I also expect a pretty boring and repetitive army composition. Cavalry needs a kingdom trade good to be built. Meaning that most of your enemies won't have cavalry at all, which makes all spear units less useful. Considering that you need separate upgrades for each unit type there is very little reason to build anything but swords and ranged units and never use spears or cavalry due to little return on investment. This is will be even more entrenched with unit veterancy over time so you won't switch units on a fly to match an opponent. So if movement is lame, armies are limited by marshals = very few, battle itself has a zero input from a player what the military gameplay is at the end of the day? It appears to become "make economy, invest in army, choose weak weak target, click to take a city". I don't think it will be fun and engaging. To many complex rules on supply and unit production make no sense if you have very few usable unit types and very little military options to wage war. With this motivation I'm trying all this time to steer if not the game itself, but at least the discussion into more deep, action/reaction, movement/position military gameplay. Unless you want multiplayer to be a causal chat room with a fancy moving background, KoH2 needs action - time dependent, situational, with uncertain outcomes. Things to misjudge, misclick, miscalculate, predict, feint, plan for in a heat of battle. Most of us came here to be Knights. We came for... well this:
  15. To continue my thoughts Expanding Military Gameplay with Army Abilities So, let’s for a minute run with an idea that we have player activated army abilities. These would cost army supplies and probably this cost should scale with the number of units a marshal has. Effect duration and cooldown would be very common mechanics most players would already have an experience with. For simplicity let’s look at a minimal ability set and see what gameplay possibilities these can provide. Consider the following: For simplicity lets say the all the following abilities have run time of 15 seconds and a cooldown of 60 An ability called “extended march” is activated to give an army a double movement speed, during cooldown army has half of the speed. An ability called “fierce assault” is activated to give army an attack bonus An ability called “fortify camp” is activated to give defense bonus but locks the army in place for the duration of cooldown Now consider a game situation with 2 armies on a global map. If you were to play as the game is right now, you options are very few – you either move away from a stronger army or you chase a weaker army. There is nothing else really in terms of military gameplay. But with the army abilities mechanics mentioned above we could have a potential for much richer play / counter play: You see my army moving in, you activate a “fierce assault” trying to attack. If I do nothing, you get to engage with a bonus. My counter play can be to run away. Your counter to that might be “extended march” to catch up. I can respond with either “extended march” but I risk to misjudge distances and timing and suffer from a cooldown slow speed, but I can outlast your fierce assault duration before we engage. Or I can respond with “fortify camp” and try to get fight with defensive bonus But you can counter play my fortify camp and cancel the attack while locking my army in place and getting potential reinforcements closer while I'm unable to move on a cooldown. Most importantly, we both have to time it properly because we are running out of army supplies each time we activate an ability. Indirectly we are investing or I should rather say "betting" resources each time we use supplies and the play is to maximize payback. However as in all good gameplay mechanics we have a counter motivation not to save our supplies forever because if we miscalculate and lose an army all the supplies will be lost anyway. Now all this becomes an interesting dance of time and judgment making global military gameplay way more deep and uncertain. This would be a tremendous bonus for a multiplayer where you don’t have RTS battles and all the military conflict will be reduced to a few marshals moving around with the same speeds. All these play options are greatly dependent on supplies available to a given army and a player skill and proper prediction of enemy actions. If the cost of abilities scale with army size you then can have a very interesting dance of smaller armies with more ability activations vs large armies which are not able to afford a lot of abilities. Imagine a play and counter play which wastes invading army supplies to the point that it cannot start a siege on a city and has to fall back home to resupply WITHOUT an actual battle even happening! And these are just 3 simple abilities out the top my head. You can enrich the global warfare dramatically even with a very few army abilities due it’s timed nature and potential to counter each other. All that can be done with a minimal impact on the existing mechanics just by using army supplies resource as a fuel for these abilities. Supply becomes way more important, size of an army would make it costly, but smaller armies will become more viable if a player uses abilities at a right time for a great effect and less cost. I would strongly suggest looking in this direction.
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