William Blake

Well, I'll start from minor issues this time ) Kingdom Advantage Names: Very inconsistent naming of kingdom advantages, some are just horrible - "Mercantilism", "Progress". Sound like a lame machine translation. Consider changing names: "Abundance" -> "Crop Rotation" (as agricultural term specific to the time period) "Mercantilism" -> "Foreign Trade" or "Merchant guilds" (mercantilism is a very scientific term for game) "Progress" - > "Renaissance" or "Enlightenment" (progress sounds very meaningless) "Age of War" -> "Standing army" (war is too broad, it is not an achievement or a tech, war is going on all the time) 64 Goods is a lot: Not going to argue about it, it will take too much effort to change it. But 64 goods is a lot. It is way way too much. Just listing names, which have too be meaningful is brrr.... It will be fine for a hardcore players, but new an casuals will be lost in all that. I look at the icons on your screenshots, I see 3 icons for horses which is manageable. But you also have 7 (seven!) icons of some men, probably specialists or whatever. 7 tiny square icons with men is practically creating player confusion on purpose. Moreover everything else is a bunch of completely obscure generic icons of things... But we are not changing that. So, I strongly suggest to split 64 goods types into 3-5 tiers. Depending on rarity/required other goods. Make tier II icons with green border and tier III icons with blue or whatever and so on. This should apply to all views a goods icons are displayed to a player. Advise player on how to get a specific trade good right now: You need a easy way for a player to figure out how to get missing trade good. Since goods are derivatives of province resources plus building upgrade, it is not obvious for a regular player with a limited game knowledge to get through this puzzle. So you need "an advisor" view or something, which would allow a player to find options to get a trade good like "select trade good M -> message "you produce M at province P" or "you don't have access to M" - > "find provinces which can produce this M" gives a list of provinces. -> "find trade" gives a list of other kingdoms which now can trade M. "Upgrade N is now available in every B in our kingdom": I don't understand this mechanic. It sounds as if suddenly you can build glassworks in other provinces which don't have natural resources. Eh.. why? If I build glassworks in other provinces, but I later lose the province with natural resources to the glassworks what will happen with all other glassworks I've built? Or if you insists on a mechanics that only first upgrade of a specific type has a cost to a player, but after the first one all other provinces can get this upgrade for free (as I suspect from "barracks upgrade" discussion we had before), I can't understand the logic behind it. Why would you put a pay wall on a first upgrade of a type, but a more advanced kingdom can just build upgrades easily. If you lose all the provinces with a specific upgrade, but you've built an upgrade before, is it still "available" for your new provinces? I don't get it. Probably at least consider re-phrasing the help text. Overall dynamics of kingdom advantages: Ok, this is my main issue. But I have to speculate here. Based on original KoH, which had probably the same system with way less goods, I expect a very unhealthy dynamics: In a beginning of a game, you have too little choice of resources and goods produced, based on your local starting conditions. This means that you can't reasonable choose anything so neither kingdom advantages mechanics and trade good are practically irrelevant for a player. In a middle game, player again has little to no choice in potential trade goods, it is all defined by very few REASONABLE options to capture or develop based on your local environment. When suddenly there is an explosion of trade good available due to much faster expansion of your kingdom, much more advanced trade (with all other kingdoms suddenly developing trade goods), way more stronger diplomacy (you have power and gold to make diplomatic relations and now can reach practically all other kingdoms on the map) and trade is using teleporting so goods are instantly available across a map. As a result, your start floating in available trade goods and your kingdom advantages start filling way too fast, giving you even more bonuses and making this situation even worse. All I see in the dev blog, will only reinforce this unhealthy dynamic from the original game. Goods are too many, the more you have to acquire for an kingdom advantage, the less you can do at a start. Since you require more trade goods per kingdom advantage and possible resource options per province are way too many, the less chances are that you will have reasonable access to specific good you are missing in a mid game. Yet at the end game suddenly you will have a flood of available things and all the puzzle parts will fill in almost with no effort. I don't know how to fix this. Maybe you should not be able to trade a good if you or the other kingdoms is "using it" for a kingdom advantage. At least it will solve a problem of "one province on a map, starts making N and everyone else suddenly gets it from trade and everyone get a missing piece of a puzzle". Conclusion: We'll see how it will work out. Although most of it is more or less clear in my head, the actual gameplay may be different, so I'm just speculating here. Overall, I'm skeptical about current design to be both too complex and too irrelevant for early-mid game, while being too trivial at end game. However, some changes to names, visual separation of trade goods by tier and UI flow to advice a player on how to get a specific trade good would be good enough to make the current system into a final game with as little pain as possible.

Well, my point is not about one particular country or another, just in general it appears to me that this is very modern understanding of a "nation" and I doubt it should be a fundamental feature in a medieval game to "restore" nations as we think about them right now.

I doubt that "Italia" was ever considered a single state by Italians until 19th century. From my understanding they are not even sure about that even now ) "Russia" was not a single state even by a formal name up until 1485. Which is not even close to what we think about Russia right now. In fact, you probably don't even want to go into that discussion. "Germany" as a single nation was not a thing until mid 19th century. "Great Britain" was not a thing until King James, start of 17th century. All these "nations" are very modern things. From the perspective of the KoH2 time period all these "nations" are in fact totally alien to a mindset of feudal Europe.

I have nothing against fun or complex systems if they matter. But this all this has nothing to do with what I want or not. We are all sitting here for 2 years expecting the game to release "soon" or at least to have a date. It didn't happen yet. Meaning that the development speed or effort it takes to make it all work is more than we imagine. We saw multiple gameplay videos and a lot of dev talks. There were no seasons in the game. The game was never meant to be changing with seasons or weather. It is most unlikely that suddenly Black Sea will rethink all that and start adding weather and seasons. This is grand strategy game spanning for generations of kings and involving huge amount of countries all at once. Some snow or rain or hot breeze from a desert are too little to care about on that scale. My original comment was just explaining why it is a problem "just to add winter" into a game which dev said is "feature complete". Star Citizen has a lot of features, all you could wish for, and keep adding. But with infinitely expanding features it is impossible to have an actual game release. And I would think Black Sea and THQ would rather like to have a release.

I'm sorry that a technical discussion of a technical problem makes you upset.

Slight problem - the game is feature complete, or so we heard. Bigger problems: Time in KoH2 is abstract. Meaning that you don't see years or months going by in game. And if you have a king lifespan say 20 minutes (I don't know, taking numbers out of the blue). This would mean that in order to make it in proportion you will need winter to summer change every 30 seconds or so. If you make seasons change much slower, your kings would die after ~3 winters which would be awkward. If you make seasons just a visual candy people would rant about "how come these kings are so out of sync from seasons is this a fantasy middle earth"? Economy is not season dependent. In order to make economy change with seasons you need fundamental change to game mechanics and balancing hell all over again. If you make economy season dependent it would be really awkward not to have seasons affect military gameplay. Especially considering things like "how come its winter but in a tactical battle there is no snow", Or "it is winter, but how come there is snow while I'm fighting in Africa" and so on. So you need seasons in all military aspects. That would be even more effort. So if you look at all that and take into account that people already lost patience with devs roughly 5 times in the last 2 years, I would take a guess and say that seasons are not going to be in KoH2. At least initial release.

I think he will instantly mature and converted to a grown up full king )

True, there were good number of Queens leading countries. Should probably be viable in all of Christian and Pagan kingdoms. But I doubt they would change it at this point in time.

This is pointless complexity. I don't understand why would you do that. As a player do I have any effect on this? No. Can I "invest" or "improve" or "cut costs" on that? No. So basically some random modifiers. Moreover, these are variable with "princes and princesses; and important relatives" and are reset with a king death and a new coronation. Such that, over time, these are just going to average themselves to a some baseline. The only situation this is even remotely relevant to a player is when oldest son is a complete imbecile and younger son is total genius so you have to switch the heir. However because it means that it will be justified in about like 1% of the time or so ) Most of the time a player will have no reason to even understand what these stars mean and what to do about it. Moreover, precisely because these are given and not affected by a player, you cannot make these bonuses significant. If they are significant bonuses this becomes a casino - "pull a good king family out of random and win". But if these bonuses are weak they are even less relevant = pointless complexity. PS Considering how many kingdoms there are and how big the families are... Well, you built a marriage simulator. It will probably take more compute on who is marrying who and keep track of children and add up slight tiny family bonuses all around, rather than military gameplay altogether.

You probably should not. It's a game, you can get by just fine without playing it.

Real time battles should be available in a single player. At least this is our current understanding. Real time battles were cut from multiplayer due to timing issues for multiple players and overall length of games.

Yes, I was wrong. There is a place for 4 siege units on UI, but it is not consistent or I am probably looking at a different builds. But these slots are missing on actual siege screens:

From some early dev stream I recall that siege units are built by a marshal based on his siege skills. But I'm not sure.

No no no, don't go into any philosophical realms. I'm very concrete here and you'd better be too or you will never ship the game ) Although it apparently will take way more tries to express my concrete concerns then I thought. 1) So you now agree that a player "wants" (has all incentives to) to maximize an army at a given time, especially to go abroad because it not only gives better chances, but it is also SAFER investment to have blob army in one place and it is also more PROFITABLE to because it is opening potential targets which cannot be even available for a small army. 2) The reverse side of this conclusion is that no one should operate or risk small multiple armies, at least in pvp environment. 3) The implications of above mean that military action will be less frequent BUT more devastating to humans. Someone will lose big army to a big army and this is setback is bigger the bigger your blob was. In my mind this is an undesirable state of things. The game is called "Knights of Honor", it is not called "Merchants of Honor", nor it is called "Clerics/Diplomats of Honor"... You can't make war to be small support activity on a side. Look, I'm not saying "you are making mistakes and your game sucks". Far from it. You made up a lot of mechanics based on multiple interconnected reasons. Fine it might be all valid and I don't suggest you go and throw things away. But when I look at what you are showing us all together, I see implications of this system and they are questionable. I think it should be way more potential gameplay around smaller weak multiple armies. Because these are more opportunities to win small and lose small. In order to make these small action viable I said that you can for instance to have variable army speed with variable food consumption (like a army = battleship, food = fuel, speed is a function of fuel consumption) to allow smaller armies to get away from huge ones and act faster in multiple place with a weak force. Variable speed allows for false hopes, miscalculations, inappropriate waste of food and so on - gameplay. Walking around with 2 marshals together at a fixed speed because it is the most appropriate way of winning war is not a good gameplay. In order to make smaller force to be a danger and have more opportunities I suggested to have a siege type where you cannot take a city, but can damage a city over time. If this is not available it means that I won't even consider any city to be a target if I cannot take it with a small army. Moreover you will not consider any of my small army to be a danger if you have enough garrison. This reduces opportunity - less movement, less mistakes, less action, less gameplay. In order to make more military traffic of weaker forces I said make food to be fuel which is always in use and always short and let small armies to run around supplying big ones with food, so it would be more movement and more opportunity to screw the things up or catch or harass or loose or win SMALL. Because a lot of small win/loses overall is averaged to a fun gameplay, but a single big loss is too huge of a punch in a real completive environment.

Well, it appears that we are talking about different things and everything you just said is nice to know but completely irrelevant to the points I'm trying to make ) Let me try again with a more concrete example. We are playing pvp. This is what you have at a 1 hour 20 minutes of game 1x time: You income is +153 gold per minute. You have 2826 gold (saved 18 minutes of gold income). You want to attack another player - me. Your marshal is at least 500 gold worth (3.2 minutes of income). If you have 1 skill it is 200 books (28 minutes! of you kingdom book income). Now your choice is to add units to you marshal, say 70 gold per unit. If you add 3 units, it is +210 gold (2 minutes of income) if you add 6 units it is 420 gold (3 minutes of income), 8 units 560 gold 3.5 minutes of income. Now, what can you potentially do to me, best case scenario? You come over, I have no marshals, you take a city. A city will have garrison, 5 units max. It could be less, but obviously when I see you I can add to garrison something. So lets be realistic, you might at best case scenario have a city with 5 units and no my marshals around. Given that, are you going to leave you home with less than 5 units? No, because that would be a certain weak army even in a best case scenario for you. So you need at least 6 to be sure. If you are already invested in 6 and marshal costs, there is zero reason no to take all 8, to be a bit stronger. Now, lets say you need to travel 4 provinces to reach a battle. If you go 2 provinces a minute, engage in a battle and return back we are looking at 5-6 minutes of game time. This is 153x5 = 765 gold income for you. Which is more than a cost of 8 units for 70 gold each. Implication of that is that just travel times required will allow an enemy to generate enough income to build up garrison, so you can't buy an advantage leaving just a few minutes earlier. This is completely unreasonable for a player to leave safety with such expensive investment as marshal and and not have max army you can potentially hire at the time. Leaving with less than 5 units is practically pointless because most of the time you will have no valid targets. (tell me how much gold you generate by pillaging a settlement and how much time it takes and I'll tell you how pointless it is) Ok, that was the BEST case scenario for you. Lets say I have a marshal around. Potentially if I have full army + garrison it would be impossible for you to take a city. If I have half an army AND you manage to catch me on a move you still cannot say that more units and men would be worse. In fact if you travel and I'm at home, even if you win battles and do not return each time you will benefit by all extra men you could bring to stay fighting abroad longer. So again, it is very questionable to leave without all men you can get into an army. And this escalates further. Because I can have 2 marshals at home and if they are together they will beat your 1 marshal to a great loss for you, so it might be wise to have 2 marshals moving at once. If you attack with 2 marshals maxed you can certainly take any city with even my marshal in it. And you can take on anything else. Since 2 marshals and 2 full armies is amazingly costly but most effective (you can't have more than 2 per side per battle so they cannot be overpowered just by more marshals at once) that will certainly become the main strategy the moment you can afford it. If you don't do that you are only creating opportunity for someone else to catch your 1 marshal with 2 and you are reducing potential targets you can take one. An actual mechanics of how and what is calculated in a battle is irrelevant as you can see. It is all about times, incomes, army sizes, travel times and potential targets for a military action.

In fact, I can pretty much predict how a multiplayer will be based on what we have seen already. Assuming that you are playing pvp, not full coop and people are playing to win. 1) On economy side, due to the current rules of province governing: we can clearly understand that a kingdom reaches practical maximum of income at around 6-8 provinces. Any extra province which you cannot assign someone to govern from the royal court is just 10% of its potential income. Meaning that going from 8 governed provinces to 9 without a governor is just 8 + 0.1 vs 8 province incomes. Yes, new province might be much better, bring different trade goods and so on, and you might switch a governor from old province to a new one. But the main relation stays - expanding over number of available governors is practically pointless. Especially on a short run which is always a factor for a multiplayer game when people can't stay in the game for the whole day non stop. 2) Let's put 8 provinces in perspective on a global map size wise - this smaller than a size of Spain. Just main UK landmass without Ireland is like 12 provinces. Keep that in mind. 3) An army at 1x time takes about 30 seconds to cross a province (lets make even numbers for now). UK and France is about 6 provinces tall (3 minute travel one way). From Baltic sea to south of Bulgaria is around 13 at a straight line (6 minutes travel one way). A siege would take you a minute or 2 at least. All this means that a player is very unlikely to project military power far away - you cannot afford to send out your marshals for 15 minutes before they can return as you won't have any military available at home. In this case "far away" is roughly 5 province radius from your kingdom. 4) MOREOVER if I have 10 provinces and you come from far away and take even 2 of them, from income point of view, anything more than my governor limit is practically no loss. But I can focus all my nearby provinces to build up army to take it back, and you can't reinforce from far away, because your marshals are here and travel takes another 6-10 minutes even if you had more. So you far away attacks risk you army, take away your military which can't return and can't reinforce in time to produce about 2% decrease in my total economy and you probably won't be able to hold it anyway. 5) At the same time, you can project power with spy actions all across the map practically instantly if you have gold. And you can instantly coordinate this power with other people regardless of the geo location. Such that it is clear to see that spy actions will become major attack, while military power will be localized threat. 6) Once you take the above into account and you are playing to win against people, your only reasonable conclusion is to choose a kingdom on a side of a global map. Choosing middle of Germany or Poland will make you reachable for everyone, while corners of the map are safe from most other people armies just due to travel time. You also will have significant advantage choosing starting location in a way to have 6-8 provinces of the same religion around you so you can expand to the optimal 8-9 province kingdom without religion issues with captured lands. Expanding over this soft limit is practically pointless from an economy perspective as it won't increase your overall income but create more problems. The more land you have to defend the more constrained you will be by the few marshals and travel times. Once you build up in your remote corner you will then convert your economy income to spy power and start nuking weakest human players all around the map while being unreachable and defending military only from local AI if anything at all. Playing anything more than that requires too much time which is unlikely for a random groups of people. Military action at a distance is not possible with the given map sizes and travel times in any meaningful way. So most of the games will be economy/vote victory or just annoying other people with spying and excommunications, sending AI to war with them and that kind of thing, to the point of them leaving the game they can't win in any observable time and not having unlimited play time. Projecting military power far away from your core lands is doomed also from the point of religion issues. You will be in a very tough spot trying to attack from Normandy to Middle East and vice versa, because even with all the travel and economy factors aside - our religions won't match, so going far away and trying to get a hold of enemy province will have religion issue against the attack and help locals to get the land back. Yes, you can argue that a lot of people will play "for fun" and some people will "play long games with friends" and "the experience is more than a final result". I'm not arguing with that. My point is - as a potential for multiplayer competitive pvp game, KoH2 appears to be not well suited.

This is not what I'm taking about, I'm talking about damage done to a city with a siege over time. As it is right now siege just goes through a progress bar and you win a city. This means that if you don't have army strong enough to take a city, you have no reason to even put any pressure on a city, because you don't make any difference if you don't win. No, it won't work this way. You don't have time or an ability to build up an army based on enemy units types. Building cavalry is questionable idea anyway, because all the real meaningful battles are sieges and cavalry is not good for that. And it is probably more expensive unit and an extra upgrade to barracks. This is why we probably never saw a cavalry units being used in the game. If there is low chance of cavalry and you need to take cities, then your army choices are reduced to assault infantry and archers. These would work the best and this is what we see in the footage all the time. Well apart from an idea that peasant armies are fun and engaging and you need to have a period of 6+ peasant armies roaming around. If I have an army and you have an army, if you spot my army to be one unit type (because if its mixed types you won't really get a lot of advantage maxing out counter units) in order to change you army composition you need to have these unit types available than stash other existing units to garrison if it has enough space and then maybe you will have better composition. And you can't build a lot at once as you will be limited by local worker resource (1 per unit) and kingdom levies (1k limit globally), so instantly switching you army from archers and swords to all halberds to match my cavalry won't happen. And then you would need to catch my army and force that battle. And I somehow should not see that you have better counter army and won't get away from you with an equal speed. I don't see any evidence for that. And I don't see that analytically too, given what you show in-game. With a few marshals you have and a cost of a marshal plus upgrades bigger that cost of a full army. (500 gold per marshal, + books + experience vs full tech 1 army = 8 by 70 gold), it would be stupid to even leave your lands without a full army. What can you even potentially do with a weak army? The moment you stop to raid a settlement you will give an enemy time to close in and you could instantly see that this is a weak army. You can't take or endanger any city with a weak army, because just garrison is 5 units plus defenses plus potential reinforcement marshal. So sending weak army is not just throwing you 1 out of 2 or 3 marshals away, it is also giving enemy an easy target to get experience from and waste all the price of weak army all together.

I’ve watched recent in-game footage multiple times, frame by frame in some cases. I have no idea what is still just a placeholder value or what is close to a final state, but it bothers me to I see current state of military gameplay. Strategic war is very lame or so it seems (I obviously take tactical RTS battles out of the picture because most of single player will be auto battles as well as all of multiplayer) This is what I see right now: Every single mechanics reinforces blobbing. There is zero reason not to have max army and zero reasons to split forces . Realistically speaking a player will have 2 maybe 3 marshals max. Which already limits number of military action available to a player, but moreover, mechanics of ally aid with a second marshal joining a battle makes it very beneficial to have second marshal nearby. Cost of a marshal including books spent in skills and time invested makes any loss a significant blow to a player, such that risking a marshal with out maxed army is foolish. Maxing army is very simple both from global barrack upgrades and kingdom levies with units created instantly on a click. So players will have maxed out tech1 or tech2 army all the time if they want. Army refill is also instant and can be done at once in most of your cities. Combat is extremely repetitive and bland. You can practically 100% see the result before armies even engage. All sieges are the same and expect zero decision making to be honest. Current mechanics of city garrison and town fortifications (% bonus to manpower) practically demands 2 max armies to overcome a city without much loses, especially with a potential reinforcement from an enemy (1 marshal plus garrison units), so running around with a weak single marshal has no reasonable goals whatsoever. Maneuvering is practically non existent, you can see a target you can take on – you move to it, you see army stronger than you – move away. Raiding any settlement is just locking one of your very few armies into place to give an enemy an opportunity to gather a gang force. All of the movement play I ever saw was tricking an enemy to siege and then add a bigger army to a city defense. Not impressive. Army refill is expensive, moreover “kingdom levies” and local worker resources are holding you from accumulating potential resources to recover in time from a big losses. (1k kingdoms levies resource limit is not enough for even 1 new full army in case of 1 marshal defeat. 150 levies per unit) Such that from a play to win perspective any military RISK has to be minimized – get all forces into a blob and try to win with a maximum advantage over an enemy in a shortest time. I really doubt this would be enjoyable and engaging experience for all of us. Since we all set on auto resolve battles being the main combat mechanics, I think we should think really hard to make it better. I’m afraid thinking about an extensive new combat system is counterproductive at this time, so I’ve tried to do as much as I can within current system we have been shown: 1) Change siege mechanics. Separate 2 stages – siege, during which attacker and defender loose little to no men, but attacker is decreasing (destroying) levels of fortifications. Such that if siege is long enough you can destroy all of the bonuses for defenders. Second stage – assault, is a battle with actual armies fighting based on remaining fortifications. During siege both armies should use food a lot. In fact I propose to have a cost in food to even start a siege so you can just hop in and out of sieges. Player choice should be a moment when to switch from siege to assault based on current situation. 2) During siege phase allow attacker to target city buildings instead of fortifications, such that given time an attacker can inflict economy damage to a city without a lot of losses given passive defenders. An attacker choice would be either try to reduce fortifications and take city with economy buildings or destroy economy and retreat. Defending player choice should be either hold enemy army wasting time and risk economy buildings or break siege going into offensive. 3) Make food to be the main limiting strategic resource on marshal/army level. Add new selectable option on marshal/garrison level – “Rations” (double, regular, half rations). Which would affect speed of food consumption respectively. With double rations army should get movement and morale bonus, with half rations should get debuf obviously but not starve for longer. On army UI add time calculation of remaining army food with a given rate of usage so a player can track and plan food as basically fuel for an army. 4) Make retreat actions cost food (you drop stuff as you run away). But it should be more or less easy to hit and run if you have food without risk to a marshal or a lot of army, which would allow harassing action against bigger armies and let a player to plan losses in terms of food costs rather than a catastrophic marshal or huge unit loss. 5) Make any army bigger than 3 units to move slowly and waste %-tage of food over time with each extra unit. Such that bigger army would be harder to maintain and harder to move. Light small armies should be able to raid enemy at longer distances faster but if caught would be weak and won’t be able to survive a lot with retreats costing food. 6) Make amount of food in an army cart to affect movement speed. Such that a small army with little food can have significant movement advantage. Small army with a lot of food would be slow, but could be used to supply another army. (also make UI to transfer food between armies, including other allied players). This would allow way more options for movement at different speeds and logistics (supply big army or a siege with food from far away). Max army with all the food is very slow but safest and needs no resupply. 7) Change upgrade system of the barracks from global to localized. Make localized upgrades (fletcher, swordsmith etc) cheaper, but easier to destroy during a siege, such that if you took a city you can’t just refill you army instantly based on your global upgrades but require to have appropriate upgrades to be present to refill respective unit types. 8) Add spy actions to sabotage food supply of a selected enemy marshal and cities in order to give non military way to harass a strong army or defense. 9) Probably add religion belies to reduce army food consumption, better bonuses from extra rations, reduced food waste of bigger armies. This would be easier to do at this point than adjusting/adding marshal skills or traditions. The expected result of this changes (I wish would be) the following: Siege vs assault phases would change the dynamics from "only capture or retreat" to "trade time for defense or do economy damage over time" Changes to food consumption would allow logistics of war to step into spotlight instead of arcade roaming around forever Variable army speeds due to army size and food rations would greatly increase tactical options Small armies would become viable for raiding and fast food resupply of main forces Ideally the war will switch from blob on blob maxed armies to more intricate play of supply, food shortage, harassing strikes and strengths vs weaknesses of multiple options instead of one size fits all approach Local barracks upgrades would make local state of a province capital to be main factor of army resupply, while new siege phase would allow to economically weaken given province military production. Hope I make my arguments clear. What do you think? Cheers

Game already has a lot of things you imply with a different names. There are "books", which is global kingdom resource, knowledge power so to speak. There are "believes" which are buffs to population made by religious actions. There are "kingdom advantages" which are buffs to kingdom based on trade goods you can secure. There are "traditions" which are modifiers based on your royal court skills. The information about all of this is scattered through the dev blogs, but it is in fact most of the things you want more or less in the game already.

The only real indication of development progress is in-game footage. However, no matter what the dev progress is, it has little to do with a release date. Scope can extend or shrink and dates can move for pure commercial/market/publisher reasons. If they are not ready to publicly commit to a date - nothing can change that. If you need ANY date - say August 13, 2022 and be done with it. You are not going to hold me to it anyway right? )

Just to put it in perspective. From dev stream: This is royal court in a middle of a game. 2 red ones are marshals - military commanders. Other 6 are NOT marshals. So from resource allocation point of view, military is only 25% of the kingdom. The rest are - 1 spy, 1 diplomat, 2 merchants and 2 clerics.

There are multiple winning conditions depending on a game mode and options and some of them are pure economy/diplomacy oriented. Although I doubt you can possibly win without any war at all because you can't get any new provinces without a conquest and other religions will be hostile to you at one point or another. But overall you don't have to go into war with everyone on the map. In fact it appears that probably you will be friendly with most other countries and still win.

I would think that you are looking at compressed stream which has rescaled video footage as a background, all streamed at 1080p max. Most likely the original image quality is way better. On top of that KoH1 had 2d main view with pixel by pixel created raster images, KoH2 runs 3d zoomable map with every object being 3d object with textures and effects on top, like clouds passing by create a dynamic shadows. At his point it is really hard to say how good your actual visual experience would be in KoH2.

From the campaign setup screenshot I can gather that there is a mechanic to put multiplayer game into a pause, presumably by any human player. There is also an optional cooldown on game pause, probably per player in a given timeframe. What is "unpause lock" in this context? An ability for other players to unpause game vs pause is unlocked only by original player who paused the game? But in my mind, these are minor details to the main question of game time - how time is handled by a multiplayer game? Is it running at regular 1x speed as single player? Is game speed in multiplayer variable or just pause unpause options? Is multiplayer "player host to player clients" or "game server to player clients"? If there is a player host, what happens to the game when host drops? If a player drops from a multipler game, can you rejoin? If you have 5 people in a game and a host player is a first to lose the game, can the other 4 still continue playing? We know from dev streams that KoH2 single player campaigns are long. I recall statements like "at 40 hours right now". In this light, how long do you EXPECT a multiplayer games to be on average. What are provisions to either carry over an existing game to continue at another day or to compress overall experience to more time-manageable single game sessions? How many players can you have in a multiplayer game at maximum? There are 6 slots on the UI shown. If 6 is maximum and we are playing on a full global map all the time, do you see an issue with player selected kingdoms being potentially too far away from each other? Can players join an existing multiplayer in a middle after it had been started? Is there any persistent progress for a player? In game persistent profile? Records of the games/victories/losses? Hall of fame, ladder? In regards of AI difficulty setting. Do you have AI playing same game (real in-game economy) or is AI getting resources and units out of the thing air to make an appearance? PS Regarding "player wars after N king generations". Did you tried to suicide your kings with no army against enemy city over and over again to cheat on this N generation limit and have early aggression available to you? An honest question, just curious )))

I'm only making arguments to have a discussion. We don't know how tactical battles work, we don't know how multiplayer works, so for us its all imaginary right now based on original game and gameplay we saw on dev streams. If we can talk different game modes, well yeah, I can see plenty - for instance 1 on 1 with tactical battles on if player's armies meet. Or for instance a global map which goes for a fixed time, say 1 hour and then you have a "crusade" event when every player selects 1 marshal and a side they want to join and they are all taken into a final tactical battle right away, so it like 1 tactical battle per game, but it is ultimate end game and every player will join it at the same time to switch game mode. In fact if we are talking options, you could do variable global game speed, such that if any player goes into tactical battle the global game is set to slowest speed, but for instance every player has limited number of tactical battles per game so you could only slow down other people game for a few times for important battles you want. Or you can have a variable global game speed based on overall player selection, so if everyone selects speed 1x the game is 1x, if someone selects .5x and some one 10x the game is set to an average speed setting of all players, such that if you want to slow down and everyone else wants to slow down you can have a game on very slow and do your tactical battles, but if you are the only one who wants its slow other people will kick the speed up but not to the max. The problem with all these options is that we don't know how KoH2 works and most importantly what is the goal in terms of player experience. Because if tactical battles are so cool and deep that you want them to be in a multiplayer you can think of half a dozen mechanics to make them available. But we don't know that at all.