William Blake

I doubt you really want your game being handled by an AI. So lets say an enemy army invades while you are away - should your AI engage or not? You came out of a battle and your other marshal is not only already in a battle, but he is losing badly because another player tricked AI to attack a small army and reinforced with a bigger army? Or your AI being tricked to attack a small army and left province capital open and so on. Event comes in - "join crusade", should AI join for you or not? Diplomacy event came in - what AI should do to make your happy? If you are so happy with AI playing a game for you, why would you even play at all - let AI drive your kingdom. Moreover, if you think AI is that good, what makes you think that your direct control over units will be better than AI control? You, in fact, implicitly expect your own control to be much better than opposing AI so you could win with less forces than a auto resolve. What if AI is in fact stronger or on a same level as a human. Lets take out the part of "it is fun" for now, just from a pure value perspective for a grand strategy you only want to directly control major battle so you could be better than your own AI. I'm not saying there is no value in direct tactical battle control, but so far I don't see how to make it all come together for multiple people if you want to have major focus on a global grand strategy game first.

Alright, lets say you will leave the battle after 10 minutes. What can happen in 10 minutes while you ware away from a global map? Lets look at https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1228675689 skip to 20 minute mark and look at the gameplay on the background. Event notifications (icons dropping down on the left of the screen) are coming in at around 10 seconds? Say 20 seconds average. An army on a global map can go across a province in around 20 seconds on a normal speed. So you are back from you 10 minute battle and you have 30 notifications you didn't see and an enemy army could get to you from around 9 province radius. Lets say we are going to play for 2 hours non stop. Let's say you have an average battle for 15 minutes if you lead it manually. If you do NOTHING but battles over and over again the whole game will only fit 8 battles. Obviously you can't just be in a battle all the time, so lets say it is 3 battles per 2 hours. Do you really think it is worth to make your global gameplay so weak so you could just have 3 tactical battles?

Ok, how long do you think a tactical battle should take? 15 minutes? More, less?

Well, lets think it through: Problem with tactical battles in multiplayer is variable time in a battle vs global game. If you have more than 2 players you can't have main global game to be paused while some people are fighting in a battle even for 5-10 minutes. And if you think about it, you probably want a battle to be longer than that. If you allow the global game to proceed while you are fighting everyone else would do so many things on a global scale that you will be totally left behind even if you won the battle to begin with. If you have only 2 players per game such that they will always be in a battle with each other, you then will have a global game which is whole map just for 2 real people and they will probably fight around 2 maybe 3 major battles before one accepts a defeat (once you loose a major army and enemy keeps his major army it is unlikely that you could recover in a short time and the whole game cannot go for days, it is not a persistent mmo), so the whole thing will be 99% no tactical battles before you meet with a human enemy and then 20 minute major battle with one victor. Very questionable experience to be honest. Now, ok, lets say we still really want to have a player on player tactical battles, but we want it to be built into the global strategy game with multiple people. I can potentially see a solution to that, but it is too complex to be viable. It goes roughly like this: Global game goes into "battle season" mode every 10 minutes During normal game all battles which are not auto resolving are going into "wait for battle state" mode Once battle season mode is on, ALL players have to choose a battle they want to lead in a tactical mode or wait for the battle season be be over In a battle season mode global game is put on pause, so there is nothing for you to gain advantage of on a global scale while battles are on and other people are fighting in a tactical mode Ideally everyone would have at least 1 major battle in queue from previous 10 minutes of a global play Battle season mode also has a time limit, say 15 minutes. If you can't win your tactical battle in 15 minutes you just get pulled out of it into a global map and autoresolve will finish the rest If all human players finished a battle faster than 15 minutes, battle season mode ends and global game is going on again If there are no battles to fight with human players scheduled battle season is not triggered after 10 minutes so you can play global map uninterrupted until there is a battle to be decided If you do it like that you can basically split a game between global and tactical modes, you will queue battles and start tactical mode for everyone who is going to fight any battle in this time window and you will get out of that back to global map at a predictable time, so people who are not fighting or finished earlier can at least know when it is going to be back to global map game again. Potentially you can make it work like that, but your experience will be dramatically different. Your global map game will take now way way more time overall r with all the interruptions. You might find that say 15 minutes is too short for a tactical battle to make sense. But you can't extend this time by a lot, since you really want to have an overall gameplay in some manageable time, few people can play for 8 hours straight. You also would need to have some new mechanics added to the movement of armies on a global map, such that you could not exploit the fact that some army has engaged and is in waiting for a battle season mode to start, but you are still free to move other armies on a global map. But you can see that complexity skyrockets and new issues are piling up out of nowhere just to make direct control over tactical battles available in a global multiplayer.

From what we saw so far there is no such thing in KoH2. It appears that you are locked into unit types such that your upgrade path is to add a new building which has stronger unit types available. But units of a same unit type are identical apart from veterancy levels and religion/kingdom advantages bonuses plus marshal skills on top of that.

Well, how about all players start as pagans and you can do your preferred thing in game?

I think there is fundamental difference between friends playing a custom game, and random people playing to compete. Former is all about shared experience and rich availability of options, latter is about feeling of struggle and yet fair achievement. We have zero idea on how KoH2 will handle ANYTHING multiplayer, but we know it is grand strategy multiplier. So with this basis, when I hear all the differences what religion brings to the table and wide arrays of mechanics from scholars to holy cities and stuff, I clearly see that "fair" can becomes very questionable very fast. Yet, I don't want to step over "rich online experience with friends", because it is completely different set of goals and player motivation. So this "community split" is very certain in my mind. For the strictly competitive side of the story, I do agree that it should better be plain, clear rules with minimal freedom to adjust options, because if there are a lot of options to compete with you will never find people who agree on these options. The reason I even write about all this is because I'm sure that devs are going to cover "friendly rich experience" themselves without a problem as it is their natural state of playing between themselves, but cruel outside world can be hard to emulate in such a setting. PS Yes, hints of irony are hard to catch, especially in a written speech.

From the latest religion dev stream we now know that "Polska Strong". We also now know that religion bonuses are very different from religion to religion and are very significant. All this talk about religions and mechanics made an interesting jump in my head to the following: Balance is hard We know from experience, that any complex asymmetrical game system is hard to balance, in fact we can be sure that for quite some time after a release the game won't be balanced and in terms of competitive multiplayer there will be strong exploitable metagame. It just happens all the time everywhere. Scale is debatable but it will happen. But this has a good side because more variety creates richer game experience. Exploration takes time If you have a lot of variety in the game and a game takes a long time, it would take a lot of time for an average player to try and fail or should I rather say "explore" potential gameplay possibilities and compare them. However, if you have long games amount of things you can try is limited since you commit to say one religion or another AND more specifically one or another kingdom. Average casual players will have little experience outside their preferred nation and it's religion abilities. Competitive play Now, all this is fine and dandy if you play singleplayer for your own pleasure. Yet we know for sure, that in context of multiplayer humans tend to have different motivation and are eager to win over another human no matter what. Such that it is highly likely that the moment some people discover some exploitable combinations of location + religion + early strategy it will catch like widlfire (I'm looking at you soulless "twitch streamer") and will be overplayed. Which is both bad for people who happen to play naturally and be in disadvantage and for exploiting crowd too, because they will get bored with repeating meta or quite a game if meta is not available for them. What can we do Lets say we don't want to remove or restrict anything in the game. But we want to have a choice for people to potentially get around these problems. I propose an optional new multiplayer mode, lets call it "Competitive", the rules are: Few selected kingdoms are preset as "available" for players to start. These few should be roughly the same size to minimize starting advantage. They also should be more or less equally distributed on a map to avoid Player 1: Scotland, Player 2: Wales, Player 3: Baghdad. This list should also be variable to include or exclude starting kingdoms which are proven to be a problem due to special units or location Player in a "Competitive" mode do not choose the starting kingdom, but get a random one from this list, such that a player will be presented with a fair and variable starting location and no one can seize a lead just by initial choice Player however can choose starting religion, which will apply to the kingdom, such that personal preference and strategy can still be based on a religion preference. Moreover if you are to have a list of playable kingdoms close to each other you can create "Blitz" games such that everyone will sooner handle people around rather then whole map. If you have same global map and a even distribution you can have long games with people getting into conflict with few close people rather than 5 on 5 on one side because everyone is Western Europe and some middle eastern meta economy-religion exploit too far away to even deal with. If you have an option for "game speed" you can crowd people together for "fast game" and distribute them further away for "long game" and you can really make an easy choices based on number of player in the current game, because placing 15 players evenly is clearly different from placing 2 players evenly. These extra rules for "competitive" are very easy to understand, more or less easy to implement. Can lead to unexpected started challenges and prevent slate repetitive gameplay from same place using same strategy all over again. It also removes issues with players contesting for the same starting kingdom and leaving the game if they don't get it or an enemy selected a clearly superior location. If you choose to go "competitive" you know what you get and I can argue it would be the most "fair" start for people who want to compete against skillful opponents. This needs to be easy to understand and setup, without using a custom game with million of options no one totally agrees on, or convincing random people "not to use this or what" before a game. What we should not do By no means I'm saying this should be the only mode or regular multiplayer should not allow any kingdom, religion / game strategy to be played. I'm just saying that in the situation when people want to compete it needs to be a way to set up a "fair" competition for people to compete rather than looking for a winning combo no matter how strange and lame it is. The less rules you can have the better and I think that size and starting locations are way to important then combined with asymmetric religion bonuses. If you want to people to compete with skill it would help to give them same starting condition and a random kingdom to win with. Because come on, Polska is so strong it will be dominating all the time. Cheers

I would just make a custom game option to select starting kingdom and any religion of choice.

Problem with super aggressive pagans is that they are most of the time are geographically too remote to have significant reach. If you have to sail from Sweden and back all the time you will probably be less "productive" with you pillaging than some Croatia (for instance) which has other provinces all around at a walking distance.

Hey Brad, you probably want to run a text replace for "KoH2:S" to the proper title of the game.

Well, there is a historical backing for Star Citizen - adding new things over and over again to never reach a release. To make an elephant unit you need separate icon graphics, 3d model, animation and sounds which are NOT EVEN CLOSE to anything else in the game. Elephants are not even close in movement to horses for instance. If there are unit abilities in tactical battles, you need add new abilities for elephants, because they are not an infantry, not a cavalry, not a artillery. Then you need to balance a unique unit, find what cost and upkeep it should be, when and how you can acquire this unit and what happens if you do acquire a lot of them... Black Sea as it looks right now cannot even spare an extra effort to keep up with dev blogs once per month. Can we kindly move elephants to DLC or something?

Well, they need content to talk about. They wanted to talk multiplayer last time. If stuff is breaking and falling apart and they are redoing and redesigning bits and pieces over and over again, it is hard for them to decide what version to present. Also, it is a lot of work for very small and declining audience. I personally would not even bother with small dev blogs. Most of the things are more or less clear, but it takes time and effort to make this content.

If I had any say in the dev process, I would cut tactical battles out of the game and forget about it. This is not total war, tactical battles are note core gameplay but just an optional eye candy content, which is very time and effort consuming to develop. Tactical battles do not work for multiplayer they say is so important for them In a single player most of the battles will be auto resolve anyway. I would just stop pretending the game has to have everything in it. Instead I would make way more deep and engaging auto resolve battles with more player control. No budget is endless. The more effort they throw on an optional side content the worse they will be financially no matter what sales happen to be. The game is already way way over the time and reasonable budget for a niche game it is going to be.

I expect the release to be summer - fall of 2022.

I'm not saying we need gunpowder. We should not and it is fine. But if they are adding fancy rare very very location specific things I'd rather have first cannons than an elephant. Mostly because I can see how a cannon is essentially an artillery like a good catapult or a trebuchet, but an elephant is what? Uber slow cavalry? Battering ram? It is not close to any other unit type.

Elephants as a weapon are not real for the given period. Gunpowder artillery: 1260 Battle of Ain Jalut, Europeans around 1330s. Which are appropriate for the region and timeframe of the game.

I would rather want to see gunpowder artillery than mythical creatures

Well, it is much deeper problem. It is not just amount of battles, it is about fine balance between too hard and too easy. If you just reduce number of battles, an outcome of one or two battles would be too great and will practically end a game one way or another. In a single player this would force players to reload a saved game, instead of trying to endure. But most of the time games tend to make it too easy for a player, so it is very hard not to win, but it is covered with making same repeating time consuming mechanics run over and over again, like TW battles which you can't really lose or even care to lose. Moreover, there is more interesting issue arising from this - how much a direct player control in a battle should be a winning factor compared to an auto resolve. Obviously you can make AI so good (even through just plain instant reaction and exact math AI can do in a blink of an eye) that player will be always too late to react in a direct control battle. But this will be too hard and no one would even play RTS battles. On the other hand, if AI is obviously too weak in RTS there will be a clear advantage to lead in a battle instead of autoresolve, which would force players to play more RTS battles just to make sure they are winning instead of waiting for auto resolve to lose. As it appears to me, KoH2 is aimed to be very casual game in terms of average player experience, such that you won't be loosing too much too fast too hard to an AI. But given the size of the map and general grand strategy setting, I'm afraid there will be a lot of battles you will not care about and a lot of routine combat you will set on autoresolve. In fact I'm quite sure that the whole game design for KoH2 runs with an assumption that all battles are autoresolved and only in a single player you can lead a battle in a direct control as an exception, mostly as an eye candy mini-subgame kind of mechanics.

No, you won't be building or upgrading units during a battle for sure.

You are looking at a game released in 2004

RTS battle gameplay has not been shown yet. But all indications are that it will be very close to the original KoH - your army has units, units have men. In a battle you command a unit, like in Total War, not a single soldiers separately.

Summer 2022

Late spring, summer 2022 at best. THQ Nordic would at least go into full marketing hype for at least 3-4 months before release like they did with Biomutant. It is not happening, so Christmas or Jan release is not an option from this stand point. They are not even talking about closed beta at the moment. If you really want to have a beta and get feed back and fix anything you need at least 2 months cycle. This is not even on the horizon. There is zero player pressure, twitch dev stream from 5 days ago shows as 544 views. Which is about zero on the reality scale for an official once a month "exclusive" stream. Meaning there is practically zero interest about the game if you consider how huge the global market is. So it does not really matter if they release soon or not, there is no audience craving for the game anyway. The current thinking of THQ N should be roughly like this - "we have practically no titles to release so we need to be careful with few we still have on the horizon. When we rush a release like Biomutant it is sure loss of money. If we keep polishing KoH2 it might be a solid product. There is no hype for the game from a playerbase so we cant just release it and patch it later based on large initial sales. So we go low marketing budget as possible and fund development for another year or two and wait for a good moment". Black Sea on the other hand will take all time and budget they can to make their game better, so no one really wants to have a fast release.

It appears that we are looking for first half next year for release. 1) There are mechanics for vassal-liege relations. We don't know much about it, but it is a form of diplomacy pacts. Mentioned in https://community.knightsofhonor.com/index/dev-diaries/devdiary-12-–-diplomacy-part-1-–-wars-and-alliances-r20/ 2) Can't rise a settlement completely. The ruins will stay on the map and will rebuild into a new settlement after some time. 3) We don't know about naval battles. Probably only auto resolve. As it is right now there are no "ships" in the game, only army which auto converts to ships to sail. So you never build specific ships or have war with ships vs ships instead of your normal land army 4) Don't know, probably not. 5) Probably not with AI allies. Obviously can do that in a multiplayer setting 6) Caravans are not physical, it is a selection of kingdoms you can trade with and they are traded outside you control. It does not matter how caravans travel to do the trade. https://community.knightsofhonor.com/index/dev-diaries/devdiary-11-merchants-and-trading-r19/ 7) I'm quite sure there won't be Iceland, Greenland Faroe Islands, Kirkwall, Azores and Canary in the game. The map is more expanded to North Africa and Caucasus Mountains regions