William Blake

This is wrong, I understand that you want to lock policy and buffs to the governed province (or shall we say 'it is easier to implement a lock'), but this is wrong. Yes, you should lock the province governor slot to the imprisoned knight, but his governing skills and bonuses should not longer apply. If his governance is still 100% effective in prison, there is no reason to retrieve his back. It should be a penalty to the province his is assigned to govern and lock on reassigning the governor until you retrieve him from prison or he dies. Potential multiplayer exploit right there. We play together, we start capture and release knights from each other, buffing our nobility standing out of thin air over and over again for no cost. You can't have zero cost benefit to both kingdoms. If you can't think of a good way to balance the standing gain at least disable bonuses if both involved kingdoms are human players. You should not lose your crown authority for executing an enemy. Especially if they are of a different faith. You should be able to "trade" a prisoner for foreign gain (+relations if released) or for domestic gain (+crown authority if executed). At least there should be no penalty on executing kings of a different religion. Don't make this into rainbows and ponies theme park, these are middle ages, no one cares about humanity much.

It is clear to me, that the described system is very one sided. It makes significantly easier to wage war and conquer kingdoms and provinces of the same religion while having a significant drawbacks for captured territory of another religions. In my mind, it should be a significant advantage to wage direct war on another religion, not the other way around. While a preferable way of dealing with same religion should be diplomacy and espionage. In the described system of religion it makes zero reason to deal with a single foreign religion province if you have same religion lands available. Yes you can, but this is unreasonably costly and prone to negative effects, for a little to no extra gain. This is very backwards on itself and moreover and very questionable for overall balance due to the fact that some kingdoms will have a homogeneous surroundings while others will have mix of religions around them. It appears that a choice of religion, for the large part is pretty much defined by the initial starting conditions, such that it is more or less irrelevant on a player choices as the choices for a given geo location/kingdom are not even remotely equal. For historical reasons we cannot possibly change that. So I think there needs to be a better way of playing around "religion" for any fixed starting location as people will tend to play over an over again a selected few kingdoms they like. I would advise you to think through a possibility of another "kingdom power"-like parameter or scale. A religious one. So you can be on a spectrum of between "zealot" or pretty lets say "agnostic". If you are going to zealot end you will get more bonuses of the religion but have a significant hit on multicultural/ethnic issues. It needs to be a way to replay same geo/nation location with a different approaches or balance to religion. I think religion with a given scope of all of global map, but a very definite player presences in a few nations needs to be more flexible and more open for choices. Zealots would have to attend to things like crusades more while having less ability to co-govern mixed population. Agnostic powers would have a lot of flexibility to pacify but gain little from their main religion, yet maybe risk heresy or something from the other more hardline kingdoms or the same religion.

For the grace, for the might of our Lord For the home of the Holy For the Faith, for the way of the sword Gave their lives so boldly

"Moscow" is the official spelling used by Russia, Moscow Mayor official website says "Moscow" everywhere: https://www.mos.ru/en/ Official website of Kyiv city council, it takes a minute to find out: https://kmr.gov.ua/en It says Kyiv everywhere, this is official spelling of their name. This is their airport, it takes a minute to google Ukrainians would like to spell the the name of capital of Ukraine as Kyiv. What the hell is your problem, bud?

It would be much better for everyone if you don't bring up modern conflict into a historical game. But in case you insist I'd like to remind you that Kyiv is Ukraine, Ukraine is an independent nation. Ukrainian is an independent language. If they want to spell the city name as Kyiv, it is up to them. Misspelling their name and denying their existence because you challenge their sovereignty and independence is an hostile act which has nothing to do with the game.

If mods are allowed in multiplayer it would be a huge problem. Imagine host player with a mod which changes stats and all other people without. So far we heard nothing about any other maps, but full Europe. The blog never mentioned a map selection of variable map sizes to be an option.

1) So the game takes one player as a host and the others are clients. No dedicated servers to host games? If a player is a host, what prevents host cheating with the game state? 2) 6 human players on a full map? So absolute majority of the kingdoms are AI. In fact it is potentially very hard to even get to another player for a long time depending on starting locations. Or do you have smaller size maps for multiplayer? 3) Way too many options and game modes, way to many. People most of the time will setup a game in way most other people won't like, this option that option. It would be hard to search for a game setup you like. For new players it will be hard to understand what rules and goals are in a particular game because few games you might have played before are too different. Most likely most of these modes and options are not going to be used. 4) It says "saving multiplayer games", are you implying that a multiplayer game with given players can be stopped, saved and continued later at some other time? If so, how do you even see this happening in real life where most of the people will never be able to go to a saved game at the same time? Can you continue a saved game if 1 out of 6 players are not present? How about 3 out of 6 missing? If I was in the first game, it was saved, and then loaded and continued to another hour can I join to this game again in a middle? Who controls a saved game? I guess Host player? What if host is no longer present, 5 of other players cannot continue the game we have saved anymore? 5) I find it very questionable to offer a multiplayer game called "knights of honor" with so little direct war conflict between human players. Most of the stuff described in this blog sounds like "merchants of honor" with gold, or resources or economy winning conditions. Even "most provinces" is obviously way more pve competition rather than a pvp conflict considering amount of AI kingdoms.

Deus Vult

Yes, it should be Kyiv

No, we don't know. Expect next year.

Half of Europe monarch were practically family. Envoys and other nobility were visiting courts of other nations all the time, you would have dozens and dozens of people seeing a monarch from child years growing up. From teen years you would have multiple countries trying to arrange marriage with you. If anyone in a kingdom would have a portrait that would be the monarch and his family, especially his sons. If you were a monarch you would be present at gazillion ceremonies for public to see, even if you are not heir to the throne, but some 5th daughter people would see you as a part of the royal court for decades. Well, from real history: Peter the Great of Russia, who went incognito as a "common handy man" to Netherlands to learn shipbuilding and carpentry. He was just one in a group of many Russians working at the same place, wore same common clothes, fake name, lived with his peers and no one dared to shows who he is. Yet, EVERYONE knew. not only in Netherlands, but England and France and Germany.

No, they said that you can make your own king into a spy and send your own king to do spy actions in another country. Minute 54 of the stream, in fact Alex said "king is the best spy with extra bonuses".

With the reference to the Dev Stream: 1) King as a spy is a stupid mechanic. There is no plastic surgery, how can you infiltrate another kingdom as a king, come on. At least make a penalty on kingdom power if you make your king into a spy, "the rumors are spreading that the king left us and nowhere to be found, the kingdom power has decreased". 2) You probably want to have dynamic balancing of cost of spy actions based on distance to a target kingdom. It appears to me that in a multiplayer setting it would be very easy to suddenly focus spy power on a single target kingdom anywhere on a map. Such focus fire cannot happen with military power since armies have to walk the distance, but spies, as I understand it, ignore physical distances. 3) In context of multiplayer it needs to be some mechanics to aid an ally with counter spying. If you can have enemy team doing spy actions on you all at once, there should be a way for your allies to help you out to balance that. Or your own counter spying should be more and more effective if there are multiple nations spying on you at the same time. 4) If you disable or turn down spy actions settings for a multiplayer game remove kingdom advantages and skills connected to spy actions, because people will not pay attention and invest into spy related stuff to find out that actions they were planning to do are not available. Or at least make a notification/confirmation so people won't select it without thinking. 5) In a contest of multiplayer what will prevent a lot of people from all other the map bribing essentially everyone in your royal court? In a context of single player with human being an enemy for half of the map, what stops AI from doing spy actions to the player to dust non stop? I can envision a player being at war with more AI kingdom at once than you have slots in your royal court. 6) There is a bunch of spy actions which are revolving around diplomatic relations between kingdoms. In context of multiplayer will a human relations to a human override the action of the spy action ( spy action 'war is declared' - human 'not it is not') or the spy action actually would work over the head of the human player?

You are insane. I don't even want to ask "how is this possible in medieval setting", magic radar, fine. But how can you kill all aspect of stealth in a multiplayer with instant effect of just hiring a spy? Why don't you make all the map all the unit visible all the time? It is essentially the same. Human opponent -> hire spy -> instant see all. You basically creating same end game as original KoH - gold solves everything. I'm not sure how you don't see it, but this is quite obvious. What you consider "expensive" in early mid game, is total peanuts end game, and you will just spy through all the enemies at the end. So you basically admit right away that you've built a cheat system for a player against AI, and most likely people will disable this part of the game all together in a multiplayer. Ok, at least we are on the same page.

Well, true, I'm not a target audience for KoH, this is why you have "practically worthless sieges". What was your question again?

Potentially, you could make a huge difference with adjusting mechanics of food/supply/logistics. But it probably won't happen because it would look as too complex for a target audience.

is a medieval dating simulator from hell. No game should ever go that way.

Reason and experience.

August, with release November / December

Well that could be a problem. If you want a lot of people playing a long game the chances that people would leave in a middle are very high. It would be very beneficial to allow other people to join an existing game in a middle so you could balance people leaving with new players. Although I have to admit I don't really know a good solution to that problem. Just a thought.

Would you be ok with mostly AI kingdoms on a map, but an ability for a human player to join a running game and take over an existing AI kingdom to play for, or human players leave in a middle of a game and their kingdoms going under AI control?

Well, I do care about multiplayer, a lot But I don't think it should be the same game I don't think there is a good way to make KoH2 as I see it to have ANY decent multiplayer with shared mechanics I'm trying to validate my feeling that most of the people here or anyone who is looking for original KoH do not care about multiplayer Because of that I'm trying to build up a case to drop multiplayer concerns and make good single player KoH2 first At best some later time you can make almost another separate game with same assets to make multiplayer, maybe But in order to make a solid multiplayer in 2021 you need to build a game which can compete with fully multiplayer titles and anything else is just a waste of time Something like that, if it make sense.

Would you drop multiplayer all together if it made single player release date one week sooner?

As we know, the game is supposed to have a multiplayer component. Steam page says "Online PVP". We also had dev statements saying roughly "multiplayer is a significant part of the game and many game mechanics are designed with that in mind". We also know that multiplayer is going to grand strategy and not tactical battles as in original KoH. But I want to talk about your expectations about it: Do you care about multiplayer at all? How long do you think a multiplayer game should be? 15 minutes, 30, an hour, several hours? How many people players do you think a game should have to be interesting for you? 1 on 1, 2 on 2, many vs many? Do you think it should be open (all players against all) or predefined allies/fixed teams? In your mind, a player vs player game is all about military victory? Economy domination? Roleplaying? A win by a combined score (World Emperor vote)? Do you think all players should start at the same starting condition or you are ok with different players starting for different kingdoms with different starting resources? Would you rather play on full Europe map or you would want a smaller more balanced/smaller map? Do you want AI playing or just player kingdoms? Do you think you will keep playing a game you cannot win anymore? What would make you leave a game in a middle? Do you think a player needs a global progression/achievements to have something to go from one game to another or multiplayer games should have no connection to previous games a player had? The reason all these questions matter in my mind is because it could have most significant impact on both game design and player experience, yet I doubt that anyone ever had a conversation about that at all. Given we had most unexpected things to come up about most obvious things before, I'm really curious what you guys think about all that.

It appears that Capital mechanics is done through a buildings probably unique, one pre kingdom. Currently we are not aware what these buildings do.