William Blake

"There’s nothing in the world more difficult than candor, and nothing easier than flattery." Fyodor Dostoyevsky If you expect a slight remaster of original KoH in 2021/2022 to be a good deal, you are very easy to please. For me personally that would be a failure because I want to see much better and much more successful game. Original KoH was a fresh interesting take, but it was not a hit. Making the same 20 years later with slightly more polish would likely to have same result. Do you see KoH2 to be top streamed game on twitch? No. Can you imagine people taking hours and hours making youtube videos about KoH2 opening tactics? No. Why? Because there is no variety of actions and there is no action/reaction in the game. There is no awe, there is no strong emotions. You won't see an amazing play you never thought possible and moves which explode with new possibilities. You tell me "this is a game about medieval kingdoms" and I imagine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gtbbIB776ks When I look at KoH2 autoresolve battles 2 blobs of peasants on some poor AI. This does not connect. You tell me "this is a game about economy" and I see "here you go, Bosnia, 3 provinces, fixed resources, fixed settlements, you can build an upgrade in 15 minutes". This does not connect. I can hardly imagine anyone replaying this over and over again because "oh my god, so many possibilities, I might have played better". Not gonna happen. You tell me "this is a game about grand scale diplomacy" and I see "oh here, a pop up, someone wants a peace pact with you, yes|no". There is nothing to play, there is nothing to replay, there is nothing to master. You tell me "this is game about huge medieval Europe and around with global trade" and I see "drop down, select which is the max gold from 10 same choices, trade done". You tell me "multiplayer is essential part of the game we build most mechanics with multiplayer in mind" and I see... well I see 3 people waiting for 30 minutes for another 2 to start a match because no one is playing it in a month. You tell me "well it is a casual game" and I see gazillion of sliders, numbers, indicators, some notification feed on the bottom showing messages non stop, event pop ups interrupting whatever a player was doing... it does not connect, honestly. There is notable history to many games and many franchises, it does not matter. Firefly just made Stronghold Warlords and it is pathetic game and it flopped. Because just following a list of features which could work 20 years ago do not make a good successful game today. What we see today in the KoH2 gameplay video is a heap of very contradictory appeals crammed together to appeal to no one. I can't see how this can be a competitive multiplayer game, I can't see how this can be a deep economy/trade game, I can't see how this can be a casual experience game EVEN on the level of Civilization games. And it makes me very upset because for my own personal reasons I want this particular developer to have a solid hit, a game new people would love for what it is, not for some memories of 20 years old past. Lets face it. This site is running for over a year now. 17 dev streams or whatever the number is. The potential audience is global. How many people we have? Around 5 writing on forums regularly and 300-ish watching a stream once a month or two? Is this appeal you expect? Is this excitement you wish to build up? If you want to tell a friend about KoH2 what you are going to say? "you click on a marshal and then on an enemy and then you select "all in" they start fighting animation on the small strip at the bottom and then you take you second marshal and click on the same battle so the fighting strip on the bottom will have more of your guys fighting air"? People come to this forums imagining all kind of amazing things, like debating if a cavalry should be able to dismount and fight on foot in a middle of the broken walls, and you show them autoresolve battle with an option to retreat. You make units with variable number of men per unit, but 60 peasants are still 1 food upkeep as 40 men swordsman unit, as we all know if you carry a sword you eat 50% more for sure. 65 types of produces goods. Sixty five! Why? What for? How you can possibly role play England or France or Germany or Italy with 3-4 provinces at best and have sixty five types of goods in the game. What for? For a game where a trade is a selection of exchange of sacks icons for gold from a drop down? I look at this and I forget all the good things - the art, the ui, the music, the setting, the map details. Because I see a shadow of a game which attracts no one and is played by no one, yet possibly has a bunch of good reviews and some nice screenshots.

Why would you want to do that? Serious question. If your army is strong and enemy is weak - just push in why wait and hide? If your army is weak and enemy is strong hiding is pointless, the enemy will push in to your city. If you hide and let them pass to go behind for their province they will just return and kill you. Because all you can potently do is to siege a city which takes a lot of time so they can come back, or you can pillage a settlement which is less time but zero value and they will turn back and come to kill you anyway.

Most likely it is an option at a start of a new game "historic province resources/random province resource", if they have some set scenarios for specific nations as a different play mode I would guess starting resources would be adjusted to the scenario.

With a heavy heart I have to say I’m quite disappointed with the gameplay video. To the point that I doubt I even will play KoH2 to be honest. I’ll try to explain why I think the game is not what I expected. While there are a lot of nice visuals and other neat things and I appreciate all the people involved in this quality effort, but I will comment only on the bad stuff which turns me off. 1) Economy It was said many times how in KoH2 there are a lot of resources, province advantages, economy tricks and so on. 65 types of produced goods. All that. Now what I actually saw: Settlements are fixed, province resources are just fixed. The moment you look at a province initially it is APPARENT what can and cannot happen and what to do with it. There are no options if one option is right and all the others are wrong. It appears that all the economy gameplay revolves around which province with which “resource/goods” you have. So there is no GAMEPLAY for me to try different things and MOREOVER to counter play any other player. No matter what happens around me on the map, I just have to maximize my given province products. Everyone makes “steel” and “barrels” and I will make “steel” and “barrels” if I have resources in a province. Zero thinking really. There is no balancing or work force / production. If I have villages they will make food, if I have other settlements – no food. There is no balance I can shift or areas I can dynamically adjust apart from going abroad and getting another province. But wait you might say, we said there are multiplier buildings in the capital to boost production. Yeah? So what? You have provinces which IN GENERAL have about the same amount of settlements of a same type. So if it is 3 of a type – I build multiplier building, if there is 1 I don’t. I get it, done, no gameplay anymore. More importantly – no more DYNAMIC gameplay. I look at a province – I decide right away what is the appropriate way to build it up for the rest of the game, done. Settlements are not going to shift, workforce won’t shift, resources are not going to change. 2) Trade is pathetic. Settlements auto generating “sacks” of trade goods and a drop down menu to select which exchange rate of sacks to gold I can have right now by selecting a kingdom to trade with. This is beyond boring. You could remove it from the game and replace the “sacks” income with a straight gold income and no one would notice. Why do you even bother to have trade like that? It is a level of mobile game mechanics. Yes you have also import/export of produced goods somewhere, but we know it is boolean “yes/no” per kingdom kind of thing, so I doubt a lot of people are excited about that kind of mechanics too. 3) War War is totally lame. This is the biggest problem. I don’t even want to mention that auto resolve preview with bunch of animated soldiers fighting air with a huge gap between armies looks laughable. Fine, work in progress I guess. But seriously, this is how you see military component to the game? It is exactly how it was 20 years ago with the original KoH. An AI army of 4470 strength moves towards and 2 player armies of 6090 and 3800 strength combined just to get in a battle, lose a bit of time and men and run away. And the player has to chase that across the map for another battle with roughly the same result. What gameplay do you see in that? If a player can click on an enemy army or not? Auto resolve battles have no options, no tactics, no orders before or during a battle except a retreat? Really? There is about zero military gameplay I terms of army composition and a player can’t even tell what it happening, it is just bunch of soldier on one side messing air and a bunch of other solders across a field doing the same. And then one of them runs and you chase it across the map yet again. Mobile games have more interesting and in depth combat than that. And you will say, but wait, we have RTS battles you can lead all the units manually! And I say it is irrelevant. In a single player you won’t play it manually after first couple of times because your kingdom is too big and the battles are too repetitive to manually chase same rebels 3 times across a province. And in a multiplayer it will not be available at all. You make units with Squad Size, Attack, Defense, Chance to Shock, Resilience, Stamina and Siege Strength attributes. Yet they are all upkeep of 1 food. What is the point of squad size if it takes 1 food to upkeep a full squad of 40/40 and a damaged squad of 1/40. What is the point of Attack and Defense attributes if your swords will count the same as more peasants at the end of the day. How do you expect a player to even KNOW not to mention PLAN for “Chance to Shock” and “Resilience” to play out in an auto resolving battle of a blob vs a blob? You yet again make a game which promises depth and variety and has none. With your system you don’t build an army to counter an enemy army, you just build a blob. You don’t have a strategic warfare you just click one army on another and you can see the strength numbers to tell right away which one will run or win. Just as I said in previous topic, all you do by attacking a castle or a settlement with an army is locking yourself in place to be hit with a stronger army. It is useless. All your mechanics right now mean that you, yet again, only need 2 marshal blob together to travel in a straight line and crush everything in its path. Any other military game play is pointless. Armies even march around with a same speed. All the promises about variety of units and resources and upgrades for military in fact will be the same as original. You blob with what you have, it does not matter. The units you build are way way way more dependent on what you can build and upgrade and really matter piratically nothing at the military gameplay. Yes over time you will have more and more elite units, but it is kinda irrelevant with combat like that. My Conclusion I wanted a game of a medieval kingdoms where I could spend a lot of time, struggling with my small kingdom in a middle of huge world. I wanted to balance on an edge of hunger and poverty, and I wanted exciting dramatic battles I would prepare and plan for a long time. Well you know medieval stuff. KoH2 as you show today is not that game. KoH2 is nicely animated game about nothing. It is an ocean wide and an inch deep. When I look at any aspect of the gameplay you have shown it is too shallow, too plain and too boring. But you have a lot of them happening at the same time animated nicely on the screen. The core gameplay is not there and I think this is precisely why you are adding more and more mechanics and small numbers, notifications, effects, and events to fill that void of the core gameplay with something. It is sad to me to see this result but more importantly it is sad to understand that you don’t see it that way and you are building some different game for someone else to enjoy. I don’t mean to get in an argument with you or make you feel bad about it. But I think it is important for me personally to relay me feelings and impressions because it might be valuable for you at the end. Thank you for your work.

I think you are getting too excited. I think the castles are just very basic mechanics of "have a castle in a province = some extra guards in the province capital". That's all. That would be very inline with all the other production bonuses all other types of settlements add up to the province capital.

I hope we can make it faster in the game than 20 years to build from a ground up ))

This looks very French, where is it?

Yes, it is absolutely useless as a tool of attrition. Rebels are only annoying because they will raze a lot of settlements over time. But an enemy army 99% of the time has no time to waste on settlements. If you moved into enemy province with an army you expect to conquer the province, so you want settlements intact. If you don't have enough force to do it, it is pointless and dangerous to lock your weak army into pillaging a settlement with enemy strong army near by. Since in KoH your main limiter is a number of marshals you can't have spare raiding forces around, because you don't have marshals to lead weak armies. I always thought settlement pillaging to be a AI tool to annoy a player and divert attention. As a human player tool it has never been a valid useful option.

Yes, that would be a completely different new extra system. Depends on how much player has to do with everything else. If I were making a game like that, I would track and manually manage swords and armor and bows probably, original stronghold style kinda ) But it is not a grand strategy game, so it does not fit the purpose. However I find boolean resources on a kingdom level to be very limited overall from a common sense perspective. Like for example say I'm playing France. I have a lot of wine produced in many places. Yet it is functionally the same as say England having a single province in Portugal or something? I'm looking at the screenshots and I see a panel which can fit at least 2 rows of 6 icons each. Which tells me that they expect to have close to that number per province. Now say there are very few goods in a game, say 15. But we have like 350+ provinces on the map. Which means that if each province has say at least 4 resources available MOST of the kingdoms will have MOST of the goods out of 15 very soon. And this would totally beat the purpose of goods as a unique local advantage. So I assume from that there are a lot of different types of goods to have a wider variety across 350+ provinces overall. But yes, I'm speculating A LOT )

1) So I look at the screenshot and see a province producing 11 resources, 3 of which are "horse heads" and I'm confused ) After some thinking and a bit of investigation and previous knowledge of the original KoH can suddenly understand that first row are province features and the second row are produced goods ) But this UI is very confusing. Either make features and goods to be different panels or make icons way more distinct between the resources and goods. Yes I understand that the icons are raw placeholders right now, but the layout is confusing. How many different goods in the game? Are we talking 50+? It would feel a bit confusing to have multiple subtypes of goods like "horse 1", "horse 2", "horse 3". Did you consider making fewer types but multiple tiers or quality levels per type? Like "basic horses", "quality horses", "most amazing horses"? Since it appears that KoH 2 is more casual grand strategy game by design it could be too much to track and remember for dozens of good which are which, used for what purpose and where they are produced or located. 2) This is a false premise. This will not happen like that. All our previous experience with KoH tells us that you don't really have a big choice for a conquest. You are very limited in your potential targets, there are tons of other restrictions from geography to diplomacy and military consideration. It is very unlikely if ever, that a player would look around for a required resource to conquer a random province just for that. You are much much more limited to a given few geographically accessible provinces to even think like that. 3) It appears that you are still going with a boolean goods for the kingdom. You either have Hemp or you don't. But if you do it is enough for everything. Is that so? This is a very limiting design in my mind. If you don't produce quantities of goods and you don't use quantities of goods then pricing of stuff in terms of specific goods is irrelevant. All you need is a single place to produce something and then you are all set. Same with the trade, if you have original kingdom trade of "you either trade a good type or not" it creates a very shallow gameplay. For instance if I have Hemp, I need no other provinces with Hemp ever. If I have 3 provinces with Hemp I don't really care because 2 of them are irrelevant and I can't gain 3x times of Hemp production and I cannot sell 3x times of Hemp. Building and upgrades which are using boolean goods are much more simplistic than N amount of good required to build, because you can't be short for a boolean goods, there is no need to produce some and buy some extra from abroad just to make required amount faster and so on. There is also zero possibility to pillage "some" volume of goods. If I don't own a province producing Hemp, there is no way for me to raid it to get some Hemp. Have you consider tracking volumes of goods produced, having a kingdom global stock of goods, trade with quantities? Could that be because you are having way too many types of goods to begin with? 4) I guess settlements can be raided by an enemy and rebels like original? If so, is there any difference between raiding a village vs a castle? If I raid a monastery, does it have impact on my fame and honor or morale if I'm same religion? 5) Is there any way to change a type of a settlement? Or create more settlements in a given province or they are preset at the game start?

Based on "Recent Events" it appears that "we" declared war on Papacy, exiled a priest who was against war on Papacy and then "liberated" Rome presumably from the previous Pope. After that with our Pope installed we suddenly started following the path of Christianity and all our clergy gets a boost of income selling new indulgencies. All this I think it amazingly historically accurate.

This is not a Total War like game. The focus is way more on a grand strategy rather than rts unit management. Moreover, in order to have a multiplayer on a grand map with a lot of people at once, you have to completely remove manual unit control because grand map can't wait for 2 people to direct manage a battle for half an hour. So, it appears that the army composition is way more important and there are few unit slots per army but a variable size of solders per unit slot. Which means you don't have to have a lot of separate units to make up a grand army of the same type of soldiers. No one really saw any gameplay of tactical or grand battles, but so it seems from the info released. It is very unfortunate that dev blogs are so vague on describing the army mechanics so far.

It would be very helpful for the conversation if you don't assume experience and age of people you don't know. Regardless, an argument is either valid or not valid based on logic and facts and not who and why made that argument. Any multiplayer competitive game is known to be very high on tension. If you don't think it is a fact, you might want to review last 30 years of gaming or watch some twitch for a change. If you don't think it is a fact that people cheat and exploit in video games especially in a multiplayer, you might want to google VAC and half a dozen other anticheat systems. It is very naive to ignore the size and complexity of this problem. You can't design game systems for "good people only" no matter how enjoyable your gameplay might be with friends.

This is a very very bad idea: If I play singleplayer I DON"T CARE what AI votes on some magic election based on very complex compound points system. I want to play until I can, even if I'm a single province against world emperor. Only I, as a player, will decide the moment when I consider a defeat and stop playing. If not I want to continue my struggle NO MATTER WHAT ai thinks or votes. Since the vote is only from the top 2, most of the time IN A HARD GAME I as the only human player will most likely not be the top 2 and I will be voted out in a middle of my VERY HARD game just by some score. And you know that and you made the button "continue playing" but it means that the whole vote is POINTLESS. You basically make any hard game a punch in a face because it will not be "a real victory, because we voted you out, but you pressed the button". If I play singleplayer and I don't know how to play or I want an easy experience, you can't expect me to understand a complex system of some points which are building up more and more for AI to win and for me to just lose on some "vote". A casual player cannot risk his experience with some sudden magic "vote" which is decided by AI based on some points a casual player does not understand or cant manage yet. And you think a game should just say "oh you know, that is a nice game you had here, too bad you are out of points and some AI is voted for an emperor" BUT you can "continue playing". All it says to a casual player - YOU LOST, game over. But that casual player through it was going really good. This type of things cannot happen out of the blue and make casual player feel completely incompetent. If we play multiplayer it is even worse. This is amazing can of worms for people to exploit and meta game some compound complex rating system as opposed to playing strategy military game we all hope to see. There is nothing worse than some magic score building up and no matter how close a military victory on a map is, you get voted out or your enemy is voted to be a victor. Everyone who is loosing the score game or even feels like loosing a score game will have major motivation to LEAVE the game in a middle which is the worse case scenario in a multiplayer for everyone involved. You are setting up your game for a huge bounty hunt for meta gaming prestige farming. Expect youtube videos of "10 ways to cheat prestige in KoH2", "play with a friend and dupe the KoH2 multiplayer for prestige farming" and so on. People will stop playing military medieval game of power and armies and start playing meta game of "how to boost prestige, win easy in 10 minutes". And it will happen, because you could not make a SIMPLE system, couldn't you, you made a COMPLEX and COMPOUND system, and I bet you with 2 people preparing to exploit it in a single match it will be exploited just because there are too many components to the system. Simple example: say catching a spy gives prestige, if you knew when to catch a spy and there is an action for it, it would be easy to catch a spy, player A and player B are playing the meta game and player B sending spies in to player A and player A catches them for prestige profit over and over again instead of playing "normal" game. Or if defeating rebels is a prestige boost I will run my province to rebel on purpose all the time just to farm rebel victories. If I know that building a cathedral is a boost, player A will build one, give province to player B, B deletes the cathederal, gives province back to A, A builds same cathederal second time get restige again. And so on. Or if you get prestige for a victory over an enemy marshal, player B will send marshals with no army to player A to win and farm prestige. The more complex your compound prestige system is, the more possibilities there will be for some exploit especially if you have 2+ people on the same game with a goal to exploit. In a multiplayer you can't have votes on who won. It is just pointless anger inducing bs which will ruin the game for people who are winning but can't get "all nice players to agree" and for everyone who are loosing but don't agree to lose yet some majority of "lame random people" just voted you out. It cannot work in a competitive game, no one votes for a nice honest winner in a competitive match, humans don't work like that. PS And if you are expecting your multiplayer NOT to be competitive, well, then everyone should get a trophy and you can't vote on who is the most special kid on this short bus.

Cost is always a factor in everything. Double rations/triple rations, cost of horses, cost of reinforcements etc.

Star Citizen much?

I would just release without a multiplayer, let people enjoy main game and in a month or two make a multiplayer expansion or DLC or whatever. In 2020 there is no reason to make everything at once as if you had to burn dvds to distribute.

Any hope for asymmetric option? 1-2 players start with big empires, all the others start with small ones? Or several teams with 1 big and few small countries each? Why do perfect balance, do obviously imperfect balance right away )

If the goal of the design to be indirect, passive and simple. then you can't have any complex system. Having 5 social classes is already way too much for "simplicity", you could do the same with 3 tbh. But the real problem is that complex multivariable bonuses can't possibly be simple and effective at the same time. Its already quite unmanageable in my books when effects come after the fact and player didn't know before an action who will be upset or happy with what. Now if all this will have effect on your army by multiple combined variables it can't be indirect and simple. Player will lose track and misunderstand cause and effect and all that. I'd rather have no social effect mechanics at all than an arcane confusing complex relationship between a bunch of variables which are annoying at best. Having said that, I think that there is a huge potential of any system which would in fact make use of a social structure and CONFLICTS inside feudal society. In my mind should be not about my kingdom actions vs other kingdoms like the current dev blog says. But in fact it should be internal to my state. There is already too much about external relationships with others. I'd rather see a mechanism about struggles and issues inside my kingdoms in my society, which give little damn to the foreign lands but has an issue of this local merchant charging way too much for these goods and my peasants have long standing issue with the landlords. Practically internal economy/building kinda thing.

I hope you do understand that I'm arguing not against whatever you want to do, but quite the opposite, to give you an opportunity to address various scenarios in more detail and think of questions people who never saw the game might have )

Yeah, right. Like you didn't want to win a war or trade with a rich neighbor to begin with.

Ok slow and indirect. So lets say I play without ANY consideration for crown authority effects. If what you saying is true, then my direct actions will outweigh all these slow and indirect effects because direct actions have a clear cost vs value and the crown authority is too slow and too little to change that. You say this naturally balances itself. So why would a player even care about it at all? If I want a war and it is clear to me what it is more value than a cost, how this slow and indirect -2 to peasants will even matter to me? In a strategy game everything is either a value or a cost. If you can't calculate value vs cost and moreover you can't really affect the outcome, then any minor things like described crown authority is a decorative trinket. With the same effect you can make just random events with +/- authority happening on itself without any input from a player. If the choice matters for me it has to matter and I should be able to make that choice. If the choice does not matter or effects are negligible than I don't even account for that variable in my choices. PS Says the man who made tactical battles into original KoH with units morale affected by a dozen parameters like position and proximity of other units on a field ))))

Well, the system gets worse and worse as you go deeper into details ) 1) Social classes - very nice. 5 divisions well maybe. "Army" - total bs. If you really want to go that route - each unit type should have "affected by social class" variable. Because Teuton knights are nobility and archers are probably town craters and militia are probably peasants and city guard are probably clergy (stretching it to make an example). So I propose removing "Army" replacing it with "craftsmen" to make it more of a social strata. Also assign each unit type to a specific social class and apply class bonuses from crown authority to each unit separately. 2) Overall dynamics: Well you just described all the things which change "Crown authority" and now it has "little and slow effect". Why would you even bother with a choice if the effect is slow and remote but the actual choice is immediate. Yes I agree that the original KoH "spend gold get kingdom power" was most lame mechanics, but if anything has an effect and gives a choice of actions it has to be a significant noticeable result for a player. A long very minor changes to some crown authority parameter will make it just nuisance since you either do not notice an effect at all or you are too late to correct and issue and it will take ages no matter what to reverse mistakes a player did long time ago. Not a good thing at all. 3) Instead I propose to change alter the basic idea. Introduce more life into the whole thing - social conflict. All the social classes should have opposing views like they do in real life. If you do something - peasants are happy, nobility is not, merchants have interest which are against nobility and so on. Instead of slowly buffing everything over and over to the max, it should be a dynamic balance of one social class going up and the others being more upset, so the actual game would be about BALANCING then rather then maxing out all the positive effects. In fact would argue that you should never be able to max out authority of all classes at all, since the perfect society like this was never known ever. Add social events which require a direct choice and an immediate action: Peasants are upset about price of cloth, want you to punish merchants, Yes/NO ( +1 peasants, + gold, - merchants OR -2 peasants - 1 craters + 2 merchants) Town craters are starving ( +2 crafters for N amount of food) Clergy wants to eradicate heretics, allow to burn witches (clergy +2 cost of faith, books, -3 to all other classes) something like that. You can't have everyone happy at the same time, you either England with habeas corpus or you are France with nobility taking over, as a ruler you should either balance all the classes or just commit and take advantage of one class with the penalties of all the others. Only this will create different gameplay, slowly maxing out all the bonuses will not. In every screen you show with anything to do with a social class standing it should never be a + or - for one. It should always be "someone is going to be happy, someone will be very upset the rest won't be affected". This should be in every meaningful choice you present to a player if you want to make a balancing act. Choice is about tradeoffs and gameplay is about active choices which change the situation in a visible way. Slow and indirect buffs to everything are not worth the trouble, player won't care about it, figure out the best generic way for maximum buffs and will never ever think about it again. So you will just waste a mechanic.