William Blake

"Fan tabletop simulation of a PC game Knights of Honor 2 is going to be released before the original" News at 11. Vesso, give the guy access to alpha, you he is going nuts waiting. You can convert all this energy into something for you own good.

In the original it was not an issue of defense being too weak. It was 90% the issue of fast unit reinforcement. Once you had a good quality army you could take any city without loosing quality units. then you would just click to instantly resupply units to full health and if you had a decent kingdom you would have gold to make it all the time. This meant that you could make up a strong army with very strong unique units and then roll through the map without stopping. You didn't have to repair broken economy of captured provinces or build up to a top level. You would just move capture reinforce move to the next province with the same army an loose nothing, as long as your kingdom generates global gold to heal units at the city you are currently in.

I think full multiplayer game will be around a hour or two. Most likely in MP mechanics would be simplified and starting/victory conditions would be much more limited compared to the single player experience. But as of now, we don't know anything for certain, it is just my guess on what is reasonable possible.

That should be scenario or campaign mode - limited map with a deeper focus on a specific period and place.

Costs and uncertain projected revenue are the main obstacle to be honest. Grand strategy is a niche genre. Multiplayer grand strategy is even more niche, non proven, no previous success to copy or even argue about. You practically have a failed proposition from the start, commercially I mean. Probably it will stay this way until few very indy people waste 5-8 years to build a game with a new mechanics which happen to be a prove or at least a good direction to go. This indy game will totally fail, but people in the industry might see the diamond in the rough and try to make it into something mainstream. But why bother, you can just make same stuff over and over again, lame and broken, but spend the budget on hype and PR. Look at Cyberpunk 2077 )

Many people tried to solve this since the dawn of PC gaming. Mostly failed or at least nothing really caught on. The best approach early on in general I know from that time was "play by email" turn based simplistic games. because it could make a game into days and days instead of continuous session as we play now. Yet if all players are acting fast on their moves it can be almost real time game. And a grand strategy kinda requires a lot of time to progress the game state to see differences in player choices and strategies. But as a real experience it is totally junk now. The other known approach is some permanent game which runs on turns or ticks regardless of players who come and leave over and over again playing as they see fit. But most of these games are pure cancer since you have to baby sit your kingdom for 24/7 or you have a huge disadvantage. Yet you have very little to do any any given moment of game time. So this is sure dead end too. The bigger problem with grand strategy is not only the time required to progress the game state, but also requirement to have a lot of people doing that at the same time. 1 vs 1 game on a grand map is probably very lame and repetitive experience if you think about it. You need few people to mess up with each other in a same game to make it into a grand strategy experience. So the pace of the game have to be both fast enough to fit the overall game into some manageable time frame yet make sure that a player can see and react on many other players doing things at the same time. And most of this players better not leave in a middle of a game or they waste effort of people they played against. There are also bunch of pure technical issues. Do you have a host player or a game server? What happens if host leaves or losses connection on say 10 other player playing? What happens once people start cheating. Can you afford servers? Can you afford development of a game server to begin with. And so on. So in general I would say great grand strategy multiplayer game design is several magnitudes harder to make. RTS or single player games are proven to work mechanics. Multiplayer grand strategy... not so much.

In Veso I trust ) I have no doubt that Black Sea can make it happen, but it is a question on how much effort will be spent on a multiplayer. Original KoH multiplayer was quite unbalanced to my knowledge ))) But only because it was a nice bonus to the main game and a lot of things were corrected after the release with minimal effort. PS In fact, if I was running things at Black Sea, I would release single player game without any multiplayer, let it settle down for a month or two and patch the main experience. Only then I would release good rich multiplayer experience as a DLC, paid or not. If I was to make really really good multiplayer it would be in fact a second separate game with assets from the main game, but I would work on it and market and present it as a different experience from a main game. And to make a value proposition to THQ I would say that after the initial sales of the main game, it would be very nice to have a significantly complex and different multiplayer game to make it into competitive repeating long lasting experience expanding the franchise with reused but still high quality fresh assets from the main game. If it is good enough it would open up a completely new potential revenue streams like customizations and all that modern jazz they like to monetize on. Then we would get drunk and relaxed and I would switch the cards saying "lets release multiplayer only as a free to play, slightly monetize it as f2p, but mainly drive different people to the main game purchase". Well drinking and forum post can carry you a long way from the original idea.

Biggest problem is in fact player perception. Everyone who goes to play cs:go understands what the game is and what to expect, no surprises. Most people who play grand strategy games as a single have their own pace, logic, attention to detail and so on. It is quite a jump from long long solo game with save/loads/pause/fast forward to something which looks like the same visually but in fact is real time competitive multiplayer. And in terms of game design you practically have to build another game to fit this gameplay.

It is very tricky to create a dynamic challenging multiplayer experience for a grand strategy game. We will see how it plays out, but I for one would be very cautious to curb my expectations.

It appears from the description and screenshots that a player will be quite limited in friends and threats. This is fine at the start of a game or for a limited predefined campaigns. But overall in a grand game we would have way more independent countries to deal with. Does it mean that most of the time most of the countries on the grand map will be irrelevant to each other in terms of diplomacy mechanics?

Once you see any gameplay videos or a beta availability add at least 6 months.

We know that in the game you will be able to either lead your own troops in a battle and play an instance of combat with your direct control. Or you can do a battle on auto resolve and never leave the global map view. It is know from the original that no matter how eager you are to play a direct control battles, over time there will be a lot of battles you don't care about and auto resolve these. We also know that a multiplayer mode in KOH2 is a global grand strategy mode and auto resolve battles are the only option. In this light it appears that a good mechanics of auto resolve battles is essential for both single and multiplayer game modes. I would argue that if an auto resolve battle has no control whatsoever and depends only on the initial size of the engaging armies, it becomes very stale and very boring very quickly. If there is a different possible outcome of a same battle under direct control of a player it should be a similar range of outcomes possible in auto resolve battles. What makes a difference in manual controlled battle? Well, you can be very aggressive or very passive. You can fight to a last man or you can retreat. Lets say you could control that in an auto resolve battle with 2 settings - "tactics" (how do you engage) and "commitment" (how much do you prepare to lose). Let's say for now we have the following minimal set: Tactics Rapid Assault (bonus to attack, increased losses, bonus kills on retreating enemy) Steady advance (default) Stand ground (bonus to defense, decreased attack, no kills on retreating enemy) Commitment: Skirmish (retreat once 25% of army is lost) Decisive battle (retreat when 50% of army is lost) No Retreat (do no retreat) Now by settings these differently for the same initial armies you can have victory to one or another side (Steady advance + Skirmish vs Stand ground + No Retreat) and different amount of losses. It also allows additional gameplay each time you need to decide what to do for auto resolve battle based on what you expect to happen. Even just controlling the moment your army should retreat gives a significant amount of new options rather than committing all the army to be slaughtered all the time for auto resolve battle which you can't control. By extending options for tactics you can also potentially expand greatly on play/counter play variants, time battle lasts and so on. But fundamentally my argument stays the same - each auto resolve battle should have an input from a player which would have effect similar to potential effect a player would have in a manual control battle. A right combination of choices should give a player better results of auto resolve, the wrong combination of choices should give significant disadvantage to the same auto resolve results. Cheers

"Rightful owner" is only an opinion of 2 kingdoms regarding a province, original claim vs current owner accepting the claim. To make an example from a real world - German and USSR agree to take and divide Poland, Germany claims some parts of Poland, USSR claims other parts of Poland, they agree on how they split the land, war goes on. Poland is defeated, all the land is taken either by Germany or USSR, then they accept each other claims they agreed on and swap parts they took during a war beyond the agreement. Between them everything is "right and legal", yet France and England and everyone else do not accept all this and still support that all of the Poland should be back to what it was.

I'm glad you asked ) But it will take a bit of explaining case by case Case 1: money This is pretty easy, you commit money with your offer if AI accepts. Then at the end of the agreed time you check if the goals are complete by AI or not and a player gets a refund. Plain and simple Case 2: trade If you bargain on trade routes or anything like that - it applies at acceptance and gets revoked at the end of the specified time if the goals are not archived. Plain and simple. Case 3: land Now the case of land ownership it gets interesting, always been. In fact it goes beyond just alliances so the system I would do have more complexity but it is quite neat. You add new mechanics - Land Claims. Each kingdom has "an opinion" on who is "rightful owner" of any province. In terms of data structure - each kingdom needs a new map[ProvinceID] = RightfulOwnerID which will hold the opinion of which land should belong to which kingdom. If at any moment any CURRENT owner of any province updates his "opinion" on who is the "rightful owner" of a province and it matches the opinion of that rightful owner the province changes hands "by law". Or in other words "kingdom A sets a claim on province P1, kingdom B is an owner of the P1, once B accepts the claim that A is the rightful owner P1 the province ownership is switched to B". In context of an alliance or any feudal ladder of "lord/vassal" the claims should be checked for all the alliance members and the ladder. Basically for all the allied parties, if no one has a counter claim on the province, the owner gives it to the "rightful owner". Why this system is beautiful: You can have claims as a currency and make a whole lot diplomacy just around "do this and we will accept your claim on that land". Which you can do on lands NONE of you own at the moment It totally solves the problem of alliances when people or AI take wrong provinces at a wrong time and piss everyone else off, if you see the claims you know who wants what It allows war tensions without a war - "kingdom A is now claiming one of our provinces Sire, its a bit troubling" It allows mechanics of hidden tension "yes I can take Normandy from France right now, but England has a claim on it, and if I take it England will push me to accept their claim and turn it over" It is very easy to implement from data structure and logic points, you need a map of int to int by number of kingdoms which is peanuts From UI perspective you need a field on a province view which will give you a list of all kingdoms claiming the province and on a global map you need a switch to view all the provinces claimed currently by a given kingdom So going back to original question "how would a player promise something for an AI alliance" it would be "I accept your claim on Normandy the moment you agree with our alliance goals, I will revoke my acceptance of your claim if the alliance goals are not completed at the end of the term". After that if I take Normandy it will go to the AI because I accepted AI claim on it. If AI takes Normandy it will be rightful owner I have no objection. Also IF ANY OTHER AI from our alliance takes Normandy it will go to the AI which had a claim. Maybe you would only need an expiration time on each claim so you could not "accept/decline" back and forth someone's claim on a land which is not captured yet. Probably you need some kind of limit of open claims per kingdom so you won't just claim whole map all the time, but a few provinces max.

Player will abuse AI taking whatever land just under the nose of the allied AI. And allied AI will never be too smart or too aware to stand up to the abuse. Also AI will time to time take land a player wanted and planned to conquer, which will make a player to be angry against "this stupid allied AI ruining my plans". Because AI is an ally player won't be able to get it back by force. All this will angry the player, disturb and mix up war plans and make alliances a nuisance just like they were in original game. Alliance should have FIXED goals and FIXED rewards before a player or an AI commits to it. "Join the war and you will get Normandy if WE win". No one in the history of men joined an alliance and started a war without an agreement on who gets what at the end of it. It should be most obvious for both player and AI if the goals are met or failed and what rewards should be distributed at what moment. The abstract alliance mechanics are not only lame as a player inability to attack an AI just because a friendly flag is set and AI can't understand a difference between an honest effort and an exploit of alliance rules by a player, but also are very fuzzy as you have no idea on who should do what what and when. As a player nothing stops me from joining an alliance and do nothing at all, if you were playing with other humans they would see it through, AI will not. You are just enforcing the gap between a player and AI by making a system which is easy for a player to cheat and hard for AI to even notice the cheating.

This. All possible effort should be made to make AI to be an opponent rather than a theme park mannequin you are supposed to kick. The more complex and punishing any support system like diplomacy is in a game, the more potential it has to be abused by a player against an AI. I'm very skeptical about complexity of "defensive pacts, invasion plans, royal marriages, vassal-liege relations and other agreements" as well as "cunning diplomatic options". It is likely to be meaningless junk or much worse - easy exploits an AI can't manage but a human player can. For a competitive single player game any system should be first and foremost an easy to compute and act upon for a game AI. I understand that KOH2 is more of an "experience" rather than a fair chess match, but I would urge you to keep yourself in check and stop making complex mechanics an AI can't perfectly navigate. For instance, take an issue with alliance/betrayal. Player has ZERO incentive in keeping any promise while AI has to keep an appearance of faith. If AI always not faithful it is not a usable system for a player to even touch. So let me describe a system I would rather want to see. Any alliance or war agreement should have fixed action you should do or fixed actions you expect AI to commit to: Raid N enemy villages by a certain time, take N provinces from an enemy by a certain time and so on. Fixed calculable actions you have to do or AI should do If you don't keep to the fixed commitment there is a cost If AI does not keep up - there is a cost of an AI Probably you should have moderate and extreme commitments you can choose from depending on how you feel about current situation You have to clearly understand what YOU have to do and what AI have to do and what are you agreeing on, what the cost is, when the deadline is. Your diplomacy play should be about making costs higher or lower or committing to less or more action as you see fit. This is the only way you can make it work. If you are just "in an alliance" and you have zero concrete goals, AI has zero concrete goals, AI can cheat you and you can cheat on AI. "We are now at war" is totally useless for a human, it is completely pointless for a AI. Concrete, fixed commitments, time to complete, FIXED CONCRETE actions you have to make or AI commits to make by a certain date. What is the reward to follow through, what is the cost of betray. CONCRETE, numbers, list of actions. As a human I can't really plan a war with AI alliance "if they will just be in war", I want to plan and COMMITMENT of "we will take Paris in 5 years, you are committing to take a province of France in 3 years". As AI it is not computable if a human player is in a real war or just faking it unless there are easy to compute goals vs results. Can't have a lose terms, a lose expectations of who will do what at what cost and how it will change your plans. I've listened to your dev stream. You only real change from KOH1 is a single leader kingdom of an alliance, but its all based on logic what PEOPLE would do as part of an alliance IF they were in real life situation. But in the game there is only a single human player who is aware that everyone else is a dump exploitable AI and AI in it's own turns can't possibly judge what a player is doing or what the player intentions are. It won't work like you trying to describe on the stream. You might imagine all that, but it won't work like that. Fixed tasks. time to complete, potential rewards, costs for failure. Do you enter the alliance, yes/no.

Hey, don't get me wrong. But it appears to me that all these DevStreams are just lame. If you have nothing to show, and you keep mentioning things which "we won't talk about now", it looks and feels as a very weak attempt to make something out of nothing. What is the goal of all this effort? When you try to explain some system, which is described by mostly anecdotes and bits of "we also have a feature" without any visuals or real explanation of purpose and trade offs, it feels very irrelevant and remote. You keep showing practically same visuals over and over again for ages and you have long talks about second hand impressions of mostly unfinished game. And the talks are getting less and less interesting. Maybe I'm wrong, but would imagine that you peeked interested by the 3rd stream and now you are just forced to stick with a schedule from some marketing department. I, for one, completely lost interest and practically force myself to watch it to listen again and again how Brad likes to play it and "this/that is not final". So, I hope I'm very wrong on this and everyone else is having tons of fun and learn amazing deal about the game from the dev streams, but I feel very disappointed with the direction it is all going. Have to say it in a hope it gets better, no hard feelings.

Give him access to alpha build. The least you can do to appreciate the effort.

Original game had a well known Mercenary units mechanics which I would like to expand and enhance in the new game. Main issues of original design were: Mercenary camps are few and at a random times, making this mechanics unreliable To balance out advantages of ready to go high level units, mercenary units were priced very high, making them too expensive at a start of a game when a player has little to no free money and pointless at the end of a game when a player has extensive military infrastructure to build better units for cheaper. Mercenary unit had no real difference from normal units such that once acquired they become just a plain regular unit in usage and function. I think there is a lot of opportunity to make mercenary gameplay deeper and more comprehensive. Design Goals: Mercenaries should be more integral to gameplay process at all stages from early to mid to end game Mercenary units should be somewhat different in usage from normal player units and create different dynamic and usage patterns Make sure that mercenaries do not replace regular player built units and do not negate a need for proper military infrastructure to be built. While still being relevant even if player has a developed economy and military power. Proposed changes: I’ll describe the list of changes all at once followed by explanation on how they all should work together: Increase amount of mercenary camps on a map making them common and mostly available at any time. Decrease initial price per unit greatly making mercenary units cheaper at start with more expensive upkeep over time compared to regular units. Fix veterancy level on mercenary unit such that they don’t improve over time, but initial veterancy should be higher than regularly built player units. Making them stronger than player built units at the start but weaker compared to max out common units. Add a spy action to bribe mercenaries in an army: limited success - all mercenary units get moral penalty, full success – mercenaries leaving the army. This should affect both player and npc armies. For all units add following properties: Unit.IsMercenary, Unit.NationalityID, Unit.ReligionID. Use these properties to implement following logic At a battle start, for each unit in a player’s army: IF Unit.IsMercenary && PlayerArmy.Units.Count < EnemyArmy.Units.Count { add penalty to unit morale } IF Unit. IsMercenary && Unit.NationalityID == EnemyArmy. NationalityID { add penalty to unit morale } IF Unit.IsMercenary && Unit.ReligionID == EnemyArmy. ReligionID { add penalty to unit morale } IF Unit.IsMercenary && Unit.ReligionID != EnemyArmy. ReligionID { add bonus to unit morale } IF Unit.IsMercenary && EnemyArmy.IsLocalRebels{ add bonus to unit morale } At the end of a battle, for each unit in player army: IF Unit.IsMercenary && Battle.IsPlayerDefeat { roll high chance of unit disappearing } Explanation of new mechanics: Mercenary units become common, cheap to acquire, but limited in many ways. Mercenary penalty facing bigger armies will make them into support units rather than main force, it would be more effective to have to add few mercenaries to a big army than to expect mercenary only smaller army to fight effectively. Morale penalty on nationality and religion will limit potential opponents (you cannot effectively go to war against Switzerland with swiss mercenaries, you can’t get arab mercenary to go on crusade and so on). Mixing a lot of different mercenaries in a single army will be very limiting in terms of effective targets you can choose. Morale bonus against local rebels will make Mercenary ideal for local policing and not good for a nation to nation conflict and easy target to spy actions. Chance of mercenary deflecting and leaving your army on any defeat will make an interesting mechanic which can dramatically backfire if you miscalculated. And make regular units much more reliable, cheaper over long period of time and more powerful if maxed out on experience. Mercenary should become auxiliary and situational force, which you’d better to hire as a boost and dispose of once you have build a replacement. This will make them ideal to deal with rebellions if you hire and disband them on demand. These mechanics can be easily explained to a player from a common sense as mercenaries do not want to fight hard battles, are expected to leave your army once you are losing, don’t want to fight against their own nation and religion, but ready to oppress local rebels. Making Mercenaries into separate use case from regular military should add depth and more choices to the game. Hope you can expand on that. Cheers

Veso, you are settings up your system exactly against what you want to archive. If as you say units do not lose exp while in a marshal's army but lose exp outside an army, it means nothing is really addressed: You force a player to keep same units under the same marshal, cause they don't lose exp that way. While in fact from game design perspective you want to make player spread forces and have tactical freedom to leave units in different places or assemble various armies to deal with different enemies. It is more risk and more engaging gameplay. You still have a system where you can max out units and they will be maxed out till the end of the game staying with a marshal all the time. Meaning your army becomes very stale and you almost have to use same units in a same army all the time in fear of not saving exp. At the same time your elite units will most of the time face no real opposition You force people to create one big army with the best marshal so his skill bonus on training or exp would be the most effective to the most unit possible. Playing with few big armies is bad for gameplay. You force people to have unit exp skills on all marshals just to keep up, making these passive unit training skills mundane applied to everyone. Actual unit performance in a battle or involvement in a war has no effect on unit exp at all. In my system there is constant effect on unit exp depending on how you play in a battle with a given unit or you don't use your units in most effective way. If reinforcement and unit's combat loses have no negative effect on exp, it is more likely that you would use your elite units all the time since they are stronger and if they don't die you just reinforce them all the time for no cost to maxing out exp. Which would lead to stale fights using the same few top units you have and loosing minimal men and reinforcing back with no real cost to exp And if you are unhappy with your system, you probably want to define the outcome of a new mechanics you are looking first and then come up with possible solutions to be checked against these requirements, rather than thinking of a mechanics first and be not satisfied for some unknown reason. The way I see it, it would be: Unit exp should be mostly due to proper usage in a battle for each specific unit rather that a skill of a marshal which just applies all the time Unit exp should vary so most of the time you won't have all green or all elite units, especially over long period of time on a global map. Endgame or not, you should not have dozens of elite units stacking all the armies everywhere Unit exp should not obstruct tactical choices. Meaning choice of units should vary depending on current enemy at hand its its army composition instead of metagame of maxing out few top units and dealing with everything that way over and over again Unit exp and marshal unit interaction should encourage smaller armies and more risk, rather than ganking with the biggest army possible. This is more than just unit exp system, but unit exp system should not encourage you to have more units in an army then you really need. So leaving units without a marshal or transfer units around between marshals should be have no penalty on exp.

In regards from the question about unit experience from the DevDiary 5. I gave it a thought and I think I have a solution you might like. Issues with unit experience: If you don't have unit experience it becomes quite plain, units become totally disposable. This takes away from the feel of persistent grand strategy. Especially with the extensive skill mechanics for marshals it would just be a gaping hole not to have unit levels. However, if you do have unit experience things get problematic on a long run. Maxing out unit experience requires you to save units through the game, but at some point you army becomes so elite that you have unrealistic advantage over any enemy. Moreover, if you manage to lose your all elite army it becomes such a terrible loss that you just cheat with loading a saved game. Which is lame but unavoidable. Saving and leveling units to max veterancy becomes really bad metagame and prevents a lot of flexibility like disband to reduce upkeep, choosing right unit types for an occasion in favor of your maxed out veteran pack and so on. A unit exp system needs to be more fluid especially over long time to reduce effects of stacked maxed out never dying armies, yet giving a player something to be engaged with during whole playtime of a game so experience gain on a unit would matter even at the endgame. Proposed solution: Assume every unit has its own experience points. Say from 0 to 20 exp. Upon reaching 5 exp a unit becomes regular, by reaching 15 exp a unit becomes veteran. Now lets add dynamic increase AND DECREASE of unit experience over time. For instance: Unit goes into battle it gains N1 exp Unit kills an enemy it gains N1 exp Yet every set period of time unit LOSES L1 exp Every reinforce of a unit with fresh people unit LOSES L2 exp Which give us an interesting flow: a unit not engaged in battle will have its experience gradually reduced over (idle) time at some point an idle unit will lose a level. A unit reinforced by fresh people will lose exp and at some point will lose a level. So units can reach veteran level and then lose levels over and over again depending on how they are used or not used. It makes veteran units vanishing in a peace time and rewarded back with experience at a war time. You won't be able to keep your kingdom stocked with veteran units forever and if you are at a war and suffer a lot of losses you will have to reinforce unit and lose exp by adding fresh recruits, if you are not at war your units are just losing exp over time. Once unit veterancy becomes fluid like that, a player will have way less issues with loosing veteran units since they have to be used or they just go back to low level by doing nothing. It would be hard to maintain a maxed out army without engaging in battles which means that you would have to reinforce your loses which again would balance unit veterancy up and down. In a battle a player would need to use veteran units and risk them to get exp up again to compensate, but you have an issue of losing too much men in the process and require a reinforce which would cost more exp than your battle performance would give you. To make this into a more advanced feature you can add skills to marshal like "reduce loss of exp while idle", "reduce loss of exp per unit reinforce" and so on. You can allow buildings or kingdom advantages to make units with some starting exp knowing that you can't really max out units and keep them at max forever. Maybe an exp loss should be not linear or maybe you want to limit level loss from reaching absolute bottom so you can only get as low as regular, its up to your implementation. Maybe to make it shine you need 5 levels instead of 3 with level 3 being more or less easy to maintain but 4 and 5 being harder and harder to gain and maintain. Its up to you to play with exact numbers depending on how you want to fit in your overall game feel. But the main mechanic should be - units have individual exp, current unit exp defines current unit level, you gain exp and you lose exp on each unit so you can't have top level units forever unless you really really try to keep them at max level by active actions every battle. Hope it gives you a new possible route to explore, Cheers

From realism or role playing point of view I would agree, spies with armies are pretty bad idea. General or any military is exactly the opposite what a spy should be because a lot of people know the general and his loyalty. I feel the problem they are trying to solve is to make support classes to be more useful and manage small local military issues like rebellions while keeping royal court size relatively small. Very hard to say how it will work out with primary/secondary skills they have.

It is usual for a development team to have assumptions about player behavior and expectations on how particular mechanics would be understood and used. As we know from experience these assumptions maybe very far away from reality. Even most obvious things are perceived differently and sometimes this could lead to fundamental issues with a gameplay. In this light, it would be very helpful to measure actual player behavior, both during demo and after a release in order to correct any mistakes made during development. It is also quite important to gather objective gameplay statistics rather than few anecdotes from the most outspoken members of community. Proposed solution Introduce data collection for raw gameplay data and sync to back to your servers in order to have an objective data to be analyzed after the fact. Off the top of my head I would do the following: With each game save and at an end of a game I would update game statistic record and try to send to your server if available at a next gaming session. If not, save the data and try to sync it back to your server on other game sessions once the connection becomes available. For the basic game data package I would have at least the following: GameID guid - a game id continuous for all saves in a current game Starting date, options, kingdom, map or scenario selected Number of manual saves for the current game Game time since the game start at the moment of data collected Current kingdom resources (gold, books, piety) Number of player Kings so far Number of Marshals, Clerics and so per class hired to royal court Number of Marshals (and so on by class) killed, captured, dismissed, died of old age, turned to be spies, executed Number of provinces captured by player Number of provinces lost by player Number of provinces re-captured by player after being lost Number of battles started by player Number of battles started by AI Number of battles won, lost By the type of a city building, total counts of built for a given type By the type of an army unit, total counts of units created/lost for a given type By the type of marshal skill, total count of a skill being trained By the type of marshal/cleric/etc special abilities, total count of a given ability being used. Even with this very little info you can do quite a lot of data mining, especially grouping snapshots of the same game using GameID. Pushing these data snapshots to a cloud server is petty trivial task and I think it would provide very valuable tool for the better of the game. Oh yeah, and the first thing you want to add is an opt-in checkbox “I would like to send anonymous gameplay statistics back to Black Sea Games” somewhere in game settings. Just saying. Thanks.

With the experience we can gather from the original KoH, I think the following should be addressed: 1. Army stacking aka “steamrolling” A mid/end game situation when a player has 2 full armies to high level units going together totally overpowering any opposition. Since no opponent can possibly have more than 2 full armies in a battle it becomes easier and easier to win filling your army with top level units and loosing nothing in a process. This has negative impact on a gameplay both in case when player has max army and in case AI has significantly superior army winning over and over again. Proposed solution Introduce some mechanic making large armies not optimal and harder to maintain, such that a player would be more inclined to reduce army size and a significantly stronger opponent in its turn would have a penalty bringing overwhelming numbers into a battle. Required change: If a max army size is N units, make armies with 20% of N or less use half food per tick per unit, from 20% to 60% of N use 1 food per tick. From 60% and up use 2 food per tick per unit. Such that a smaller army would be way more efficient on food. This will penalize long running invading large armies, but would allow a quick defensive action with a bigger army without a significant penalty over short time. This would force to use smaller armies while attacking a smaller, economically weak opponent since you cannot get a lot of food for a large army deep in an economically weak land (no local food). A large empire won’t be able to overcome this with gold since food is localized resource Probably make marshal skills to reduce food usage or penalty of large armies which you would have to take instead of direct power skills like dread or direct combat buffs. 2. Static army composition A mid/late game situation when a player picked up strong units which allows win fights without significant unit loss. Since the healing of damaged units could be performed at any province such an army would heal over and over again going from province to a province while the army units won’t die and would not need to be replaced only healed. This has a negative impact on gameplay since every batter would be same player army over and over again and original strong unique units will be always available as long as the healing it done over and over again. Proposed solution: Introduce mechanics forcing rotation of units per time or require local economic state to impact unit healing. Required change: For a regular unit, do not allow to heal a unit if there are no required industrial building (forge, stable so on) or at least make a significant cost penalty (like triple cost) on healing a unit in a province without proper building. For unique units, remove healing on if these unique units are not available in the current province. (Vanguards can’t heal in Spain for instance) For unique units allow a new command – “return to home” which will take the damaged unit automatically back to the province it was built in, walking across the map with a regular speed. Once in the original province they will setup a camp and player can pick them up back to a marshal army. This would allow to make damaged unique units to save experience since they can’t heal anywhere on the map. 3. Endless chase A common situation on a global map when an army is chasing another army but since they move and the same speed it takes half Europe to catch up. This makes a boring gameplay when a player can’t catch an enemy in time and AI can’t possibly catch a player. Proposed solution: Army speed on a global map should be variable in burst, allowing quick maneuvering at a cost of long time movement speed. Required change: Create a command “quick march” which makes an army on a global map to move at a double speed for a fixed time, after that an army will have a half speed debuf for a double of that time. Make a marshal skill increasing the quick much time and another skill to reduce length of speed debuf. Probably, during quick march and/or debuf time food consumption of an army should double. Alternatively make quick march to be a toggle which consumes morale of army unit, so a high morale army can afford a long quick march but a low morale army cannot. Once moral of an army falls to low levels during quick march force an army to make camp for a fixed time to recover. 4. Crushing defeat A mid to end game situation when a player had a large army of high experience top level units which happens to suffer a stunning defeat such that high number of high experienced units was lost. Usually this is practically “reload saved game” situation since there is no reasonable way to replace these high experience units and the war will be lost since any fresh no experience army will be way less effective. This leads to out of the game solution through replaying from saved game such that the units won’t be lost of the battle would be avoided. This is pretty bad from immersion perspective and impacts player experience in a negative way. This also in part happens with a player who avoids conflict for a long time such that at a certain point all opponents have experienced armies against fresh inexperienced troops. This negative reinforcement is not desired as it takes more effort for a player to avoid conflicts but produces a disadvantage. Proposed solution: Introduce a mechanic to level up unit experience without a direct combat at least to a certain medium level. Required change: Allow marshal to train units during peace time, probably by setting up a training camp outside a city for that purpose. Training should consume time, food and probably gold draining morale of the units. This will not allow to training in a war time next to a real threat nearby as it would leave the army with a low morale. Allow to setup training camps only in the provinces you own. Probably have marshal skills to increase max trained level of units, reduce costs and/or time of training camps. Sorry for the long post, hope it makes sense.

Why I can't have marshal-monk like most historic knight orders were in Europe or in fact any Muslim hero like to be a warrior cleric instead of just a warlord? Why cleric can't negotiate as a diplomat? Most appropriate in fact from a real life perspective. If I don't have a slot for a diplomat I don't have any diplomacy? If there is nothing to negotiate about as slot is wasted on an idle diplomat? Why merchant can't spy? He is going to that foreign land anyway and its a perfect cover up too. If there is no trade worth a merchant price plus cost of a slot does that mean that I drop merchants all together from my gameplay? Your choice would come from selection of the skills for a knight every time you level up. You can take a very focused path through skills or be more generic. Mix and match things differently every time. We already had this with builders and farmers - some classes just less useful no matter what you do. If they are less useful no one takes them and all their functionality vanishes from the game. Five slots for four "support" classes is way to little to have any variety mid to end game.