THQN Brad

Hello friends and welcome to DevDiary 34 for “Knights of Honor II: Sovereign”! Our next update is coming live tomorrow, so we are excited to share with you the new features and changes we’ve prepared. Two of the aspects we’d like to build upon most are Diplomacy and Religion, as they are essential for the game and we have plenty of ideas of what we can add or improve there. Since this is a major endeavor, we’ve decided to split it into several updates and for this one we started with Catholicism – the most widespread religion in the game. One of the biggest triumphs for Catholic kingdoms is having a royal court cleric becoming the Pope. As it was, that already provided huge bonuses, but most of them are passive and remained in the “background” for players – automatic conversion of loyalty and religion of provinces, fame, books and religion production, diplomatic benefits due to other kingdoms’ reluctance to meddle with the Pope’s home kingdom, culture, influence… Still, what seems most fun to players are the actions one can perform while the Pope is in their court. Thus, in this update we’ve added “Arrange Peace Talks”, providing a serious diplomatic power in the Catholic world. It allows forcing a Catholic kingdom to offer white peace to its enemy, through the Pope’s influence. Another new action is “Ask for Absolution”, valuable when a friendly kingdom is excommunicated. We added plenty of new opinion and relation changes, related to crusades, Papacy and Catholic clerics, which makes playing and interacting with Catholic kingdoms more immersive and adds more depth to players’ decisions. Some of those changes aimed to balance powerful strategies like having a cardinal too early in the game, donating gold to the Papacy to easily increase the relations with it (as if it was a standard kingdom) and exiling clerics just to receive and accept a new one later one. The main focus of the diplomacy changes we’ve introduced is also giving more control in the hands of the players to refine their strategy. “Form vassal” is an important new action specific to kings, enabling them to separate an unloyal province they do not want as part of their kingdom and “convert” it to a newly formed vassal kingdom. As in some cases hard to control new lands can be more of a burden than an advantage, this action introduces a viable strategy to still benefit from conquering them. Another new action comes for the Diplomat class – “Bolster influence”. It works similarly to clerics’ “Bolster culture” and can be helpful for things like quick expansion, strengthening diplomatic relations and ultimately for claiming the Emperor of the World title. A new diplomat puppet spy’s opportunity gives a new way to handle annoying defensive pacts and invasion plans against your kingdom, which can sometimes even turn your friends into foes. There are many other smaller improvements, like new UI indications for influence and truce duration, relation, opinions and crown authority changes making interactions more immersive and removing some unpleasant results of situations like ending up in truce with kingdoms due to the leader of your alliance signing peace with the enemies. Besides Diplomacy and Religion, there are other very significant changes as well. We’ve vastly increased the availability of special units, spicing up the gameplay when playing with more kingdoms and when new territories are conquered. Merchants also received a new action – “Entice mercenaries”, enabling players with strong economies to rely less on mercenaries appearing in their lands and to instead call some to aid them from foreign lands. Finally, we’d like to mention the addition of a “Search” feature in the “Royal Library”, which we hope to aid newcomers but also to be useful for advanced players that want to know every nook and cranny of the game. The help module already had hyperlinks and convenient ways for players to jump into currently important topics from tooltips and interface elements, but it is now much easier to directly and independently find information on topics one is interested in. We’re excited for all of you to jump in and explore these new changes to the game. Please feel free to post any of your thoughts or feedback once the patch has released. Also, for a full list of all changes, please refer to the Patch notes that will be posted with the release. Happy conquering! View full article

Hello friends and welcome to the third post-release DevDiary for “Knights of Honor II: Sovereign”! We know that it’s been some time since our last update and you’re probably hungry for news about what’s to come. So, let’s dive right in and discuss what you can expect in the latest upcoming patch. With the upcoming update you can expect a few major quality of life additions, with perhaps the most requested by fans of the game being the zoom-out level of the game’s camera. It has been increased both in world view and during tactical battles, when the “Extra zoom out” setting is enabled. This allows players to see significantly bigger portion of the world. Preserving the older zoom-out restrictions may still be a better choice for players with low-end hardware, as observing such a large area with numerous objects in it has its toll on the performance and requires more powerful system to ensure high frame rate. When you need to transition to political view, you can now do it seamlessly by simply scrolling the middle mouse button. In the same manner, zooming in while on political view leads to a seamless world view transition, enabling much smoother navigation between the two modes. While we’re on the topic of navigation, the option to set waypoints to army movement in world view has also been introduced. You should now be able to do that by holding down SHIFT while ordering an army to move, similar to how you can set waypoints to units in tactical battles. This can be key when you want to navigate past certain kingdoms’ territories, for example to avoid relationship drops or potentially threatening armies in the area. It is really useful to avoid other inconvenient maneuvers of your armies, like crossing rivers while being chased or passing in the vicinity of castles and towns, that deal attrition damage. Waypoint can either be set to an empty spot on the map or to any specific object (e.g., town, settlement, mercenary camp). Armies will interact with said object if it’s the last in the movement queue, with the caveat that entering battle cancels all subsequent waypoints. We’ve also vastly improved the AI in tactical battles. A big part of our efforts was focused on making sure that noblemen cavalry squads act more careful and avoid ending up in dangerous situations; and when that happens – to try and run before it’s too late. These features were already present, but we made a major overhaul of the system and fixed some unwanted behavior that we encountered along the way. Extensive work was done on fleshing out the threat assessment by all units. Areas where archers are shooting or can shoot at are now also properly recognized as higher-threat zones and entered with more caution – a behavior that didn’t work as we expected it to and is now debugged and rebalanced. AI squads also try to protect their archers more often. On players’ side, keeping your archers more spread-out should now be of a bigger importance, as disorganized state has more severe penalties and properly triggers when ranged squads are trying to shoot while their lines are overlapping. Finally, increasing the friendly fire significantly should make strategic players think twice before sending deadly volleys where their own troops are fighting. There are also some vital tactical battle improvements on a more micro-level. For example, squads should now position themselves a bit better on the battlefield and chase enemies more efficiently. Enemies are now more reluctant to split their forces and rush for your capture points, which sometimes allowed for easy victories by the players when forces were otherwise equally matched. As a combination with all these changes, and many others, we hope that playing tactical battles will feel more fluid, challenging and interesting as an overall experience. A few new exciting rules have also been added to campaigns, hopefully allowing for more varied starts and interesting challenges. First off, you can now “shatter” the world by forcing all kingdoms on the map (not only player, but also AI-controlled ones) to start with 1, 2, 3, 4 or 5-province territories. This option can be set via the “Kingdom size” option in both singleplayer and multiplayer lobbies. While playing with these rules, all kingdoms start off on an equal footing, with no trade centers, caliphates and autocephalous states (with the exception of the orthodox owner of Constantinople). Speaking of fair starts, the “Religious Standing” campaign rule has been reworded and expanded to include more options in multiplayer. Now called “Kingdom standing”, it offers separate settings which offer more starting limitations for all players in a campaign. Namely, starting with no trade centers, not having an autocephalous/caliphates state, or having no vassals/sovereigns. The two other options in this ruleset allow you to either start a campaign fully historical regarding these aspects, or fully balanced (taking all of the criteria above into account). Last but not least, we’ve been working hard on narrowing down the potential causes for some unfortunate game crashes and disconnects in multiplayer. This update includes some vital backend tweaks that will hopefully eliminate as much of these issues as possible. As we wrap this diary, we’d like to thank every person who has commented on the forums and our discord channel, sharing what they’d want from the game. This feedback is invaluable to us and it would be an understatement to say that all of it helps us immensely. Thanks to all of you who also responded to our enquiries, when nasty bugs and issues were reported and we needed additional information. You rock! If you have any further questions, or simply wish to chat about all things related to Knights of Honor II, feel free to join us in our DevStream on Wednesday the 19th of April on the THQ Nordic channel: http://twitch.tv/thqnordic. Until then – go forth and conquer! View full article

Hello friends and welcome to the second post-release DevDiary for “Knights of Honor II: Sovereign”! We hope you’ve had fun with your campaigns and exploring the game. This time, we will be focusing on a topic that’s been mentioned several times in the past, and one that’s very much important for the game – modding. Needless to say, modding is an incredible tool when it comes to allowing players’ creativity to go wild, as it can enhance a game greatly in the most unexpected ways. Many of us have dabbled in this process ourselves and enjoy seeing what people create, so we really want to provide the right tools for those of you who would like to get creative and shape KoH2:S the way they want to. With that being said, we are happy to reveal that the upcoming patch will introduce some much-needed changes and improvements to the way modding works in our game. First and foremost, we will be adding basic Steam Workshop support. This means we will provide a tool for mod creators to upload their mods to Steam Workshop and an in-game link to the Workshop page where players can browse and subscribe to mods. At the same time, we are fundamentally changing the way mods are made. Instead of copying complete folders from the original game files and then changing some lines here and there the mods will now contain only the changes. In other words, if a mod only changes a single value in the game, using the new system, the mod will essentially consist of a single line of text (excluding some "service" information describing the mod itself). This will solve two major problems with the old system: Mods will no longer be invalidated every time developers release a patch (starting from the next one). It will be possible to have more than one mod active at a time, assuming they don't "conflict" with each other (i.e. they don't try to change the same thing differently). Unfortunately, as a result of these changes, all existing mods will have to be re-done by the mod creators once more, hopefully for the last time. Note that the new system is not 100% fool proof - for example if the developers decide to double the attack rate of longbowmen (and it somehow makes it through all stages of the approval process for new patches), while you have a mod also affecting the attack rate of longbowmen - then your mod will take precedence over the changes coming from the patch. This may or may not be the desired effect, there is no definitive answer. For example, let's imagine the developers are not completely crazy and they also halved the damage done by longbowmen, so the average DPS stays the same. If your mod only changes the attack rate, but not the damage of longbowmen, the results will probably be way off balance. But all other mods, which have nothing to do with the attack rate or the damage of longbowmen, will continue to work just fine. We will provide more information on the exact syntax to do this and how to generate a mod for Steam Workshop when the patch goes live, both in its release notes and in the game files. With this upcoming update hopefully providing a much improved groundwork, we hope to improve the modding capabilities of KoH2:S even more in the future. We can’t promise anything yet, but features like being able to add or change portraits and models, more QoL upgrades to make and use mods, as well as providing better tools for adjusting terrain and elements of the map are definitely on the table. We would also be interested in hearing more from you. What types of mods do you enjoy the most – ones focused on simple cheats, visual changes, quality-of-life improvements or massive system and setting overhauls? Is there anything that you’d like to see modded in KoH2:S specifically? If you yourself are a modder, what types of tools would you like to have? Join us in our DevStream on the 26th of January @ 4 PM GMT / 11 AM EST and feel free to modify our conversation with your questions. We hope to see you there and until then – go forth and conquer! View full article

Hello friends and welcome to the first post-release DevDiary for “Knights of Honor II: Sovereign”! We hope all of you are enjoying your campaigns, as much as we are watching you play and explore the game for the first time! The road to Knights of Honor II’s release has been long, but that doesn’t mean it’s over, and in this diary, we’ll hopefully shed some light on the immediate future of the game as we go forward. For starters, we managed to address some of your feedback and already made certain tweaks to the game, which some of you may have noticed as part of the update which was rolled-out last Friday. Its main focus was to offer more variety to different difficulty levels when it comes to the game’s diplomacy and warfare, as we noticed that some of you had a tough time in the early parts of the game. These few key changes should hopefully shape the gameplay to be more approachable on easier difficulties, and then more challenging on harder ones, especially when player led empires grow big and with numerous vassals. We also removed the gold cost for hiring mercenary troops, which belonged to your kingdom recently, as many players felt that to be too punishing. On the military front, AI army leaders should also no longer charge in to battle without support, which was an evident issue when their side’s estimations were really high. The update also tackled some immediate issues such as game crashes, low performance in tactical battles and various problems related to changing the game’s resolution. For a full look, check out the patch notes here. This isn’t our only patch we’ve been able to get out, either. Earlier today, we also released a small patch which addresses some military related issues – we are planning to reduce the strength of Varangian Guards and all crossbowmen a bit and boost longbowmen and templar knights. Most importantly, at the moment the desert heavy archers are completely broken (they have the wrong attack values) and we are going to fix that by severe decreasing them to the correct values that were intended.. Also, to reduce the exploity tactic of quickly taking control of the enemy capture points, we are increasing drastically the time needed for capturing them when many enemy squads are alive. The AI already pays attention and tries to counter these maneuvers and there is a dependency between time needed and enemy squads alive, but with the current values it seems it was still too easy to achieve for some players. We are making this more difficult to restore that part of the challenge Tactical battles should provide. As we are constantly reading your feedback and assessing it, we will continue to tweak and improve the game. With that being said, a bigger update with many more fixes and improvements (that still require further testing and localization) is currently under preparation and hopefully we will manage to complete it before the holidays. It will address many usability issue and bugs and also include additional improvements of AI behavior in battles like better protection of the army leaders on lower difficulties – we made the AI intentionally a bit suboptimal in its decisions, especially on easy and normal difficulties, but the balance here is not quite hitting the mark, so we’ll be increasing the difficulty. There’s also a plethora of quality-of-life additions that we’ve planned to introduce in the upcoming months, ranging from better explanations for certain mechanics to improved visual feedback for various elements of the game. One topic we’re investigating is additional zoom-out levels, as well as the possibility of directly transitioning from world view to political view depending on the zoom level. We know this is a highly requested area of improvement, and we’ve been doing analysis of both technical impact on performance as well as feasibility from an implementation perspective. No promises, but we’re actively exploring what improvements we can make here. If you want to hear more or share your opinion directly with us live, be sure to join us in our DevStream on the 15th of December @ 4 PM GMT / 11 AM EST on the THQ Nordic channel: http://twitch.tv/thqnordic, where we will discuss these changes in further detail, talk about some future plans and gladly answer your questions about Knights of Honor II. View full article

For those who tuned into the DevStream last week, we played a game with Saxony that was quite a recovery from a bad situation. Jordan the Cleric did his job and earned the title "Good Boi," we recovered from a tough war with multiple enemies, fun was had by all! We can keep that game going and see where things land, if we can bring Saxony to great victory surrounded by enemies (and few allies), OR, we can start a fresh new save together and forge a fresh future. Give a vote on what you'd like to see and we'll be with you on Thursday, Nov 10th, at 11 AM Eastern / 4 PM GMT on the THQ Nordic Twitch Channel http://twitch.tv/thqnordic. See ya there!

Hello friends and welcome to the 30th DevDiary for “Knights of Honor II: Sovereign”! This time, we decided to delve a bit deeper into the world of AI and difficulty, explaining our thought process behind balancing pacing, making sure players are engaged in all stages of the game, and what sort of obstacles we met along the way. It must be said that much of the feedback we’ve seen from our closed beta testing has been invaluable on that front, for which we thank you all! So what makes an AI “fun” to play against? While it must be challenging, it should also behave in a human way. In KoH2, the AI is constantly thinking about what actions to perform, with different priorities dictating which ones it will perform at any given time. Early in development when systems were still being added to the game, the AI used to simply gather all of its armies and send them to a single location, which was simply overwhelming and not fun to play against. But as more decisions were added to the AI’s thinking process, waging war against another kingdom felt more manageable. While you move in with your armies, it might be considering its defenses against other hostile kingdoms, upgrading fortifications, gathering garrison troops, asking other kingdoms for support via diplomacy or even constructing buildings. By adding these sorts of distractions, the AI starts to think (and feel) less like a machine, giving players time to react and adapt their strategies. And after a few campaigns, you might begin to notice small nuances like the AI preferring to defend its towns under siege and lead battles in home territories. Behind the scenes, each AI kingdom also has a certain “budget” reserved for different areas of development. These are dictated to a certain extent by their current king’s abilities – for example, a ruler with good stats in religion focuses more on developing his kingdom’s piety and clerics, while someone well-versed in diplomacy would take extra care of maintaining strong bonds with other kingdoms and employing powerful diplomats. These are subtle factors and don’t dictate an AI’s behavior completely, but do play an important role in the grand scheme of things. And then, with all these tools in play, comes the fun (albeit sometimes grueling) part of balancing how AIs behave in certain scenarios. Diplomacy is a system that highlights this in interesting ways, as certain diplomatic offers have adjusted pros and cons, depending on if the recipient (or the subject) is an AI kingdom. For example, AI kingdoms are more likely to form royal marriages with players, so that you may have an easier time finding spouses for your king and ensuring the continuation of your royal dynasty. This is only valid on easy difficulty, though, with AIs being more reluctant to marry their princesses in general (to avoid losing lands to inheritance claims). Yet, there are moments when even the AI surprises us with advanced plays, which aren’t exactly by the book. For instance, you may experience a kingdom inviting you to wage war against someone, only to find out moments later that they are in a defensive pact against you, alongside that kingdom. Or, seconds after marrying your princess to their prince, you receive a message that a foreign spy from the same kingdom has murdered your king, followed by foreign claims for inheritance. As painful as it might be on the receiving end, such experiences can define a campaign and make it more memorable. Of course, the AI may sometimes seem clever by random, but most of it is driven by the game’s difficulty. For example, higher levels increase how much gold, books, religion and levies an AI kingdom gains. Starting conditions are also affected, such as how many wars you might end up in at the beginning of a campaign, or how long it might take before rebellious population starts to amass in your provinces. In tactical battles, AI armies can also react better at higher difficulties. This may manifest in your marshals being more susceptible to being flanked and picked out by enemies, cavalrymen tending to prioritize archers more and ranged cavalry micro-managing against you while shooting. In a sense, you could say that the AI “cheats” on some difficulty levels. In other cases, it is not unfair to say it makes mistakes intentionally, from time to time. But in the end of the day, our main goal is to deliver fun and memorable moments, and sometimes that extra spice can be the deciding factor. Naturally, AI and difficulty is a constantly-evolving part of our game (as in any game) and we’d love to hear from your thoughts on the topic. What do you think is the most critical part of making an AI feel “good”? Do you think an AI should have some extraneous elements added to help it, or should it be on an equal playing field with players? We’re sure you’ll have many questions and comments on the topic, so feel free to raise them in the comments section below or on Twitch, during our DevStream on Thursday, November 3rd, @ 3:00 PM GMT / 11:00 AM EST. The Twitch stream will be hosted on the THQ Nordic channel: http://twitch.tv/thqnordic and we’ll be grabbing responses from this post and playing the game live! Until then, we bid thee farewell. Go forth and conquer! View full article

Hello friends and welcome to the 29th DevDiary for “Knights of Honor II: Sovereign”! We were silent quite a while, but it was all for a good reason – thanks to the players that participate in the beta, we feel like we’ve made a great progress towards polishing and balancing the game the last few months. Today we will talk about the Political View (PV) of KoH2:S, where you can quickly see the most important information on a grand scale, needed for making strategical choices – where to find the things you are looking for, who are your potential threats and allies, where to expand next, what are the problems in your kingdom and the region, etc. If you have played the first game in the series or other grand-strategies, this feature will probably feel familiar – we have not tried to reinvent the wheel, but rather make it as convenient as possible. To do so, we’ve spent quite a while iterating on what the most useful modes will be, what should be included on them and what indications should be toggleable by players. We’ve also had an additional goal – we wanted the Political View to be helpful and easy to use, but we didn’t want the players to spend too much time on it, as we felt that this will worsen their overall experience, robbing them from the beauty and atmosphere of the World View. Thus, we took the hard decision to limit the movement and attack commands of armies through PV and we added a possibility to have all those PV modes apply for the minimap as well, so that, combined with the minimap zooming feature, players can check out the most important things without even entering full-screen PV. There are 12 different modes with custom legends to indicate what color-coding stands in each one: Kingdoms – This is the most basic mode; kingdoms have unique colors, so that players can easily see their overall territories and their provinces. Stances – This is probably the most important mode of all and a very convenient one to set for the minimap. It shows the stances of selected kingdoms – allies and enemies, sovereign or vassals, trade relations, royal ties, trade partners, non-aggression pacts, defensive pacts, invasion plans… Relations – Also a very useful PV mode, which does not so much show the current active agreements between the kingdoms, but indicates the potential of such. As relations have a huge impact on diplomacy, through this view future friends or foes can be found and with proper actions, friendships can be strengthened and wars avoided. Marriages – A simple mode, which helps players to find unmarried princes, princesses and kings, in order to try and arrange a royal marriage. Stability – Low stability in provinces and rebel presence are indicated in this mode, mainly helping players to quickly oversee the internal problems of their kingdoms, but also weaknesses in foreign ones. Trade zones – Trade centers and their zones are indicated here. Trade centers with larger zones can bring significant riches, so these are important to develop, protect, or, of course, conquer. Religion – In this mode the religions of kingdoms and provinces are simultaneously indicated. As differences in kingdom and province religion can cause a lot of local tension, it is important to quickly see provinces in and around your kingdom with such religious differences, so that you can convert, possibly “liberate” or culturally influence them. Kingdom religions also have considerable effect on diplomacy and opinions, so players might have а different approach to kingdoms, depending on their religion. Culture – Similarly to the previous mode, on this one provinces, that may turn out to be more or less problematic are indicated. As religions, cultures are also grouped into families and sub-families. Loyalty – Gaining the population’s loyalty in your kingdom’s provinces is a hard, but important process. Through high influence and some cleric actions, loyalty can be gained even in neighboring provinces, which in terms can ease conquest or even enable diplomatic claims over foreign lands. In this mode players can quickly see which provinces are obedient to the king and which would rather be ruled by another one. Province features – As resources are definitely among the most important reasons for conquest, this PV mode helps players to quickly find where they can get those precious settlements and resources they need for their planned buildings, upgrades and advantages. Color-coding in this and the subsequent two modes is always from the players’ perspective, marking in a different manner domestic and foreign provinces where specific features/goods/buildings are. Goods – Here is shown where a specific good is produced, and where it CAN be produced, potentially. As goods can be imported by merchants, this mode can quickly help players find trade partners, which produce the goods they need. Buildings – Similarly to the previous mode, here is indicated where a selected building is constructed, as well as where it can be constructed. This, for example, can be used to find out which are the enemy’s main army recruitment provinces, which in terms might be a good objective to try and siege or overtake quickly in a beginning of a war, to slow down the enemy’s “war machine”. Each mode can be viewed with Kingdom or Province labels. The elements, that can be visualized or hidden, are towns, battles and armies – kingdoms’ armies, rebels, crusaders and mercenaries, with or without their nameplates, containing additional information. This way players can customize “on the go” their PV indications the way that fits their playstyle the most – some may prefer more information indicated simultaneously, others may not be so fond of that and prefer to have a neater view. In both cases, hiding or showing specific elements when needed is just a button-click or hotkey-press away. During the beta we’ve added a new feature – players can now not only configure which of the aforementioned elements is visible, but also whether they will be selectable. Some players prefer to select battles and armies from Political view and others prefer to stick only to the simpler province/kingdom selection, so we decided to leave that choice in your hands and let you configure the PV behavior for each element. We’ll talk more about political view in our DevStream on Tuesday, October 4th, @ 3:00 PM BST / 11:00 AM EST and we’ll be happy if you can join in our conversation. We are easy to find on the map – the Twitch stream will be hosted on the THQ Nordic channel: http://twitch.tv/thqnordic and we’ll be grabbing responses from this post and playing the game live to show how Political View works in real-time! Until next time, we bid thee farewell. Go forth and conquer! View full article

Hello friends and welcome to the 28th DevDiary for “Knights of Honor II: Sovereign”! We cannot hide that talking about the tactical battles in KoH2:S is quite exciting and a little scary for us, as this is one of the features that was (and is) hardest to develop. We know that many of you wanted to see it earlier and we are thankful for your patience. Our goals in regards to the tactical battles, or “Battle view” (BV), as we call it internally, was to modernize the experience from the original game to the 2020’s, but still without complicating the gameplay too much or making these battles the main focus of the game. After all, KoH games are mainly about the grand-strategy gameplay – economy, diplomacy, politics and warfare on a grand scale. When a battle is in its preparation phase, players can choose to “lead” it, entering Battle view. This transitions them to a map of the battlefield, generated based on the area or town it is led in. We’ve developed an elaborate algorithm to represent as best as possible the terrain features and even the shapes of the towns, when such are present. While the player is leading the tactical battles, the rest of the world is “paused”, though this does not apply for potential reinforcements – armies, headed towards a battle can still arrive while it lasts and it is not too late to call near-by armies as reinforcements either, even after the tactical battle has started. As in simulated battles, there are up to three “armies” that a player can control – two led by marshals or other royal court members and one, formed by local defending troops – militia, town guards, garrison troops, etc. Each army consists of up to 8 squads + the noblemen cavalry squad. There are three different types of battles – field battle, assault and break siege. In the first one, which can be started if armies meet on the field or in a settlement (excluding castle), none of the armies have defensive structures and both armies have “army camps”. In break siege and assault, the defending side of a town or castle has fortifications, which include walls, gates, towers. Within towns and castles there are “capture points”, that have to be defended. The durability and attack power of fortifications depend on the siege defense and attrition damage of the town/castle. How damaged they are depends on what percentage of the siege defense is lost prior to starting the tactical battle. Entering an assault when siege defense is brought to zero is completely different from assaulting as fast as possible, since in the first case many towers, gates and even wall segments will be severely damaged or even completely destroyed at the start of the tactical battle. Both assault and break siege battles take place on the same town/castle “map”, but in break siege the attacking force will be waiting outside (defenders have the initiative) and in assault, well, the attackers are trying to storm the fortifications (attackers have the initiative). If the initiative is lost, whoever had it fails their attempt and retreats, which leads to some morale loss and a continuation of the siege. Thus, it is advisable not to sit and wait, if you have undertaken break siege or assault; and nor will the enemies wait, if they are the ones that took the initiative. There are several ways a battle can end. If an army loses its leader, it disperses immediately, so it is important that the noblemen cavalry squad is well protected. Too dire morale losses of the entire army can also lead to an army’s full retreat. Finally, if one side holds all capture points and/or army camps, it is victorious. As always, we’d love to hear what you think about Tactical battles. Are you excited about this feature and do you often prefer to lead your armies personally in grand-strategy games in which that is possible, or do you prefer to let the auto-battle do the trick? If you have played the original game, share with us did you enjoyed the battles there and what did you find best and worst about them. We’ll talk more about Tactical battles in our DevStream on Thursday, July 14th, @ 4:00 PM BST / 11:00 AM EDT. Get your armor on and join in – the Twitch stream will be hosted on the THQ Nordic channel: http://twitch.tv/thqnordic and we’ll be grabbing responses from this post as well as answering questions live during the stream. Some gameplay videos of tactical battles will also be played then for the first time. Next time we’ll will talk more about “Tactical battles”, more specifically about squads – the role their stats play in this mode and what commands will be available to players. Until then, we bid thee farewell. Go forth and conquer! View full article

Hello friends and welcome to the 27th DevDiary for “Knights of Honor II: Sovereign”! Back in our 5th DevDiary, we talked about Marshals and Armies. Today it is time to finally revisit and expand on that topic. Let’s have a closer look on what it takes to prepare and maintain an army and how size and power can vary from army to army, even though all marshals can lead 8 squads. Fans of the original KoH game will find the army recruitment similar in KoH2:S – each squad requires gold (kingdom resource), as well as population and food (province resources). To make the things more interesting, in KoH2:S we have added one component – kingdom levies, which represents the capability of a kingdom to train and arm new soldiers quickly. Unless your strategy is to amass militia, levies are very important since, besides for recruitment, they are also needed for army equipment, fortification improvements and others. They are “produced” in settlements, mainly castles and villages, depending primarily on governor bonuses, buildings, upgrades and traditions. The maximum “storage” values of kingdom levies can also be increased by some buildings and upgrades. A kingdom with many levies “in store” can quickly mobilize and prepare for war. A kingdom with high production of levies can sustain the size of its army in longer conflicts, replacing the losses with new recruits. Each army led by a Marshal has up to 8 squads, but that doesn’t mean that all fully recruited armies have equal manpower. The size of each squad depends on unit types, but also on numerous manpower modifiers like king’s bonus, kingdom levies production, “additional troops” recruited for that army, skills, traditions, and others. Crusaders also have significant bonuses and rebel armies’ manpower bonuses grow in time, especially when their rebellion manages to win some battles and land. In result, two armies, that have exactly the same number and type of units recruited, can differ in size up to several times. There are very interesting examples in history, ancient, medieval and modern, where lack of supplies played a decisive role in battles, military campaigns and even wars. We really wanted to make an additional step forward and represent the importance of logistic and equipment in warfare, so we added the following feature: Each army starts fully supplied, but fighting and travelling, especially abroad, requires a lot of supplies and eventually, armies can run out of them. In that state armies can no longer start sieges and receive substantial penalties on some statistics like movement speed, units’ morale, and stamina. Resupplying can be done by pillaging settlements, as well as in home towns, for the cost of gold, as well as food from the local storages. There are also additional skills and actions that can be helpful to maintain a good supply, like an army leader having Logistics skill, the army having a supply wagon equipped, or the Merchant’s “Supply army” action. Each squad recruited, no matter if it is in army or garrison, additionally requires upkeep of “kingdom food”. This is a more abstract stat of a kingdom and it is not a currency. Instead, total production and import are compared to the required army upkeep. Lack of food’s effect is not as immediate as that of the lack of army supplies, but when a kingdom’s food is insufficient, this reduces growth, stability and army opinion. Severe food insufficiency can even result in some armies going rogue. Players may strategically choose to go along with exceeding that soft limit for their kingdom’s total army size and indeed desperate times might call for such measures, but they should be careful how long and to what extent do they keep their armies and population starving. Now we also should discuss army equipment, which we’ve mentioned a few times. Each army leader has between 1 and 4 such slots (by default 2 for Marshals), depending on their class, skills and traditions. Each of these can be used for one of the following: Additional troops – A manpower boost for all squads in the army, on the cost of increased food upkeep and supply consumption. Supply wagons – These increase the current and maximum supplies of an army and are helpful in longer campaigns, especially in distant lands. Siege equipment – There are several types of siege machines, invaluable in taking down strong fortifications. They have different cost and requirements and as effect vary only in strength in Battle Simulations, but are vastly different in Tactical Battles, led personally by players. As always, we’d love to hear what you thing about this military side of our game’s economy. Do you find such more in-depth system interesting, or does it sound too complex? Do you like the army equipment, adding even more variety to specialize your armies and what other things would you like to be available in it? We’ll talk more about recruitment and supply of armies in our DevStream on Thursday, May 19th, @ 3:00 PM UTC / 11:00 AM EST. Note that this is in 2 weeks – we have some unfortunate schedule conflicts, including the live Orchestra recording for the game’s music next week (exciting!), that have us running a rare delay from posting the Diary to holding our stream. We didn’t want to go quiet that long, so we’re posting this up today. Feel free to enlist and join our ranks – the Twitch stream will be hosted on the THQ Nordic channel: http://twitch.tv/thqnordic and we’ll be grabbing responses from this post as well as answering questions live during the stream. Next time we’ll will talk more about “Political view” and its filters, a crucial element of the game, that allows you to find quickly and conveniently in the game important information about kingdom relations, resources, religion and many others. Until then, we bid thee farewell. Go forth and conquer! View full article

Hello friends and welcome to the 26th DevDiary for “Knights of Honor II: Sovereign”! In “DevDiary 17 - Settlements and Province Features” we started talking about the economy-related features of provinces. If you haven’t checked it out, it is a good place to start on that topic so that you can grasp the whole concept of these related features. In this DevDiary we’ll continue with a more in-depth view on how goods are acquired and what benefits they provide to a kingdom. Goods production is done in Buildings and Upgrades and usually have a province feature as a prerequisite. For more advanced ones, usually more basic Upgrades and goods are also required. For example, glass (one of the 64 goods) can be produced in the “Glassworks” upgrade of the “Woodworking” building, which requires the “Deep forests” province feature. Additionally, for that upgrade “Colliers Kiln” must be built first and minerals are also required. There are much harder goods to produce, like navigational maps, compasses, cannons… - these require whole production chains and multiple goods, which in terms require multiple province features. The good news is that goods production counts for the entire kingdom, so the “puzzle” is not solved province by province, but on a global level. Goods can also be imported by Merchants (for details, check out “DevDiary 11 - Merchants and Trading” , but that requires upkeep both in gold and commerce and, depending on their rarity, importance and how complex it is to craft them, that upkeep can be quite high. Few social classes/professions like Bourgeoisie and Scholars, for example, are also under the “goods” category and are “produced” by Upgrades, but naturally, they cannot be imported. Some of the Upgrades, that require goods, can provide huge benefits in one direction or another and they can also enable recruitment of advanced troops. So, if players want their kingdoms to have elite armies, then they must make sure they produce or import goods like iron, horses and leather. Besides a requirement for kingdom development in general, goods have another usage. When players collect specific sets, they unlock kingdom advantages – a feature from the first game that we wanted to preserve in KoH2:S, as it created an interesting conquest “puzzle”. There are 7 common kingdom advantages each kingdom can develop – Abundance, Mercantilism, Masonry, Progress, Age of Discovery, Age of War and Age of Prosperity. The eight one depends on a kingdom’s religion, as it is related to culture and the cultural advantages of Christians, Muslims and Pagans simply cannot have the same goods required and effects. Although no advantage is easy to achieve, we can say that the first four are easier than the last four. As advantages are usually achievable during the end-game phase, having the required goods is more of a measurement of success than a path to such. However, depending on players’ starting province features and those of near-by provinces, sometimes development of an advantage rather early on can be a good strategy. When players develop all advantages, they are able to Claim victory – one of the three major ways to win the game. In result, a province’s features and what goods are provided by it become a crucial consideration when planning both conquest and defense, as goods are needed both for standard development, kingdom advantages and in the end – they can be the path to victory relying on expansion and economy, rather than prestige and diplomacy. Unlike in “Emperor of the World”, if a player claims victory by developing all advantages, no one has a say against that. It will be nice to hear your thoughts on goods production and effects. Do you think that the system looks too complex, or maybe too simple, as we ignore the difficult to manage “logistics” part of the resources? Which path to victory sounds most fun to you and if you have played the first KoH game, did you have a favorite strategy to achieve it? We’ll talk more about Goods and Advantages in our DevStream on Thursday, March 24th, @ 3:00 PM GMT / 11:00 AM EST. Without you, our dearest fans of the game, our kingdom’s most important advantages will never be complete, so join in our conversation. The Twitch stream will be hosted on the THQ Nordic channel: http://twitch.tv/thqnordic and we’ll be grabbing responses from this post as well as answering questions live during the stream. Next time we’ll will talk more about armies – recruitment, manpower and supplies. Until then, we bid thee farewell. Go forth and conquer! View full article

Hello friends and welcome to the 25th DevDiary for “Knights of Honor II: Sovereign”! So far, we have talked about the role of the royal family members here and there, the king’s class-related bonuses, diplomacy effects of royal marriages, etc. But we’ve never had a more detailed look into the royal family itself, so it is high time to do it. Since the beginning of the development process, we knew that we want the royal family members to play important roles in the kingdom, but not to such extent that will make them the center of the game, as we didn’t want KoH2:S to be a dynasty simulation, but rather than that to be focused on the kingdom government and grand-strategy. We wanted the related features to be quick to manage, but still – to add depth to the game, to call for strategic decisions and interesting choices to emerge. There are three main groups in royal families – the king and the queen; princes and princesses; and important relatives, which are in fact ex-princes and potentially – future kings. All male characters can become a part of the royal court and all besides the important relatives can be married – for diplomatic benefits and, naturally, for having successors. The King’s abilities, combined with the Queen’s ones if the king is married, affect the entire kingdom. There are 5 abilities (each one with a value between 0 and 5), similar to the 5 knightly classes. But they do not necessarily correspond to the king’s class – he might be a great merchant himself, but at the same time to contribute too little to the dealings of the rest of the merchants and the overall economy of his kingdom and instead to be very influential over his soldiers. The abilities and their primary bonuses are as follows: Warfare – Boosts the morale of all armies. Economy – Boosts trade income and reduces the costs for Buildings and Upgrades. Diplomacy – Increases the kingdom's diplomatic influence and chances of success for a few grand-scale actions. Religion – Increases the kingdom's cultural power and chances of success of for a few grand-scale religious actions. Espionage – Increases espionage defense and the chance to reveal enemy spies. Beside the kingdom-wide effect of their abilities, kings have significant benefits in their activities, depending on their class, as well as governing bonuses. When a king dies, one of his heirs inherits the throne, if they are old enough to bear the crown. The eldest prince is by default the one who succeeds his father, but players may choose otherwise and change the successor (prior to the king’s death, not upon it). However, this has its cost and risk – such decisions reduce the crown authority and the eldest prince might decide to rebel if he sees such a change of succession as unjust. When a prince succeeds the crown, all of his brothers become “important relatives”. Each of them brings a bonus to the kingdom passively, regardless whether they are in the royal court or not. Furthermore, if a king dies and there is no prince to succeed him, one of the important relatives is chosen as a successor and the dynasty is preserved, as they do have royal blood. The worst case is when there is no one from the dynasty eligible to succeed the crown – then a knight from the royal court, or just a newly generated character, becomes the king and this changes the dynasty. That can be very dangerous, as it leads to serious crown authority loss and if there is tension in the kingdom already, it can even lead to one of the most severe events in the game – splitting of a kingdom. Losing the control of important provinces and entering wars with the newly formed separatist kingdoms, that defy the new king and his right to rule, is never pretty. However, such dire consequences are only probable in very large kingdoms, with serious governing problems. To avoid a dynasty change, it might be a good idea for players to protect their kings and princes, as well as to make sure they are married soon enough. If no diplomatic marriage with another kingdom is arranged, the king might and probably will marry to a local noble lady sooner or later. This happens outside the player’s control and brings no diplomatic benefits. You can read more on that topic in “DevDiary 13 – Diplomacy Part 2 – Diplomat and Pacts”. Princes and princesses, on the other hand, never marry automatically. As princes might inherit the crown rather late in their life, it is risky to leave them unmarried, as their remaining time might not be sufficient for raising an heir. Therefore, it is a good strategy to marry your princes soon enough. Though their children are not part of the game before a prince becomes king, if they are married prior to succession of the crown, there is a chance that they will already have one or more children upon becoming kings. It will be great to hear your thoughts on the royal family features – do you find these an interesting part of the whole experience, would you prefer not to bother with the royal family at all, or on the contrary – would you like to have more gameplay mechanics from that sort and maybe more complex dynasty trees? We’ll talk more about Royal Family in our DevStream on Thursday, February 17th, @ 4:00 PM GMT / 11:00 AM EST. Become part of our royal family and join in our conversation. The Twitch stream will be hosted on the THQ Nordic channel: http://twitch.tv/thqnordic and we’ll be grabbing responses from this post as well as answering questions live during the stream. Next time we plan to talk about the production of goods and their usage (ok, we admit that we copied this section from the previous diary, but we are honest this time). Until then, we bid thee farewell. Go forth and conquer! View full article

Hello friends and welcome to the 24th DevDiary for “Knights of Honor II: Sovereign”! After the deep dive into the religion topic, we will now return to “Multiplayer” – a topic, started in DD19, where we already talked about game modes, victory conditions and team games. Now we will have a look into more detailed settings, that will be provided for the players to finetune their experience. Many of these work in singleplayer as well, but talking about them in multiplayer aspect provides a more thorough view. What players might probably want to pick first is the starting period. We have 3 predefined starting periods and each of them includes the political landscape of the Old World. Depending on this setting, different kingdoms will be present on the map and allocate provinces, corresponding for the period, together with their culture and religion for that time. This setting also affects starting royal families of all kingdoms. For further variety, you can mod these periods or even create a new game from a save, so the starting possibilities are practically unlimited. As we’ve mentioned very early on in our DDs, there are some very small historical inaccuracies in this direction that we’ve chosen to undertake in order to capture the most interesting “landscape”. Gameplay and fun over historical accuracy is one of the pillars we’ve set for KoH2:S and we hope that no one will be offended by this choice – after all, our goal is to create an entertaining sandbox strategic game, that quickly dives into the “alternative history” category, rather than to follow the actual history of the world, step-by-step. After a period is chosen, players can pick either starting kingdoms or a starting provinces, which will create a corresponding kingdom from it – you might wish to be a king of Nottinghamshire, instead of England. Players can also set the starting number of provinces, unless they want to play with the historical territories – an option, especially useful for having somewhat balanced multiplayer games and when you want to roleplay a specific kingdom, but you don’t want a too easy or difficult start. Random kingdom or province selections are also valid options. Finally, setting up the starting gold can give players a small boost or handicap early on, as this setting does not affect AI controlled kingdoms. Starting conditions can be considered part of the “difficulty” settings, but they are not sufficient in that direction. In the hands of a novice player, a big empire can quickly crumble due to rebellions and many wars with its numerous neighbors; and very skillful players can still feel the AI Kingdoms are not a match for them, even when starting with one or two provinces. This is why the “AI Difficulty” setting is probably the most important long-term. It does not only tweak the strength of the AI kingdoms, but also their aggressiveness and other game parameters to provide either more a dynamic, or a more casual experience. The last few settings are multiplayer specific and as these Dev Diaries shouldn’t get too lengthy (right?), let’s focus on the most interesting ones. “Player wars” can be either allowed “Always”, “Never” or be allowed after defined time or generations (the number of kings’ deaths in any single player-controlled kingdom). So, a proper game for all players can be found or created – whether you want to avoid the nasty feeling of the other players, wrecking your towns or pillaging your settlements; or you want some of that, but not too early in the game; or you just want to go in PvP action from the first second – it is all a matter of how this setting is configured. “PvP Espionage” setting might look less important and at the start at the game, it really is. But later on, when powerful espionage is achievable and economically affordable, it plays a significant role. As some Spy actions can be very powerful, hard to detect and as there is no way to make an impenetrable defense against espionage, it might be frustrating for some players to be the target of such cunning offensive, though others will surely find a lot of fun in it. If you dislike that backstabbing gameplay, espionage against players can be either limited to less harmful plots, or directly forbidden. The final setting we’ll take a look at is for players, that hate being eliminated or just prefer playing a chill co-op game with their friends. “Defeated players” setting can allow limited picking of new kingdoms to those players, whose previous one got destroyed. This option is probably our team’s favorite, as, friends or enemies in-game, we want to complete the multiplayer games together, until someone reaches the set goal. As adding more settings is not impossible, we’d love to hear whether you find these ones nice for shaping your experience and what else would you like to tweak in the game. How would you use these to make the “perfect” game for your playstyle in single and multiplayer? We’ll talk more about Multiplayer in our DevStream on Thursday, January 13th, @ 5:00 PM GMT / 12:00 PM EST and we’ll be happy if you can join in our conversation – there are still open slots in our lobby. The Twitch stream will be hosted on the THQ Nordic channel: http://twitch.tv/thqnordic and we’ll be grabbing responses from this post as well as answering questions live during the stream. Next time we plan to talk about the production of goods and their usage. Until then, we bid thee farewell. Go forth and conquer! View full article

Hello friends and welcome to the 23rd DevDiary for “Knights of Honor II: Sovereign”! In this one we will try to conclude the religion topic and take a look at Islam and Paganism and the unique gameplay they bring to the game. There is no connection between those two, of course, neither historically, nor gameplay-wise, but we decided to fit them in in one diary, as time is quickly progressing and there are a few other topics we are eager to tell you about and hear your thoughts. Muslim kingdoms have passive advantages on faith and gold production, due to the devotion of their worshippers, as well as the talent of their exquisite craftsmen and merchants. They have different religious buildings and upgrades from the Christian ones, resulting in different needed goods and provided bonuses, but can be just as powerful. Even some shared buildings and upgrades provide different bonuses, e.g. Christians get happiness in provinces where Wineries are built, as well as additional commerce per Monastery. Since alcohol is forbidden in Islam, Muslims do not receive these bonuses, but have additional benefits from Spice shops, Carpetmakers and other things they value more and can benefit more from. Muslim scholars also have a unique action – they can set out on great journeys through the world, when opportunities for such arise. Once started, they will visit many cities along the way and often find trade prospects, strengthening their faith or gaining new knowledge. They can even, very convincingly, preach to the locals about the greatness of their kingdom or religion. However, regardless their persuasiveness, they can sometimes anger the locals and in times of war, suffer dire consequences for their actions or mere presence in some provinces. The greatest achievement of a Muslim kingdom, however, is becoming a Caliphate. It is an extremely hard goal and can be achieved only by great kingdoms, ruled by great leaders. The title is a well worthy achievement, though, as Caliphates have significant diplomatic influence over the Muslim world and can declare a Jihad against their enemies. In this holy war the caliphate and its allies have higher morale and other bonuses against the infidels. The Islamic kingdoms are also usually eager to join, as this is a respected act and the sole participation, not to mention victory, increases the opinion of their Scholars. In KoH2:S, there are two branches of Islam – Sunni and Shia. They differ mainly by the cities they consider holy and thus defend ferociously. Kingdoms, following Shia Islam, also have more difficulties in becoming caliphates and are usually more zealous and less tolerant against other religions. Paganism is a very peculiar “religion” in KoH2:S, as we undertook a more gameplay-oriented approach for it. Instead of representing specific historical pagan kingdoms with the beliefs they had, we decided to leave that in the hands of the players. The religious noblemen here are called Shamans and each of them can promote one belief – like “Family”, “Raids”, “Conquest”, “Gods”, etc. Each of those provides bonuses to the entire kingdom and players can strategically pick their preferred combinations, or shape their kingdoms according to their fantasy, if they prefer a more immersive experience. Shamans have one additional huge benefit, compared to Scholars and Clerics – they can lead armies, even without learning a marshal (military) skill and their armies consist of up to 8 squads (considering that all other non-marshal characters can lead only up to 5). This makes them very versatile and the pagan armies can be numerous and devastating. Unlike all other religions, paganism spreads by itself from province to province, even across borders. This can be very helpful in gaining the loyalty of both the domestic and foreign population, which respectively increase stability and can make conquest easier. Finally, it is much easier to change the religion of a pagan kingdom, so players can join the Christian or Muslim world at one point of the game more easily, if they see this as a good diplomatic or strategic move. Playing as a pagan kingdom is not as easy as it seems, though, as there are many drawbacks as well. They have very few and weak religious buildings and upgrades and cannot as easily develop their culture and knowledge, thus they cannot produce some important goods. Their book production is severely penalized, their gold income is slightly reduced and, last but not least, almost the entirety of the world looks down on them, which has its effect on diplomacy. We’d love to hear your thoughts on Islam and Paganism. Would you try to find the best strategies, strengths and weakness of kingdoms, following different religions, or would you pick one and focus on it? What pagan beliefs would you like to see in the game and promote, to fulfill your fantasy and do you find that “sandbox” approach interesting, or would you rather have a more historically accurate predefined setup instead? We’ll talk more about Islam and Paganism in our DevStream on Thursday, December 9th, @ 5:00 PM GMT / 12:00 PM EST and we’ll be thrilled if you join in our conversation. The Twitch stream will be hosted on the THQ Nordic channel: http://twitch.tv/thqnordic and we’ll be grabbing responses from this post as well as answering questions live during the stream. View full article