[DevDiary 34 - Update 1.4 - Catholicism and Diplomacy]

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!

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[DevDiary 33 - Patch 1.3 Updates]

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 19^th of April on the THQ Nordic channel: http://twitch.tv/thqnordic. Until then – go forth and conquer!
 

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[DevDiary 32 - Modding Improvements]

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:

1. Mods will no longer be invalidated every time developers release a patch (starting from the next one).
2. 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!

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[DevDiary 31 - First Post-Release Improvements]

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 15^th 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.
 

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[Upcoming DevStream - Which Kingdom/Save should we play?]

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!

 

[DevDiary 30 - Tuning the AI]

Hello friends and welcome to the 30^th 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!

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[DevDiary 29 – Political View]

Hello friends and welcome to the 29^th 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!

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[DevDiary 28 - Intro to Tactical Battles]

Hello friends and welcome to the 28^th 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!

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[DevDiary 27 - Army Recruitment and Supply]

Hello friends and welcome to the 27^th DevDiary for “Knights of Honor II: Sovereign”! Back in our 5^th 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 19^th, @ 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!

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[DevDiary 26 - Goods and Advantages]

Hello friends and welcome to the 26^th 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 24^th, @ 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!

 

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[DevDiary 25 - Royal Family]

Hello friends and welcome to the 25^th 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 17^th, @ 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!

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[DevDiary 24 - Multiplayer Part 2]

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!

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[DevDiary 23 - Religion: Islam and Paganism]

Hello friends and welcome to the 23^rd 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 9^th, @ 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.

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[DevDiary 22 - Religion: Christianity]

Hello friends and welcome to the 22nd DevDiary for “Knights of Honor II: Sovereign”! We decided to return to the Religion topic, started in DevDIary 20 in which we made an overview about the common Cleric actions and religion effects. Today we will take a closer look at Christianity – the religion, followed by the most European kingdoms at the historical period and region the game takes place in.

In KoH2:S, there are two vastly different branches (families) of Christianity – Catholicism and Orthodoxy. As we mentioned earlier, we’ve chosen this simplified model after considering and experimenting with a lot of variants and sub-branches, since we felt it serves best the purposes of the gameplay. Further segmentation seemed to bring a lot of complexity for little gameplay and strategical effect.

Catholic kingdoms have arguably the best starting bonuses – they have trading and commercial bonuses, as well as lower cost for buildings. Their religious gameplay is centered around the Papacy – good relations with it can lead to a lot of benefits, like promoting Clerics to Cardinals, which have significant bonuses on piety and books production, as well as on their actions. Eventually, when black smoke rises above the Sistine Chapel, one of the Cardinals is chosen to become the new Pope. In case the new Pope is not from the Papacy, the kingdom from which he was selected from loses him as a knight in their royal court, but now have new special actions available only to those very close to the Pope- like instigating a crusade or requesting a kingdom to be excommunicated.

When a Crusade starts, a strong army is assigned to a leader, chosen among those army leaders who are deemed worthy. Then the army marches (without any player’s or kingdom’s control) towards a chosen excommunicated or heathen kingdom. This powerful army will try to destroy its target, usually providing control over the conquered towns either to the kingdom of its leader, or to the Papacy. Sometimes, especially when their quest goes wrong, Crusades go rogue and can establish their own kingdom or simply turn to (in)famous rebels. Things can go wrong in quite a few ways, especially with some help, like assassinating its leader, pulling some strings with a spy to divert it, or destroying the Papacy just to name a few.

Playing as a Catholic kingdom is not as easy as it sounds, though. Its Clergy is the most demanding and easiest to offend – actions like attacking other Catholics and refusing Papacy demands will reduce Clergy opinion, as well as the relations with the Papacy. And Papacy’s demands are not always easy to fulfill – for example, gold is often demanded for crusades and the sums are definitely not neglectable. Getting excommunicated is also disastrous, as Catholics, hated and declared as an enemy to all other Catholics, may lead to a lot of problems and it is hard to receive an absolution from the Holy See.

There is also the danger that someone will overtake Rome and destroy the Papacy – regardless of the religion of the conqueror, the Papacy cannot exist while another kingdom holds Rome. This, of course, brings a lot of hatred towards the conqueror from all Catholic kingdoms and they will struggle to drive the invaders out and restore it. This will bring the liberator a lot of bonuses if accomplished– relations with the Papacy and the whole Catholic world, as well as significantly increased Clergy opinion.

Orthodox kingdoms have the highest books production. Their gameplay revolves around the relations with the Ecumenical Patriarchy and/or having an Autocephalous (independent) church. Claiming Autocephaly is not an easy task to do, though, as it requires high crown authority, a very experienced Cleric, and some sort of influence over the kingdom controlling Constantinople and the Ecumenical Patriarchy. The more autocephalous kingdoms there are, the harder it gets for a new one to be recognized as such, so usually reducing their numbers by force or espionage is usually a necessity.

Unlike in the case with Rome, controlling Constantinople means controlling the Ecumenical Patriarchy and the Ecumenical Patriarch himself. Every Patriarch, especially the Ecumenical, is a very powerful cleric with significant bonuses on books and piety production, as well as on their actions. Patriarchs also provide a few random bonuses (which significantly vary between one patriarch to another) to the entire kingdom. Orthodox kingdoms can choose among their clerics and a few characters, outside their court, to succeed the Patriarch title, once the previous one dies.

Both Catholic and Orthodox kingdoms can send their Clerics on missions in Constantinople AND Rome, where they get different bonuses depending on their sub-religion – books, piety, commerce and relations. If they are in the religious center of their own Church, the bonuses are increased, based on their level. Being on such missions allocates their full attention, but when they are needed for something else, they can quickly return to their kingdom and once the tasks at hand are done, they can easily return to the religious centers. In this aspect, Christian Clerics are more versatile to play with than Scholars and Shamans, as well as Merchants, who, in comparison, require more time to build up a good trade with a kingdom and lose that progress when they are recalled.

We’d like to hear what you guys think – which one do you think will be your preferred religion, or would you prefer to experiment and try all of them? Are you looking forward to leading mighty crusades, or do you prefer to pick kingdoms, following less demanding religions than Catholicism and focus on other kingdom aspects?

We’ll talk more about Christianity in our DevStream on Thursday, October 14^th, @ 3:00 PM GMT / 11:00 AM EST and we’ll be thrilled if you join in our conversation. You can come and repent, ask for forgiveness, but Though Shalt Not ask for the release date! 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, if the Pope allows it, we will return to the topic of Multiplayer, talking more about starting conditions, rules and how those can shape each campaign. Until then, we bid thee farewell! Go forth and conquer!

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[DevDiary 21 - Royal Dungeon]

Hello friends and welcome to the 21st DevDiary for “Knights of Honor II: Sovereign”! We initially planned to talk more about Multiplayer in this one, but since we are still iterating on a few settings and the lobby UI, we decided to tell you first about the Royal dungeon – how knights get imprisoned, what events can take place afterwards and actions undertaken – by the prisoners’ kingdoms and by the “dungeon keepers”.

Surely, the most common way knights get imprisoned in KoH2:S is in battles – when Marshals, or any other knights leading armies, fail to retreat in time and lose, they are either killed on the battlefield, or more often – captured. Historically, it was very common practice for noblemen to make their status and heraldry noticeable, and the enemy soldiers knew that they are worth much more alive than dead.

Spies, of course, can also often get imprisoned, considering the illegal and risky nature of their activity in foreign kingdoms. Sometimes, even more peaceful and “innocent” knights can end up in a Royal dungeon. If war occurs with a kingdom where a merchant or diplomat is, there is some chance the enemies will hold them as prisoners. Also, the sneaky spies can try to frame knights on missions and, if successful, they get imprisoned in the kingdom they are in.

Once imprisoned, knights cannot perform any of their actions and the only role they continue to contribute with is governing. They cannot be assigned or reassigned as governors, but if they already were, then their advisors, skills and “governing policy” continue to affect their province. Not all prisoners are helpless, though. Leadership skill makes “Inspire riot” available and Plotting skill – “Organize escape”. These are both risky actions, but still – a possibility for the imprisoned knights to escape on their own.

They can also be rescued from the outside. Spies can try to help own or friendly prisoners escape and this is not an opportunity, but simply an action – when a spies arrive in kingdoms, they can immediately start plotting the escape.

There are risk-free ways of getting back imprisoned knights. There is the diplomatic way, convincing the other kingdom to let them go, or paying a requested ransom. There is nothing that can go wrong in both cases and the kingdom’s nobility will appreciate the effort of saving one of them.

In case none of these options is available or affordable, imprisoned knights can simply be abandoned. This, of course, decreases the Nobility opinion, but frees the prisoners’ position in the Royal court, so that a new knight can be hired. After all, desperate times call for desperate measures.

When kingdoms capture a knight, there are several actions available. The most merciful is releasing that knight. If he is a foreign knight, that leads to relations improvement. Your noblemen would also approve that decision. They will also approve if the released prisoner is a knight of yours who rebelled against you – in that case, he will be back in the royal court. This will hurt your crown authority, though, as mercy against betrayers might be considered by some as a sign of weakness. Lastly, releasing simple rebels is well received by the peasantry and ill-received by the nobility. We are still considering adding the possibility to invite knights, renounced by their kingdoms, to become members of your royal court and this will most likely make it into the game.


Executing knights leads to pretty much the opposite results. If they are foreign knights, this will surely worsen your relations and in times of peace, lead to a crown authority loss, as it is considered rather barbaric. Executing your own knights is frowned upon by the nobility, but increases crown authority. Crown authority is also increased upon executing rebels and some gold is acquired. Sometimes nobility would also approve, but the peasantry will definitely not and sometimes the clergy as well – after all, rebels are part of the local population and often popular among them.

Finally, there is the “deal” action. Prisoners can be given some funds to lead a rebellion in another kingdom. This can end in many ways – the prisoner might really become a loyalist rebel leader, he can just go rogue and lead an independent rebellion, or even take the gold and disappear. As powerful as they can be, such shady dealings are always a bit of a gamble.

Even if no actions are taken, various events can occur within a dungeon. Prisoners can die there, escape by themselves or even form riots or mass escapes. The last two options are more likely to happen if a royal dungeon gets filled up over a certain threshold, which can be increased by some traditions and buildings. Thus, it is generally unwise to keep too many important people in a dungeon for a long time and getting rid of at least some of them from time to time, one way or another, will reduce the likelihood of such unwanted events.

In this section of the DevDiary, we’d usually say something like “we’d love to hear what you’d like to do with your prisoners”, but it sounds kind of wrong and we are also afraid what you might answer… But, jokes aside, tell us what you think of these features – do these actions and options sound interesting to you and if you have other ideas – feel free to share them – who knows what neat features can still make it into the game.

We’ll talk more about Royal Dungeon in our DevStream on Thursday, September 2nd,  @ 3:00 PM GMT / 11:00 AM EST and we’ll be thrilled if you join in our conversation. Do come right in, our wardens expect you! If you behave nicely and do not ask for the release date of the game, we might even lower the ransom price for letting you go. 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 will return to the topic of Multiplayer as planned, talking more about starting conditions, rules and how those can shape each campaign. Until then, we bid thee farewell! Go forth and conquer!

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[DevDiary 20 - Religion]

33 minutes ago, Bassilisk said:

I'll be waiting for the live stream to hear more and will read more but for now I get ththe first cooment.... muahhahah

Nice!

[DevDiary 20 - Religion]

Hello friends and welcome to the 20th DevDiary for “Knights of Honor II: Sovereign”! Today we will start talking about religion, going through all key points of the feature and the common gameplay options it presents to all kingdoms. Though this is not one of the central elements of the game, it still plays a big importance and different religions offer quite a few unique elements, thus leading to unique strengths and strategies the players can explore.

So, starting with the basics, we have 3 different religious “families” – Christianity, Islam and Paganism. Christianity has a subdivision to Orthodoxy and Catholicism and Islam – to Sunnism and Shiism. Indeed, we have considered Coptic Christianity, Ibadi Islam, Bogomilism and many others, as well as simply adding “heresy,” but we wanted to keep this feature simple enough, so we didn’t branch the religions any further. Things were getting way too burdening for the average player and the gameplay differences we would introduce were too insignificant compared to all the confusion. Paganism is the “religion” we made the biggest “historical” simplification to, as we unified all religions that are not Christian and Islamic in that category. As a result, this turned Pagans into more of a sandbox, which led to some really cool gameplay options for players. In another two or three DevDiaries we will have a deeper look on the specifics of each religion and sub-religion, but right now, we will focus on the common stuff.

 

For starters, religion plays a role in kingdom-to-kingdom relations. This means that kingdoms from one and the same religion are more eager to sign trade agreements, non-aggression pacts, marriages and others. In the same vein, kingdoms from different religions are more aggressive towards each other, especially if a “heathen” (in their eyes) takes hold of a holy city.

Depending on the religion, kingdoms also have slightly different building possibilities – the Christians have Churches, Cathedrals and Universities, the Muslims have Mosques, Grand mosques and Madrasahs, while the Pagans only have Temples. Within those (and within other buildings), there are some different upgrades, effects and requirements, so some resources are more valuable to kingdoms following specific religions. Certain types of units may also require a specific religion – for example, only Catholic kingdoms may recruit Templar Knights.

Within a kingdom, religion plays a significant role, as provinces that preach religions different than the official one of the kingdom have some religious tension. Ruling over a Shia province within a Sunni kingdom leads to a smaller hit to the local stability, for example, but if it was within a Catholic kingdom – well, that could be trouble. On top of that, religious settlements such as Shrines and Monasteries aren’t so beneficial to a Muslim kingdom and pre-built (from the previous owner) buildings like Cathedrals or Temples also have very limited bonuses.

And here comes one very important role of each Cleric/Scholar/Shaman (called differently depending on their kingdoms’ religions) – the “Preach” action. This is a slow and very expensive action, which costs both gold and piety/faith/tradition – the main “currency” for all kinds of religious actions, named differently for each religion. Preaching is done in a region – a starting province is selected and once it’s converted, the religious character will simply continue to another near-by one. If he succeeds to convert the religion of a province, this will ease the tension and convert the religious settlements in it to the one of his kingdom’s type – e.g. Temples will convert to Monasteries if the religion of a Pagan province is converted to Christianity. All previously built structures will also continue to function, with the caveat that some effects related to buildings like Universities and Cathedrals might be altered, or even stop working. And besides being expensive, the “Preach” action also presents a serious threat to the life of the religious person doing it, especially if crown authority is low, the kingdom is at war, or the knight is of lower level.

If a religious character learns the “Charity” skill, he also gains an additional action – “Commit to charity”. As you’ve probably guessed, this is also an expensive one that has an upkeep, and while the cost scales with the size of the kingdom, so does its effect, as it increases the stability within all provinces. There is no limit to how many knights can perform this action at once, so if things start to get really ugly within a kingdom, having several of them committed to charity can really be life-saving.

Apart from these character actions, there are also a few key religion-specific ones that Clerics/Scholars/Shamans can utilize, but we’ll touch on them in more detail in future dev diaries, when we delve more in-depth into each specific religion. Of course, when not performing any actions, religious characters continue to play a key role in governing, particularly if you have provinces which have a lot of religious settlements. For example, putting a cleric in a province with many monasteries will result in a steady influx of faith and books, which in combination with the right buildings can turn the realm into an important location for boosting your kingdom’s culture.

Finally, one common action that is available to all kingdoms is the option to accept a new religion. This is a kingdom action, instead of a knight’s one, and can be extremely risky. Even upon success, it has some consequences, like possible rebellions, religious characters leaving your court due to disapproval of the change, and a severe drop of the opinion of your religious cast. Failing adds a huge crown authority drop on top of that. To increase its chances, a kingdom needs to have many provinces already preaching the target religion, as well as a respected king, preferably skilled in some particular disciplines like Theology, Leadership and others. But, of course, changing a religion can open huge gameplay possibilities and instantly has an effect on the diplomatic relations, both to kingdoms following its old and its new religion. This action is easiest for pagans, as they don’t have such a strong religious institution and are the least reluctant to accept another religion. 

But in the end, we’d love to hear on your opinion on the topic! Are you the type of player who enjoys delving into the religious side of things in strategy games, or do you prefer to take on a different approach? And do you see yourself using many religious characters in your court, in comparison to other classes?

We’ll talk more about Religion in our DevStream on Thursday, July 22^nd, @ 3:00 PM GMT / 11:00 AM EST and we’ll be thrilled if you join in our conversation – we will talk more in-depth about our approach to designing the religions in our game, some key differences between each one and how vital of a role religious characters have. 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 will return to the topic of Multiplayer, talking more about starting conditions, rules and how those can shape each campaign. Until then, we bid thee farewell!

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[DevDiary 19 - Multiplayer Part 1]

Hello friends and welcome to the 19th DevDiary for “Knights of Honor II: Sovereign”! The time has finally come for us to talk about the multiplayer features in our game, and we can say that we’ve been waiting for this moment with a mounting anticipation ever since DevDiary 1. There we mentioned that “multiplayer” is one of the pillars of KoH2:S and indeed, it nearly doubled the game design and programming efforts, but we still think it is worth it.

Maybe you wonder why is it so much more difficult for such a game to support multiplayer. Well, the technical reasons are more straightforward – every simple logic must be well synchronized between the host and clients and split to request and responses. Permission levels and cheating protection are also important and there is really a lot of work on lobbies, connections and reconnections between players, chats, saving multiplayer games and so on. What is a bit less obvious is that many mechanics are way more difficult to be balanced and fun simultaneously in multiplayer and singleplayer modes – especially diplomacy, battles, espionage, but many others as well. Let us focus on the major questions first, though.

KoH2:S will be playable with up to 6 players in a game. That number might be increased later on, but for now, we find it suitable. All of the 3 popular variants of team formations are available – cooperative play, team games and free-for-all. When playing in teams, the players’ efforts and results towards a common goal are united and there are some additional benefits and rules, e.g. no force in the game can drive teammates into war, including espionage, pacts and others.

The second major setting is the game mode, which defines the victory condition. As these are very different between each other, they require vastly different strategies from the players in order to win.

For example, in “Peasants’ rush” the players (teams) are tasked with expanding their kingdoms to a selected size, so they have to find a way to make a rapid expansion and usually overtake their weakest neighbors, but also to defend their starting and newly taken lands. In “Greedy kings” the goal is collecting a large amount of gold as fast as possible, so here trading and economy are crucial, but waging war for that purpose is also a viable strategy.  In “War for goods”, players have to find an efficient way to produce many different resources and thus they would be wise to carefully choose which territories provide the province features which they need to unlock and develop production chains. This mode requires especially good planning in team games, as long-term expansion, trading and development strategies for the kingdoms in a team must be well synchronized to avoid producing the same resources.

There are already a few other modes implemented, but we are still iterating and have yet to decide how many and which will be included. This is one of those things we can continue to work on even after the release of the game, too.

Beside modes, there are many other game settings available that are useful in shaping up the experience the way players like it, but also provide more variety. Some non-default settings can result in substantial differences in the gameplay rules, which players must take into consideration and adapt their strategies accordingly if they want to maximize their chances of success. As there are many such settings, we shall talk about them in part 2 of the Multiplayer DevDiaries. For now, let’s take a look just on those, which tie especially well with game modes.

Time limit is an option, that can be set in several ways – it can be strictly specified, it can be specified with some random (and hidden to the players) extended time, and it can be set to “generations”. One “generation” is counted when the last of the players’ kings dies and is replaced by a new one. So, this limit can vary greatly depending on how protective the players are towards their kings, as well as some other settings like aging speed and espionage restrictions.

The combination between game modes and time limit allows the players to setup their sessions the way they want – it is easy to configure a blitz game by defining low targets for the modes, e.g. only 10 resources produced for “War for goods” and a 1-hour limit to do it. Of course, if players want a long game, they can increase the target resources to 60 and not set any time limit at all. The balance between the goal and time limit defines how challenging the game shall be, of course.

Finally, for players that dislike games resulting in draws, there is an option to set one or two tiebreakers for when early end (usually time limit) triggers. Tiebreakers are set separately from victory condition, so they can be configured to “complement” it, or to be completely different. For example, in “War for goods” setting the first tiebreaker to be “number of unique goods” will make the players race towards that goal no matter what, but setting it as “most gold” or “most provinces” will allow some players to focus on completely different strategies if and when they assume no one would reach the main goal in time.

It is important for us to hear about the preferences of our most devoted audience – the people, that follow us here and in our other social channels throughout the development process – you. Do you prefer playing such games alone, or do you love the concept of playing them together with friends or allies and enemies unknown from all around the world? Are you more eager to join forces with other players and rule over the evil AI kingdoms, or are you looking forward to some merciless campaigns where you will face the unmatched cunningness and creativity that only real players can offer? Do you find the pressure of time as a fun element, or do you prefer to take your time and calmly make your way towards the final goal you’ve chosen?

If you have some cool ideas for game modes and victory conditions, or for some special settings that you think that would be important, it is now a great time to share them with us!

We’ll talk more about Multiplayer in our DevStream on Thursday, June 24th, @ 3:00 PM GMT / 11:00 AM EST and we’ll be happy if you can join in our conversation – we will surely mention more game modes, settings and details about them. 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 will talk about Clerics and Christianity – since the religion topic is vast and Christianity, Islam and Paganism are very different in KoH2:S, we decided that it is simply impossible to talk about all of them in a single entry. Until then, we bid thee farewell. Go forth and conquer!

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[Forum Badges]

We actually talked about adding badges at one point early on. Is this something others would like to see?

[Where are the past dev diaries?]

They'll be coming back to YouTube very soon. We had to make a slight adjustment/update to all of the videos and the media team was a little slammed last week with other priorities. I have a meeting with the team on Friday, so will check in on timeframe, but hopefully it's as early as sometime next week!

[Fun topic - What's the first country you will play in KoH2?]

Does the country Veso set as the default during early game development count as my first country? 🙂 or can I pick one based around what I'll play first when the game ships?

[DevDiary 18 - Spies and Espionage]

7 hours ago, Sh0ppo from 9ers_Gaming said:

Syre, we captured a spy.
We don't know where he comes from and what his intentions are - but we could find out his name: Sir Bradley from the THQ Nordics

It's Sir Bradford to you! 🙂

[DevDiary 18 - Spies and Espionage]

Hello friends and welcome to the 18th DevDiary for “Knights of Honor II: Sovereign”! As you are now well infiltrated in our development process, the time has come for you to eavesdrop on classified information about one of the most emblematic features in KoH – the Spy and Espionage.

We must admit that we were greatly inspired of the intrigues in Game of Thrones, amongst many other books, movies and games, and the concept that “everything (and every man) has a price”. We had (and still have) countless ideas around what could be achieved by espionage and how the system should work exactly. The bar we set for ourselves on the Spy class is quite high, since Spies are favorite to many of the fans of KoH and since the release of the first game, we’re humbled in how it seems to have provided a source of inspiration to a few game developers over the years as well. We’ve tried to preserve the “magic” of this feature, but at the same time build on it and add more possibilities and actions.
 

There was also one very major difference to take into consideration – one of the pillars of the development of KoH2:S– the multiplayer. As people can be much more cunning than an AI, and players in one team can infiltrate several spies in the same kingdom, we had to be careful when designing and balancing what these knights can do and what strategies can the players explore. In result, espionage in KoH2:S has a lot of similarities to the one in KoH, but also at least as many differences and new additions.

Let’s start with probably the most significant difference – how a spy infiltrates a kingdom. Instead of waiting for the enemy to hire a new knight (which then turns out to be your spy, if you are lucky), you can now immediately infiltrate any kingdom and your spy never becomes a character in your opponent’s court. Instead, he can do his dirty deeds alone, or BRIBE some of the opponent’s knights. At one point of the development of the classes, we decided to make a very clear distinction between diplomats and spies and removed all offensive actions from the diplomat (like ruining relations between foreign kingdoms and such) and most defensive ones from the spy. As a result, they are now used for very different strategies.
 

Upon arrival in a kingdom, a spy immediately “provides” vision over its lands, which includes the position of its armies – a valuable piece of information, especially in case of war. Additionally, he starts collecting various type of rumors about the kingdom he is in – its future plans, some weaknesses and problems, etc. Furthermore, for a cost/price he can start searching for a way to ruin the relations of that kingdom with another one. But these benefits are just the tip of the iceberg. As time goес by, various opportunities will arise for the spy like murder plots, provoking war, etc.

One of the most common and important among those opportunities is the Bribing. Any enemy knight, except the king, can potentially be bribed and if that is successful, new opportunity types will arise. These opportunities depending on the newly bribed puppets’ class, whether they are governing a town, whether they are leading an army, etc. For example, a bribed merchant can aid in robbing the treasury, a marshal can try to inspire a kingdom-wide army revolt and a puppet spy can aid in the assassination of otherwise unreachable targets like the members of the royal family. A governor can open the gates during siege, and a puppet, that afterwards becomes king… Well, we will let you imagine what opportunities might arise from that.

Every spy action brings some serious risk, though. We can easily say that this class is all about “high risk, high reward” playstyle. If a plot is revealed, this has a negative effect on the foreign relations of the kingdom and can even lower its crown authority, depending on the action. Furthermore, the spy might be imprisoned if captured, or even outright killed. What the chances of success and revealing are depend on many factors, not just the skills and rank of the spies and what exactly are they trying to do. Some of those factors are traditions of both kingdoms, their crown authority, their kings’ espionage attribute, the rank of their best spy (thus spies also play a counter-espionage role), etc…

Besides the risk, most spy actions are very expensive, with their activities and bribes often requiring high upkeep and good preparation before they are executed. It is often a good strategy to combine espionage with other activities, in order to “tweak” the situation for the most beneficial results. Thus, espionage is useful mainly mid and late game for powerful kingdoms and if you want to build the “Ultimate Spy Realm”, well, a lot of dedication is required for ranking up your spies, getting proper traditions and ensuring stable economy, that can provide for spy activities.

Well thought out and executed espionage can be really devastating for a kingdom and for some players, being the victims of these actions might not be so fun. We’ve provided an option for players, who dislike that part of the game – a host can forbid or limit spy interactions by their severity level, so if you are up for a “fair honorable” game with no sneaky stuff, you can set it up like so.

You’d better tell us what you think, or we will make you talk, one way or another! /evilgrin

Does the concept of such infiltration and bribery seem appealing to you, or do you remain loyal to the old concept of the spies, disguising as foreign knights? Are you fond of the espionage system at all, or do you prefer the more straightforward method of “infiltrating” your enemies with 50,000 feudal knights?

We will spread more deceitful rumors about Spies and Espionage in our DevStream on Thursday, May 27th, @ 3:00 PM GMT / 11:00 AM EST, so you can sneak in and eavesdrop on our conversation. The Twitch stream will be secretly hosted on the THQ Nordic channel: http://twitch.tv/thqnordic and we’ll be stealing responses from this post to answer during the stream. You can try interrogating us during the live stream, if you dare, but you will not find out anything out from us – we will not talk!

We would have told you what we will talk about next time, but our memory is kind of fuzzy – maybe some gold might help us remember… You know where to find us. Until then, we bid thee farewell. Go forth and spread your network of spies!

************************************************************************************************************

P.S. CLASIFIED: Curious information from the recently opened top secret KoH dossier, do not read without the proper authorization!!! Note to Brad Logston – do not publish this segment!!!

Maybe you remember how in the first game to infiltrate a spy, you must send him in a kingdom and wait for a new knight to be hired there; this knight would then be your spy. The problem was that royal courts were getting filled pretty quickly as the game  progressed, making hiring rare. Thus, it was next to impossible to infiltrate new spies during the mid and late game, rendering espionage practically useless. So, we implemented (unknown to the players) a workaround – knights, that were already hired,  could also “turn out” spies. That led to an interesting side effect – your princes could become spies, sent from someone and players were wondering how is that possible. Well, that’s how.

We are not too proud for “cheating” the system like that, but sometimes ruthless decisions have to be taken for the greater good – the fun of the players. It is all about the fun…
 

This DevDiary will autodestruct in 3, 2, 1…

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[DevDiary 17 - Settlements and Province Features]

Hello friends, and welcome to 17^th DevDiary for “Knights of Honor II: Sovereign”! Though we initially planned to talk about Espionage and Spies in this one, we decided to change the topic, and cover some fundamental features that are high time we shed more light on. Settlements and provinces are at the base of the game’s economy, connected to the production of any resources or currency.

As we established in the very first DevDiaries we wrote, the world in our game is divided into provinces, more than 300 of them. Today we will take a look into the key elements of a province, and how those elements define a province’s potential and benefits to whoever controls it.

Every province has exactly one town, symbolizing its governmental center. Through that town the players can view a summary of everything important in the province, as well as make decisions about it. Besides the town, there are always several settlements around the province, usually around 5-6. In some locations there can be more or less, depending on the province’s size, but many fall into the 5-6 range. These settlements determine, to a large extent, the strengths of a province. There are 4 basic types:

• Villages represent larger population and commercial potential
• Crop farms are related to the production of food and other agricultural resources and goods
• Settlements with religious importance primarily serve educational and religious purposes, represented in our game by “books” and “faith”; they can be monasteries, mosques and shrines, depending on the province’s religion
• Castles primarily improve defenses and recruitment capabilities
• In addition to their type, some settlements can be coastal as well, which plays an important role if some naval related buildings are made

All of these provide initial bonuses, but more importantly, certain buildings and upgrades affect their production and efficiency. This means constructing a building in a province which has several related settlements to it can be substantially impactful.

 Many possibilities arise for players to explore – they can try to adapt their strategy to the provinces they have; or try to execute their initially planned strategy, picking the most suitable provinces among their own for each purpose planned; finally, they can also try to quickly conquer certain provinces that they find suitable for a given purpose. As an example, finding a province with 3-4 monasteries will definitely be a good goal for someone planning to build a cathedral and university – such territories are often worth fighting for.

In addition to settlements, each province is characterized by several “province features.” Some of them are represented by a corresponding special settlement, e.g. Flax Fields, Herb gardens, Cattle farms, Mines etc. Others are not represented by settlements and are considered to be either an additional resource in an existing settlement (e.g. gold veins, silver ore and lodestone are related to mines, but there are mines without any of those), or just as something that can be acquired in the province – rare game, amber deposits, salt, etc.

There are “geographical” province features as well, with the main difference compared to other province features being they are predetermined by the position of the province’s town and its surroundings. We love to randomize as many elements as we can, so the game feels different every time you play it, creating more of a “sandbox” experience. Settlements and province features are randomly generated each time within some rules and boundaries, but we can’t really say Venice is not a coastal town or that Vienna is not on a large river, right? Geographical restrictions do apply for some of the other resources as well, e.g. you will not see camel herds in Sweden, vineyards in Sahara, and you are quite likely to have horses in the steppes.

It is hard to say where the line should be drawn, as gameplay on one side and historical accuracy on the other can clash, but we are trying to find the best balance between them and create enjoyable gameplay without making the Old world look too crazy.

But let’s get back to the function of province features. Most of them do contribute a little to the province’s economy, but don’t necessarily get significant bonuses from the regular builds. Instead, province features provide the possibility of constructing unique building(s) and upgrade(s. Often this leads to new resources becoming available for the kingdom, and in turn makes new buildings, upgrades and units available as well.

For example, “Herb gardening” can only be made where the Herbs province feature is available, and through it kingdoms can make upgrades like “Herbalist shacks”, “Dye workshops”, “Apiaries”, “Candle makers” etc. and thus produce resources like Herbs, Dyes, Wax and Candles, that have usage in textile, medicine, naval buildings and upgrades, etc…

As you see, we use the terms “buildings” and “upgrades” rather loosely, as these can represent industries, techniques, practices, organizations and what not. Buildings and upgrades are quite a large topic – they are over a hundred with interesting specifics, so we’ll need to leave them for another DevDiary.

To summarize, province features are quite important and often a driving force for expansion. Supplied with well-tanned and hardened leather, iron and trained warhorses, a kingdom can recruit fierce elite soldiers; great naval advantages and discoveries are impossible without plenty of resources, from timber, tar and wax to maps and compasses. As we talked earlier in the DevDiary about merchants, some goods can be imported, but it is hard to maintain a kingdom’s economy if it relies too heavily on resources produced elsewhere – it can be rather expensive and sometimes trade relations can be ruined.

We’d love to hear what your preferred playstyle is in strategic games with such sandbox elements – do you like to adapt your strategy to the circumstances, or bend the circumstances, until they fit your strategy? To what level do you enjoy the random generation – would you prefer full-fledged unmanipulated randomization and thus – a new world every time; somewhat determined world, only with nuances; or straight-out predetermined one (if you pick the later, you’ve probably played “Lost temple” a lot, right?).

We will talk a bit more about Settlements and Province features in our DevStream on Thursday, April 22^th, @ 3:00 PM GMT / 11:00 AM EST but more importantly, this time we will spare part of our streaming time to show a sneak peek at new in-game footage of KoH2:S – if you want to be among the first to see new gameplay, tune 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.

Next time we will talk about the emblematic class of KoH series – Spy and Espionage; what we’ve kept from the first game, what we’ve changed, added and why. We are having a bit of Déjà vu with this last sentence…

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[DevDiary 16 - Prestige, Great Powers, Emperor of the World]

9 hours ago, Yavor said:

Hello dear Devs,

I’ve noticed that you postponed your devdiary. Please tell us whether the staff of Black Sea Games and THQ Nordic are healthy and fine! I know that Sofia has been hit hard, so I wanted to ask. I wish for all of you to stay healthy and safe, everyone!

Kind Regards!

Hi Yavor,

Thanks for asking! Everyone is fine and healthy, talked with the team this morning. There were schedule conflicts last week that forced us to move the DevStream to 3/18 that we just couldn't work around (my fault!). Look forward to seeing everyone on Thursday!

Cheers!

- Brad Logston