THQN Brad

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 14th, @ 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! View full article

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! View full article

Nice!

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 22nd, @ 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! View full article

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! View full article

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

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!

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?

It's Sir Bradford to you! 🙂

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… View full article

Hello friends, and welcome to 17th 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 22th, @ 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… View full article

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

Hello friends, and welcome to 16th DevDiary for “Knights of Honor II: Sovereign”! When we talked about traditions in DD10, we mentioned the concept of a kingdom’s prestige, and how traditions are unlocked as prestige increases. Prestige has а much greater impact in the game, though, and it even paves the road to victory, so today we will take a deeper look at how it is increased and what role it plays. Measuring the greatness of a kingdom in KoH2:S is done by summing up two elements. The first element represents major events that took place in its history (fame). The second one represents its current greatness (prestige). Actions and events can lead both to increases or decreases of fame. The example that usually comes to mind first is battle and war outcomes – winning brings fame and losing reduces it. There are many ways to increase your fame however, like leading a crusade or putting an end to a rebellion. The ways to lose fame are broader, so the players might want to be careful with their actions – executing noble prisoners, breaking non-aggression pacts, attacking their vassals, etc. bring ill fame. The negatives of such actions, however, have a long lasting, but not permanent, effect and as time passes, the wrongdoings are forgotten, little by little. Things that comprise prestige are control of important cities (e.g. Mecca, Constantinople, Venice, Alexandria, London), production of unique goods, important buildings, and rankings. Rankings are an interesting new addition to the series and a major factor here. They are always relative – it depends how well a kingdom is doing compared to the rest of the world – and the prestige bonus is awarded depending on the kingdom’s standing and not on absolute values. Currently there are 15 rankings in five categories (wealth, conquest, culture, society and politics) and the players can aim at topping those which best suit their strategy and playstyle. Additionally, a kingdom also gains a percentage of the prestige earned by its vassals, as well as from kingdoms it has royal ties with, but only by marrying princesses. In the first game of the series players didn’t like marrying princesses, as that would only lead to potential claim of inheritance from the other kingdom, so to counter-balance that in KoH2:S, we added bonuses that only princesses possess, like the prestige bonus, espionage and counter-espionage bonus, and others. As the game develops, we are iterating and balancing the events and actions that increase or decrease fame, as well as adding ways for fame to change when we introduce new features as well. The good news is that this feature is easily moddable as well and those who want to get creative can easily add or remove fame as a side-effect of a building or an action. If a kingdom’s prestige rises above a required value, and if it is among the nine with highest prestige, it starts being considered a great power. Besides the epic golden frame of the coat of arms, great power status provides significant bonuses like higher army morale, stability, and cultural influence in neighboring kingdoms. It also allows the kingdom to vote for becoming the “Emperor of the World”. “Emperor of the World” (EoW) is an important feature we kept from the first game, representing rare gatherings of the Great Powers’ (GPs) kings who can vote to accept the superiority of one of the top two claimants, or abstain, if they want to support none of them. In the process, voters are not all equal, as each kingdom votes with the value of its prestige. Players can even get bolder and try to proclaim themselves as EoW whenever they see fit, as long as they are among the Great Powers and have the required prestige for that action. This is very risky, though, since if the rest of the GPs deny the claim, a war starts between all who denied it and the claimants. In order to get their support, it is not nearly enough just to fulfill the requirements or even to lead the prestige chart and be the leading great power. The rest of the great powers would only support someone if they see them worthy for the title, but likeable as well. Here things like good relations, royal marriages, large scale trading, being caliphate, etc. play a huge role. Yes, this is a bit fictional roleplay-ish feature, which lacks historical accuracy, but it turned out to be quite fun in KoH1 and a good conclusion to a game – if you feel victorious, even though you’ve not conquered yet every single province, you have way to feel like you can win and claim victory and see whether you’re really the undisputed EoW. After all, the game is about becoming the dominant empire in the Old World and not always about “owning” it all. In the situation where an AI kingdom wins such a vote, players can also singlehandedly refuse to accept them, but then they get in war with all of the GPs and results are usually not pretty. However, in multiplayer games such votes cannot be denied and the Emperor of the World is victorious, while the rest must admit their defeat. We’d love to hear what kinds of things you think should bring or take prestige and fame and which ones you expect to be too restrictive for your playstyle. Would you prefer more realistic and punishing effects to make you play more carefully and respectfully to your agreements and common manners, or do you prefer more freestyle gameplay, without too many consequences? We will talk more about Prestige, Great Powers and Emperor of the World in our DevStream on Thursday, March 18th, @ 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 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. View full article

Hello friends, and welcome to 15th DevDiary for “Knights of Honor II: Sovereign”! For this one we have chosen to take quite a different approach and tell you about changes in gameplay features we’ve already presented. The idea behind this is to keep you up to date in regards to the features, but more importantly, to let you in on how we iterate over the game, what kinds of reasons make us add, scrap or rework stuff, and overall give you a better look at the development process. Let’s start with one of the major features that we covered many months ago – the Armies (DevDiary5). When we presented it, the default number of squads a non-marshal knight could lead was 6, marshals could lead 9 and there were additional bonuses on top of that as well – for kings, crusaders, pagans (depending on traditions they follow), etc. The absolute maximum was 18 or 21 in different versions of the game, and we should have in mind that often two knights per each side participate in a battle. However, we decided to reduce the number of squads to 5 non-marshal / 8 marshal and these numbers being the maximal ones. Why? Well, first of all, by playtesting we found out that players usually use 1-2 unit types per army and having too many squads didn’t lead to actual gameplay variety. Also, we found that 12 or more squad was trickier to handle – the UI was busy and it required a lot of micromanagement to check your troops – e.g., how many exactly are healthy, wounded, dead; to merge or abandon some squads, to refill them, to check out their experience and levels. As we want our tactical battles to also be a bit more dynamic, compared to other grand-strategy games, controlling 20 squads in a battle (or even more if you have garrison or other additional troops) felt too burdening. Having less squads makes the choice and handling for each one more significant. Of course, we didn’t want to lose gameplay features, so instead of the “additional squads” bonus, there are now bonuses on “units per squad” and on army morale. The gameplay choices are just as interesting, but everything is neater and tidier and easier for the players to grasp and control. As of now, one squad can vary quite a lot – depending heavily on the province the army leader governs (how many “levies” it has), his skills, kingdom’s traditions and other factors, you can double or even triple your squad size. Moving on to DevDiary7: Rebellions. We iterated a lot over the rebel features over the course of development and when we presented them, we felt that they were quite good. Since then, we’ve made several changes, though. One of the bigger changes was determining Rebellion zone, and allowing rebel armies to cross borders and affecting nearby kingdoms. It felt quite reasonable as an effect, and depending on other gameplay features, sometimes it felt fun too. However, players started complaining about rebels more over time, though, and for mostly two reasons. First, it doesn’t feel fair. You make great efforts to keep your citizens calm, you maintain high Opinions, crown authority, take care of religious and cultural assimilation and in the end – rebels are still coming, because your neighbors are chaotic. Is it realistic? Kind of, it is not unimaginable that some rebels and bandits will date cross in the other kingdom and pillage whatever they can there. “Life isn’t fair”, you might say, but in the end, this is a game and user experience and fun is what leads us (one of our pillars we talked about in DD1, if you can remember). The second reason is that this feature didn’t scale too well. Rebel spawn in neighboring kingdoms, which you cannot control, is still manageable for small or medium sized kingdoms and it creates interesting situations, but do you know what happens if you control 150 provinces and have 50 neighbors? We assure you that the rebel swarm could get very, very ugly. We didn’t totally scrap this behavior, though. We made it more rare, exclusive to “famous rebels” and we might include it to some extent as an element for higher difficulty settings for players, that want more challenging experience. So, saving the big one for last… let’s go back to something we talked about in DevDiary4, Invasions. Here we basically scrapped the “occupation” state, which had a connection to diplomacy, pacing of the game and the way wars are led in general. At first everything about it looked very in-depth and interesting, but (as with number of squads) the numerous stages of overtaking a province seemed confusing for some players and (as in rebels crossing borders) it didn’t scale too well, getting a bit tiresome after you do it 50 times in a single game. The process had three stages – taking political control (in the end of a war or before it), dealing with the disorder state of the locals and then the long process of cultural conversion. Of course, we didn’t want just to dumb it down, so we tried to simplify it, without losing essence. Without having the “occupied” state, we moved some effects to the “disorder” state. Forceful establishing of order by an army now has a political effect and it can be harder to achieve the peaceful establishment of order while the war continues, unless the local population was loyal to you in the first place. In a way, the disorder state behaves as “occupation” while wars last and like the previous disorder state after they are over. The kingdoms that owned these provinces can also demand you to return their lands as a part of a peace treaty or even at some point later in time, and thus we represented that they still have a claim of ownership and the diplomatic part is well preserved. Of course, changes like these three are just the tip of the iceberg – surely, we change smaller stuff every day and make much more drastic changes for features we haven’t yet presented. Naturally, we are trying to make blogs and streams for the “finalized” ones and yes, this is one dirty word in the industry. Our policy is to rework something as much as it needs to be reworked, allowing the time for features to mature and grow to create the best experience we can craft. At Black Sea Games we believe that this is the right path for making really great games. However, we are getting close with KoH2:S and are very satisfied with how most of the things work as they are now. We will talk more about the evolution of the gameplay systems and the dynamics of developing and iterating over them in our DevStream on Thursday, February 11th, @ 4:00 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 as well as answering questions live during the stream. Next time we will talk about one of the main goals of the game – Prestige – how do you gain and lose it and the effects it has in the course of the game and in its end. Until then, we bid thee farewell. Go forth and conquer! View full article

Hello friends, and welcome to the 14th DevDiary for “Knights of Honor II: Sovereign”! In most of the previous diaries, we’ve been focused either on military related stuff, or on relations and interactions between different kingdoms, as those are, naturally, the essence of our game. In this one we will digress from that main course and talk about the “opinions” of different social classes. This feature revolves around how the actions, made by the players (or AIs), affect the different classes in their kingdoms and how the opinions of those classes, in turn, affect the kingdom. In the first game, there was an important kingdom-wide parameter, representing how satisfied the people are with their ruler. It was called “Kingdom power” and we kept it in KoH2:S, renaming it to “Crown authority”. It still plays a major role in the game, but just a few months ago we decided it felt a bit flat and we really wanted to enrich the gameplay and immersion. So to address this, we tried to add more depth in the internal affairs of a kingdom with the “Opinions” feature. Our goal was not to make it too complex or overwhelming for the players to manage, but instead let it run a bit in the background. Opinions have a significant effect, but the control over them is primarily indirect. They reward players for doing what social classes would want from a king, rather than separately taking actions to increase opinions or simply paying gold for that purpose. There are 5 social classes in KoH2:S – Peasantry, Nobility, Clergy, Army and Merchants. Their opinions can vary from -10 to +10 each, and when they are positive, some benefits apply; when they are negative – so do penalties. Additionally, below or above given thresholds, the corresponding social class may take actions to support or oppose their ruler. In contrast to parameters like rebel risk and happiness, opinions are kingdom-wide, so even small changes may lead to very significant effects, especially in larger kingdoms. Explaining how they work will be easiest with some examples for each one. Peasantry opinion is strongly related with rebellion risk and food production rate, but also affect the morale of peasant and militia squads in the army. It is relatively easy to increase, as many buildings, improving the wellbeing of the people and some basic religious buildings play a favorable role. The steps to avoid losing it are rather simple, though not so easy to do sometimes – the player must protect the common people from invasions and rebellions and when possible – not to enter wars voluntarily. After all, that’s what the simple folk fear most. Nobility opinion affects things like crown authority increase costs, influence in neighbors, loyalty of knights, revolt risk… It is probably the hardest to increase, as there are very few things that can make the aristocrats happy, e.g. winning a war or crushing a rebellion. On the other side, there are tons of things that make them upset, like financial instability, military losses or even diplomacy decisions, depending on the influence of the kingdoms that they concern. Army opinion plays an important role for army morale and obedience and is one that is very dangerous to keep low, unless players wants their own armies to march against them. It depends on military successes, constant supply of provisions and not leaving men behind – abandoning wounded troops or a famous marshal to rot in the enemies’ dungeon is not the greatest way to win the sympathy of the soldiers. Merchants’ opinion naturally affects the gold income in several ways, among which corruption levels, trade income, cost for buying supplies and others. As one could guess, they are happy when more opportunities for trade are created and maintained, e.g. constructing the needed buildings and making proper trade agreements with the other kingdoms. On the other side, things like going bankrupt, bad diplomacy with trade partners and wars are really bad for business and thus they are not accepted well. Clergy opinion we saved for last, as it is most complex to explain, since it depends on the kingdom’s religion. There are some common effects, like book production and religious influence in/by neighboring kingdoms, but also many other effects, depending on what the kingdom religion is. For an example, Catholics’ relations with the Pope depend on the clergy opinion and vice versa, same goes for the Orthodox and the Ecumenical Patriarch; pagan shamans, on the other hand, boost the army’s morale. Events that can rise and lower the clergy’s opinion differ even more. Catholics are very concerned with good relations with the rest of the Catholic world and his holiness, the Pope. They really appreciate things like leading a crusade or defending Rome. Muslim scholars care about the relations with the caliphs and jihad involvement. For example, they can get really mad if their king decides to sign peace with the enemies of a caliphate in a holy war. Pagan shamans care a lot about military successes, as it was commonly considered that losing an important battle means the king has upset the gods and they have withdrawn their divine favor over him. In general, Opinions improve slowly and passively, where a player may not be able to do much to increase them directly with actions. After all, it will rarely be a good strategy to declare war just to make the shamans happy with some battles, and even if you do, this can backfire and decrease the opinions of other classes. In these cases, diplomats can be helpful, as their “Improve opinions” action can speed up the process – the more experienced a diplomat is, the more effective this action is, and if they have royal blood, the classes appreciate the attention even more. Even then, the results are far from immediate, and the best strategy may be to avoid unnecessary deterioration of opinions altogether. We are still experimenting with this feature, adding and balancing causes of opinion changes and effects the different classes have. Feel free to share what effects and reasons for increase or decrease of opinions you think imight be interesting and immersive to be included in KoH2:S, or which do you think will be tiresome to deal with. We’d also love to hear what you think about this feature in general – do you enjoy a bit of focus on the internal policy of a kingdom in grand strategy games, or do you see it as unnecessary sidetrack? And do you like the selection of classes we’ve picked, or would you prefer them to be more, less or simply different? We will talk more about Opinions in our DevStream on Thursday, January 7th, @ 4:00 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 as well as answering questions live during the stream. Till then, we bid thee farewell. Go forth and conquer, our brave warriors! View full article