[Favourite nation in KOH1]

My personal favorite has always been the Highlands.

Loved how they start with easy to get Swordsmen, usually restarted the game until I lucked into having a Swordsmith 😇

The positioning on the Isles was also nice to build strength through War, Intrigue and Marriage, before going on to conquering the rest of Europe.

[Gunpowder units in the late era]

Personally I feel gunpowder would introduce a massive shift in power balance. Could be an interesting mechanic to disrupt the game later on but I feel like it would be too disruptive.

Basically everyone not going full on Gunpowder will likely lose. Likely players (knowing this full well after at least a single game) will go all in on Gunpowder and beat 50% of the bot controlled kingdoms because of it. Assuming that some kingdoms would not got for Gunpowder so you can see the effect it historically had on the political landscape and because a Gunpowder rush would be no fun.

That being said, while games with lines of musketeers are fun to watch and play matches in, personally I don't see KoH as that game.

[DevDiary 3 - The Royal Court Part 1]

All of these dev diaries bring back so many, fond memories of playing the first KoH 😊

On that note, I also do remember it being quite frustrating to only being able to appoint a couple of knights, agreeing with @Taha. In most games I would have loved to have more, especially towards the end. But then again I also do think that this limitation made things more interesting and challenging. It gave me the need to make important and high-impact decisions while also keeping the complexity low.

If memory serves right (I really need to play KoH1 again), I already spend a good portion of the later game in pause mode to manage everything and more knights would only increase that need. I love KoH for it's simplicity and real-time mechanics though and hate to see those go in favour of more knights.

Feels like there are interesting discussions and reveals in front of us 😁

[Getting to know you!]

• Name/Handle: Hendrik / HoverBaum
• Country: Germany
• Games I like to play: Strategy and open world or hack and slay RPG style games. currently only the occasional game of League though.
• Pets: none.

[DevDiary 1 - Game Vision]

KoH still is one of my all time favorite games. I loved it for being real-time and easy to get into. Epic strategy game sin history settings were always interesting to me but the Total War series and similar never appealed to me for their turn based mechanics and steep learning curve. KoH for me was the perfect balance between all the things.

And it was simple amazing to conquer all of Europe has the highlands (of cause never re-uniting Scotland). The nations felt distinct which made multi play throughs fun. I also loved how the map evolved over time, you could see empires rise and crumble, all while waiting for the perfect opportunity to trade or invade. 

Personally I only ever played solo using the base game (no mods). And that was already fun for ages. Also picking the game back up again about five years ago for nostalgia was a great experience. It was super easy to get back into and I immediately felt the urge to get the map and production graph back out again that came with the original game. (I think there was something like that 🤔, would be embarrassing, fi not.)
 

Anyway, can't wait to see how KoH2 will turn out and get back to conquering Europe. the first images and videos from in-game looks super familiar and refreshingly new at the same time.