frujin

That's the spirit! Nice read 🙂

Well, the game is all going to evolve and change based on community feedback. We are already working on first two updates.

multiplayer can be between 2 and 6 players.

Yes, all these are shown. How current morale is calculated, all things like "archers on the hill", "cavalry in a forest", etc... You see it quite clearly ... Initiative is a real mechanic. You start an attack, you have "initiative", but if you do nothing ... it slowly vanishes.

https://steamcommunity.com/app/736820/discussions/0/3187989286455629440/

Of course. It always boils down to maxing what you CAN max at a given time. My comment was about what "full army" means. Sometimes army with 5 slots filled can have more manpower than another with all 8 slots filled in. The entire topic can quickly go very "philosophical". Overall, battles are only ONE element of a war. There are many more. Wars are multidimensional. The game is about winning wars, not about battles. Of course, you can't win a war without any army (although there are mercenaries in the equation too), but you can defend quite well even with less armies and make the invader pay hefty price for their attack. Think of chess - it's a simple game and all "battles" are bland and stupid. We know that the queen always will take that pawn, the pawn has zero chance of winning. The entire game is deterministic and "theoretically" can be computed from any position to the end, therefore it "can't be fun". If we had such powerful computers, of course 😉 So, battles in KoH2 are like pieces in chess moving and attacking each other. But the war is more like the whole game. I know it may sound a bit too "vague" but getting much deeper will sway us from the KoH2 topic, and we will get into game design, games theory etc. Not the place for that ... Look, the question of all questions - is it possible to reach a situation where it is clear that one player will win and the other will lose even before war starts? Of course, that's the point of the game. It means that one of the players played his "cards" better and this is the reward 🙂 Think of chess... P.S. Is KoH2 suited for competitive PvP multiplayer? Depends, on what "competitive" means. If we talk e-sports, ELO ratings, etc, then "no". Is it fun to play PvP? Oh, yes .. a lot, especially with a group of friends 🙂

I don't see any evidence for that. And I don't see that analytically too, given what you show in-game. With a few marshals you have and a cost of a marshal plus upgrades bigger that cost of a full army. (500 gold per marshal, + books + experience vs full tech 1 army = 8 by 70 gold), it would be stupid to even leave your lands without a full army OK, so the thing is that the man power of an army depends on many things. Yes, there are 8 "slots" for unit types. But these are not simply "units". Think of these as 1/8th of the army composition. So, if you have for example archers in one slot, that means 1/8th of your army will be composed of archers. But how big this army will be depends on MANY factors, which are not easy to maximize out. Actually, there is a "soft cap" on the army sizes and it takes a lot of progression in various aspects of the game to be able to reach it. Each time you "hire" troops of a given kind in a slot, they also come with a "base man power value". For example, if no other factors contribute, 1 slot of archers will give you about 250-300 basic man power (I don't remember the exact number, but it is not important right now). And then this number can be increased manifold depending on skills and level of the marshal, traditions, where he governs, what the army carry with itself, etc. etc. And now *these* things can't be maxed out so easily. In fact - it's quite hard and takes a lot of skill and strategic planning. If you aim exclusively for having huge armies, and even if you achieve it, it will come with serious *opportunity costs*. I mean, you can't have everything in the game 🙂 P.S. We paid a lot of attention to make the game much deeper than the first one, but still keep it similar on the "surface". How much "bigger" is the new game compared to the old one? Orders of magnitude 🙂

This is wrong, and everything that follows is wrong too ....

When I click on the hour, it goes to the last post.

Top right. Next to Facebook and Twitter icons.

Indeed, there is FFA in Grand Campaign mode. Means, no other conditions than those built in the campaign.

Attacker has no benefit. They just need to prepare the attack and breach defenses enough ...

Balance of unit types is by far not complete!! May be we should explain in more detail how exactly auto-resolve works and what the stats of units mean. Peasants are not very reliable (notice their negative resilience, the only unit type with such) in the long run. Hmm ... We keep following this topic ...

It actually does this. And more than this.

We are reading ...

Probably yes.

Number of troops.

Multiplayer features are affecting deeply the single player design as well. They are very intertwined ..

While perfect balance is not possible, we still have many, many options for "tuning" multiplayer games to make them more even for everyone.

Don't you think that if we do this - instead of more difficult, the conquest will become more "boring/tedious"? Because it is just "more of the same" ...?

Nope. Actually, you were ready to pay some tribute and get out of this war that you never wanted at the first place. And you also didn't want *any* agreements with this rich neighbor - since you planned to invade there at first opportunity. It's not always that simple William 🙂

And even deeper than that - it's time and moment in time. In one of my recent games it really hurt when some rebel managed to sack one of my biggest towns and the news about it ruined the peasantry opinion in the middle of a war that was anyway going difficult. Indirect outcome was that I lost a lot of food supplies and armies morale went quite low. Suddenly a war that I believed I could win turned into a disaster and I was forced to surrender my souverenity. No, you can affect the outcome. You know very well that losing this war will ruin nobility opinion of you. Or you know very well, that refusing these trade arrangements with your rich neighbor will make all merchants angry. There are many factors and you learn to take these into consideration. Sometimes you feel like "ah, okay, they will be pissed off, but I don't care", but sometimes you do stuff only to please certain groups. Effects are significant! 🙂 Also, opinions are not directly "tied" with the crown authority. They can make it very hard for CA to be increased, bad opinions can even undermine a lot of CA's benefits, but at the end - these are separate features. Actually, what we meant is not that there is no choice, but that there is no "magic button - Improve Opinion of X". Sort of ... 🙂 And finally, ... there are other games where every-now and then a pop-up appears that asks you (de-facto) "+2 nobility opinion or -1 peasantry but 2000 gold". You don't even read the "flavor text" - it is so "obvious". Feels like some "robot created this". So we try to stay away from these as much as we can. Sometimes, the challenge IMHO better be a bit more "emerging" rather than "artificially planted", even a bit "perfidious" if you wish, ... and the beauty is when you learn how to recognize it actually exists 🙂 Oh no 🙂 ... I am totally ignoring this for now) 🙂 🙂 cheers!

This happens only to certain extent currently. It might bring you to some neutral situation, but won't let you have everything maxed out. This on a side note. We are still playing and testing the feature in-house and changes might happen. (Actually, some of the earlier diaries are already quite obsolete, and needs update may be ... hmmm :)) Meaningful choices - yes. Too much "micro" - no, this won't be KoH anymore if we slide in that direction. About "army" - we are following the discussion carefully - and as always - we might change things based on feedback (as we already did several times in the past). So, thanks for sharing your opinion (no pun intended :)) ----- P.S. Let us share our reasoning for the "army" thing. Maybe naming is wrong, but by "Army" we mean people that are actually mobilized and on the field. It doesn't matter if their roots are into nobility, or peasantry - they equally won't like starving (yes, nobles are less likely to "starve", but when their people starve - nobles will inevitably become worried as well), fighting hopeless wars, being on a march "forever", losing allies, being sent to "the edge of the world", etc. This is very "top-level point of view" on what "army" is. Otherwise, most of your comments are right - the "army" was mainly nobles + peasantry + mercenaries. With some exceptions (early Byzantine, some clans systems, etc.).

With "Army" or without "Army" opinion - interesting discussion ...

Right now a diplomat can maintain only one pact and it increases the gold cost for the diplomat.