Zerg

There is no official statement as of today regarding this. Personally, I don't think it will be in the game. On another note, the first instance of gunpowder used in european warfare was in the 14th century (at least that's what most historians believe, see https://www.wired.com/2009/08/0826crecy-cannon/) and not the 13th century.

This is confirmed to be in the game. It was also a feature in the first game and the developers mentioned in a dev-diary (sorry, don't know which one) that prisoners will not take up a place in the royal court anymore.

It is 99% confirmed to be a playable faction. In the gameplay-video at1:46 you can see that the player is in a relation with a country called 'Bosnia'. Also they will cover roughly the same time-frame as in the first game, so if the kingdom/country existed back then it will most likely be a playable faction like in the first game. I'll link the gameplay-video down below. There is currently no information if this feature will return with the second installment. There are already multiple dev-diarys covering what knights will be able to be recruitet into your royal court. Short o

There are technical solutions to that, like hashes for every differnet mod of the game. (Crusader Kings does it and its industry staandard to differentiate modified games) Game will most certainly will only have 1 map, europe, as did the first game. Id expect to be able to see in multiplayer lobbys if someone has a game open with a different mod.

A nice read as always. I can't really add much to the conversation but I can at least say how I will play the game 99% of the time. No time limit, full sandbox mode without any intermediate targets, always free for all and I will never play with randoms but with family members and friends. I'm also really happy to read how much time went into finetuning and technically improving the multiplayer-expierience. As a fellow programmer who worked on some network code for my company some years ago I can only imagine how complex it can get to have 6 players smoothly connected and synced all the t

Can you please stop creating new accounts and posting replies into this thread?

From the gamplay-perspective I totally understand why a king can be a spy. No one would ever make their king a spy if some of the actions (like infiltrating another kingdom) would be simply unavailable. Historically it makes near to no sense, but as long as the gameplay is fun, I can live with it. They could maybe change it, that the king can never be captured since it is not him personally infiltrating but just him "commanding" an army of spies. There defintely were monarchs who focues on controlling courts (mostly their own) through intrigue. Also, since Brad loves to boast about how ex

Yes, this was indirectly suggested in the diary. See here: Yes, they mentioned in the diary about skills that every knight now has skills and some skills are shared between professions. Just to back up my answer, see dev diary 9: There you can see that there is a "merchant primary skill" and this will most certainly be the same for every profession. Quoting directly from there: "As an example, let’s take a look at the “Bargain” skill. It is primary to Merchants and increases the gold from trade to merchants. Spies and Diplomats can also learn this skill of course, but t

Is there a way to counter-spy in general? Or is there a way to at least focus on the happiness/loyalty of some of your knights in order to make it harder for them to be bribed? To give an example: I have a spy in my court and would hate to get killed by him. How can I increase his loyalty towards me so that he won't stab a knife in my back as soon as I turn around?

Yes, I do. I would still buy and play the hell out of the game without it, but if the multiplayer does work well, I would gift the game to 2-4 other persons aswell. It should be savable and continueable. A full game will probably take about 3 to 20 hours, depending on how hard a player/team can steamroll and win. Of course it would be awesome to have 50 real players on the same map, but this will not be possible because of bandwitdth-limitations and such. I would guess they (the devs) try to optimize it for 3 to 6 players. Definetly open, diplomacy could be alot of fun

I do like the idea of being able to upgrade units, but I think calling peasents recruits would be strange since its two different things. Also, as Ivory Knight already said, I also don't like the idea that upgrades are "locked in" as in only archers can be upgraded to heavy archers. I think it would work great if upgrading units would lose them half of their XP (or maybe 75%) and it decreases the cost of the new unit by 50% of the old units cost and completly negates the population-cost. Disbanded units joining rebels is another thing I'm wary of, since I think most people were happy to b

As far as I can remember, you (William) mentioned in another thread, that you did play the first KoH. That's why I'm puzzled by what you are writing here. The system is pretty similar and it worked very well in the first game so why would it be different in the new one? It's just a simple stone-paper-scissors system where every province-capital has to balance between 3 things: Ability to defend against attackers, ability to produce high quality units, ability to produce good and/or generate income. Peasent should have never been built in the first game, unless you really had to (e.g. the enemy

I think that problem will be gone with the 2nd installment since you can't cheese your economics anymore by spamming merchants in the early game, no? As far as I can tell from the dev diary about merchants it will be alot harder to get trade agreements and follow up on them to make a lot of money. Also, in multiplayer games raiding and the war of attrition will be one of the best tools to damage other players while you can't directly take their cities/provinces. Having your village destroyed, which produces 17 gold every tick can be a hard hit. I guess rebellions will be rising more frequently

Good eye, its a french castle indeed. I just saw the documentary some months ago, it is not a real medieval castle but a project to rebuild one from scratch only with materials and tools from that time. See https://www.guedelon.fr/en-famille-ou-entre-amis or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guédelon_Castle

The lead game designer (frujin) confirmed this to be an option in the comments of Dev Diary 9 (see )