Zerg

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 their benefit is the cost reduction of certain actions, e.g. bribery and others."

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 if all players are in the same discord. There you could replicate real-world examples of medieval diplomacy (all the backstabbing and complex agreements). All of them combined. Just like in CIV you should be able (especially in multiplayer) to win through different means. I'm sure everyone will hate the player who hires 6 spies just to fuck with the others right from the beginning :D I would find it very boring if everyone starts sames. I don't imagine this game has a hardcore-pvp game, so most probably players will not aggressively go for other players right from the beginning. This type of games are just not build for high-competitive pvp games. Full Europe and/or custom/modded maps (Just like the one planned from Calliope). AI needs to be their to fill up the map. Yes, just like I said earlier. I don't see this game as a high-competitive game. And also, there are always ways to fuck with bigger country (*cough* spies *cough). Also, bigger players are more likely to be targetet by other players so there will be organic balancing. The online-profile could state some statistics like games played, but apart from that, no. Overall, I can say that I hope multiplayer will be a similar expierience to CK2/CK3 but with the gameplay of Knights of Honor. I don't play competitevly, I just play to have fun and whats more fun than to fuck around with friends on a big map in a game we know from 15 years ago and loved?

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 be able to go back home and continue their normal lives. Also, from gameplay-perspective, it feels rather punishing. Stars did increase the statistics of the unit. Right from the game manual:

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 is storming your last province, where you don't have any barracks/swordsmit yet). I'm sorry if I'm misinterpreting things here, but it feels like you just want to have another Total War clone? Anyway, I'll write down my impressions for the devs to read: I love the idea of having some sort of timer to build units. Maybe units could start out with 1/60 and slowy fill up over the next seconds. Of course, units which higher requirements should take longer to fill up (training time) I really really like the fact that armys do use the roads on the map. Please make it so that i can close popups/messages by clicking into the backdrop of the modal. I don't want to snipe the 'X'-Button all the time. Also, please let us build Buildings, like Barracks without opening the secondary screen where it shows the next upgrades (swordsmits, etc.). A little hammer on the top left right unter the '1' would be nice. Increasing the size of some symbols and texts would be nice. I don't know if they are so small because the footages was recorded on a 4K-monitor but it looks small for me. Some examples: Resource on the top left, coats of arms of allies, enemies, vassals, friends and so on; The "under siege" icons over sieged castles The font of the auto-battle-predictions is not in the "medieval" font but I think you know that already Categorizing the recruitable units would be nice

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 as well.

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 )

They didn't mention yet how it will be implemented, but I can think of several more option to implement this than WestAant mentioned. All battles have to be fought. No battles can be fought. All battle between 2 or more players have to be fought. Battles where only 1 player is participating (against AI) can't be fought. When a battle is initiated, all players can vote. If a specific amount of players (50%, 2/3, All) agree, the battle will be fought. Only important battles will be fought. Again, these are most probably battles between players or sieges against the last city/fortress of a kingdom. Players, who are not participating in a battle are allowed to take over the AI-army. Every player gets a "important-battle token" after every hour (or maybe 2). They can use it to fight a battle in person. Otherwise, battles will be calculated. I also would guess they will make some sort of server-setting when hosting a (public) multiplayer-game and everyone who thinks about joining, sees which setting for battles will be used. I, for example, would never join a server where battles are fought because im only marginally interested in the battles.

You should check out DevDiary 9 here:

A very interesting insight at how development is done at Black Sea Games! I think I asked those questions already in the first dev-diary back then but as far as I'm aware, they are still unanswered, so maybe I'm in luck this thursday: How will the crossing of major rivers work? In the last image of todays dev-diary you can clearly see that the army is about to cross a river but how will it actually work? Is there absolutley no gameplay-mechanic planned for that and the army will just turn into boats vor some seconds and turn back? Or do you maybe already have some mechanic in place? How is modding coming along? Do you still plan to have vast modding capabilities at release? Thanks and I can't wait for the DevStream 😄

Happily for us we don't have to come up with solutions how multiplayer will work. It's a tricky job, there are multiple possibilities and every one has its advantages and disadvantages. We can only wait and see how they solve it. I personally prefer a solution which works best for people who want to play together non-competitevly and just have some fun and goof around. You guys really need to download the HD-patch which includes an option to remove all intro-scenes :D My thoughts to the additional points mentioned by DoVla: 12. That's certainly a neat addition. I remember Lords of the Realm II having something similar every season. You can look it up here (https://www.gog.com/forum/lords_of_the_realm_lords_of_magic_series/lotr_2_ultimate_economic_guide; search for 'Non-weather events'). 13 & 14 I don't care if they add that, as long as it can be ommitted and doesn't punish me to hard. If i want to roleplay, I'll probably just play Crusader Kings 2. Knights of Honor has a special place in my heart because it was so atmospheric with its wonderful music, imagery and overall feeling without being a full-blown calculator-mathematics-startegy game.

Disclaimer: Everything I do not comment of I (sort of) agree with. 2. The hardest part of the game is to get big. After that it's only a run to the goal. There are some mechanics to increase difficulty if you are a big kingdom. If you did not care for your conquered provinces, you will soon be haunted by rebellions. Also, your hired knights will be more likely to be spies from other kingdoms and sabotage you. And if your king dies without a heir, you are in for a fun ride. But still, after you've got yourself some provinces, it's mostly a race to one of the early victory conditions (getting all kingdom advantages or being votes as ruler over europe). 4. & 5. Please tell me you know about increasing (and decreasing) the game speed, do you? You can pause the game aswell. I personally only play with speed set to 0.5 or 10 times the normal speed 99% of the time. 6. I personally like the province-management system. I just wished I could rearrange the buildings in a neat order. An option like you mentioned in point 1 would be a win-win for every player. 7. There is the possibility to reduce taxes to zero, which helps a bit. 8. If you read some of my earlier posts you will see that I am strongly against expanding the number of slots for royal court members. I think it would make the game an unbalanced mess. Most players wouldn't even use more than 3-5 marshalls simultaneously, since it isn't fun to micronamage more than a few moving entities on the world map. 10. There is a option when you start the game to pause the world map while you are in a battle. Only thing that then can still move are armies in range to call in a second army nearby.

The additional possibilities diplomats bring into the game sound great overall. After reading the article, I've wondered if you thought about the possibility of being able to imprison or even kill foreign diplomats? Do you plan to implement some sort of maximum range a diplomat (or merchant) can travel? Also, I think we've all noticed that some people get increasingly aggressive in different channels (here, Discord, etc.) because of a missing release date announcement. I just wanted to tell you that I'm most certain there is a silent majority which doesn't care that there is no release date yet and condemn the hostilities towards you. Just wanted to put that out there, so you don't feel frustated with these kind of people shouting everywhere at everyone. Thanks and can't wait for Thursday!

I get that you are excited about the game (we all are, that's why we are here), but this is some very nitpicky thing you want to talk about. Off the top of my hat I see several reasons why it was chosen to name the game like it is named and why it won't be changed: Continuity - The first installment was named 'Knights of Honor' aswell. Marketing - All marketing materials are already created with that name. Minor Detail - At least 99.9% of the potential target audience will not care. I even think, they may win more customers/players by deliberatley chosing the american english naming convention, since it is spoken by more people on the world. Language - Even "Ye Olde Englishe" isn't the english spoken in the middle ages, so "honor" is most probably also not a word written like this at that time. I don't want to sound rude, but it's such a minor detail and if this really holds you off from enjoying the game, there will be hundreds of other details which will do so aswell.

If there are only 30 skills available in total I think that having 8 traditions is too much. Off the top of my head I would say that maybe around 10-15% of the skills should be atainable at the same moment as tradition. So if there are 30 skills in total, only 3-5 should be possible to hold as tradition at the same time. The system itself looks fine at first glance, I can already imagine myself specializing in all the economic skills as Venice. It feels like it would help with replayability for the same kingdom where you just choose different traditions each time you play it.

Yes, heres the source.

They mentioned in their facebook-post that a mechanic like this would exists. So if a knight dies there is a chance (maybe even 100%?) that he will or can be replaced with his heir, which has similar but reduced abilities.

It's already confirmed to be in game.

I'm sorry but that's a horrible idea. Lets just assume someones is attacking a province of mine. Normally we attack with 1 to 2 armies and sometimes the defender has an army in the province aswell (maybe even 2). Now with 4 additional entities on the map (the 4 generals) we would have 6 to 8 armies on the world map. This would be a nightmare to manage. It was already hard to manage your armies to attack the same target if enemy armys were close togehter, this would just destroy any fun in controlling armies on the world map.

Maybe you want to elaborate what you are not happy about? The problems you mentioned in the dev diary should be solved with what William Blakes proposed (and you already had as an idea yourself). Personally, I never saved any expierienced troops in the first game. They always had to fight upfront in my armies to break the enemys morale the fastest. So for me even the old system would have been fine, but I can see that some people would feel the incentive to save up their best troops.

I may have misunderstood things, but as far as i understood leveling was a thing in the first game, right? Your squads would, after a certain number of fights, gain stars (up to 3) which in turn increased their overall stats. My Questions: I really do love the art, but sadly the provided images don't fit my computers resolution. Is there any way to make them available in multiple resolutions or so that no important parts will be cut when we have to stretch-to-fit the image? How will siege units be implemented in the game? Will it stay the same as in the first game?

I think they meant "knights" as an overarching category. Like knights could be marshals (lead bigger armies), diplomats (manage relations with other kingdoms), spies (you get the idea) and so on. So in the first game they only let 3 out of the 6 categories be governors of provinces (which were clerics, builders and farmers), now every knights, no matter his skills, can govern a province and give it bonuses. And I have to disagree with ivory knight, even tho in his last stream he sounded like a nice guy. I think islamic nations should play a big role in KoH2, simply because the medieval times were just one big conflict of religions. If I try to think about the biggest events in that time following things come to my mind: The Crusades (against islam), Reconquista (against islam), The Rise of the Ottomans (payback-time for islam), Battle of Hastings (only big non-religious conflict), the Northern Crusades (against pagans) and the Eastern Crusades (against pagans). For now the devs should concentrate to implement improvements every realm will benefit on. Things like special skill-classes for knights for specific realms could be added in by the modding community later on. So please ahmet, write down what you think a vizir and/or janissary-comander should be able to do (what a diplomat or generic marshal cannot) and maybe it will happen sometime. Greetings!

That image up there is part of the Knights of Honor Manual (see https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steam/apps/25830/manuals/manual_english.pdf?t=1447351680). Sadly i do'nt own that Total War game so i can't look up what governors do there, but maybe you can explain? I've read about janissary and that they were practical military slaves, but what do you think a commander should do, or what mechanic do you expect in the game? I still see no difference between a vizir and a diplomat governing a province, maybe you can share your thoughts what mechanics should be introduced with vizirs?

Your post is far from comprehensible.. As far as I can tell a vizir is nothing else than a diplomat for inner affairs. Janissary were already in the first game aswell. Also, you could assign governers in the first game and will most probably be able to in the second game. For people who don't know what you mean by "a Total war system", this makes no sense at all. Maybe you want to clarify what you exactly think should be different?