BC Knight

Zooming out with mouse scroll could eventually bring you above the clouds, but during game I don't see any possible reason why would you do this. Just to sit and enjoy the view.

Indeed. Peasants will be happy to go home, recruits on the other hand would become unemployed soldiers Yes, after I posted and saw the first comments realized that combining XP and building requirements is very bad idea. Besides all said in the comments player will be very often in the annoying situation when have all required buildings to upgrade an unit but the unit doesn't have XP. So he will end up deleting the unit to recruit the better one. But I haven't thought about that earlier. I can't edit my first post anymore so if someone reads it in the future, pls ignore everything that I am saying about XP in the process of upgrading the unit. The XP itself could exist in the same way like Koh1 to give bonus in the stats of the unit. So in your words 1st you fire your soldiers, then execute them to prevent anyone to become a rebel, lol You can see the difference in the battle stats in the rts battle when you hover over the unit Here is the difference about the recruits and the peasants that I am talking about in the first post. The peasant is the one who works in the farm, or in the stable, or could be a hunter, a fisherman, etc. While the recruit is a person with an unknown background who made a decision to enlist in the army. /Well at least this is the way how I am seeing the things/ My main point is after you have become a soldier in medieval times, you would probably find this lifestyle more rewarding than doing peasants work, also in most cases you may not have anything else to return to if you lose your job as a soldier. And that's why I am saying that these men would like to seek alternative ways to fight for money and most logical in game options that I see are becoming mercenaries or rebels. And I don't imagine to be very punishing to the player. If there is a rebel nearby to get one unit reinforcement is not a huge deal. On the other hand if the AI starts disbanding units like crazy it may turn into a s%%% show, ha. And, yes if the peasant is a real peasant like a farmer, fisherman, if you called them to war using the described mechanic in the first post in the section Peasants 4 Life, after you disband them they would be happy to get to their families as soon as possible. Thank for the comments, guys.

I didn't say that you have to train always the lowest possible unit level and train it. That would be inefficient in mid and late game. And maybe XP doesn't fit well in KOH and creates more bugs than helps. Look at the same process but ignore everything that involves XP. You hire Recruit in the beginning of the game because you usually don't have the required buildings and when you build them you go to town and upgrade the unit. The cost would be the same as you would pay to recruit the unit but you save the manpower. If your unit has 50% health you may pay also 50% manpower to get a refilled upgraded unit. This idea is to replace the process of deleting unit that you don't want in order to replace it with something better and not to replace the entire recruitment process.

I am writing about what (I think) the situation right now might be and how it could look if there is a mechanic that allows the player to upgrade units. When I thought about that I also found some complications and issues that may arise with this. For sure I am not saying let’s do this because it sounds cool. I will talk mostly about peasants and will be viewing two different situations. The first is as I said earlier - “Hey, why my peasants are still peasants and what to do to improve them?” - Upgradeable Units Let's see how Peasants look in KOH2 It says “Peasants are non-professional soldiers called upon to fight in desperate times and ...” With that, you could say that it makes perfect sense to have non-upgradable peasants in the game that you can hire and disband whenever you want and I can agree with that. That’s why I added the second option - Leave the peasants to be Peasants 4 Life! But with some benefits. Upgradeable Units For the purpose of this example, I’d like to change the term peasants to peasants recruited as soldiers or just Recruits. The goal is to have the option to keep and upgrade the unit until it reaches the most advanced level without deleting them. Why do this? First - It sounds just natural. If you are recruited as a soldier, there are most likely two options for you - either to die in battle or to get experience and become a better and better soldier over time. So staying a recruit for the rest of your days is not very likely. Second - I don’t know if manpower is a concern in KOH2 because in KOH 1 wasn’t really. From the screenshot above I can see that just peasants cost 3 Manpower to hire and that is 3 times more vs. KOH1 so it looks that in Koh 2 Manpower may be a bit different. With that said if you already have the men recruited you should not spend manpower to upgrade the unit. The cost for upgrading in terms of gold/food could be also reduced - like 75% vs what you would pay if you recruit the unit, not that makes a huge difference but still…If the unit costs 2000, with 75% discount you save 500, not bad. If we have Manpower as a vital resource for our kingdom, disbanding units in order to hire more advanced units sounds like a waste - a terrible waste. Third - UX. I think that brings a lot of flavour to the game. The player could have the feeling that they hire real men from their kingdom, and keep them and improve them over time, not just unit slots that you could delete at any time without even thinking about. Forth - This may be a dumb reason for someone but not for me - It saves number of clicks - click(hover) select + click remove + click select + click hire + click select desired type of unit = 5 clicks Click(hover) select + click upgrade + optional click to select type of unit = 2 + 1 Clicks Setup I think that's pretty straightforward. In the battle or/and by having a “Trainer” marshal skill units get XP points. When the unit gets enough XP the marshal would go to a town or castle and if in the province are already built the required building for the next level unit you will be able to click on the upgrade button Here is a simple unit tree without going too much in detail. The Green XP shows the points needed to upgrade, req - means buildings required to train or upgrade unit Let's say recruits can get up to 100XP Once they get it you would be able to upgrade the unit to bowmen or swordsmen. Then with more XP, you can upgrade again and so on. Would you be able to hire higher-level units directly? Yes the cost will be slightly higher for recruitment and you will spend manpower Would you be able to disband units at any time? Yes. You may have other reasons to do this. What happens if you have a unit with some XP but you lose men - this sounds like a big issue. For easier calculation, let's have the following example: We have a unit of Recruits that could have a maximum of 100 XP and a maximum of 100 men. The actual stats are 70XP and 50 men. We go to a town and refill the unit with fresh recruits. What would be the XP value of the just recruited men? If they join with 0 XP, when we combine them all, we would have an average of 35xp - Not cool! How will you be able to upgrade a unit if you have to refill it with fresh men with 0XP? I can see a way to avoid that problem - to redesign the entire recruitment process and hire men, not units - but this is a topic for another day. What happens when you disband a unit? Think about real life. The relationship between you and the unit is employer vs. worker. In this case, you hired men to fight for you. Disbanding them would mean that you leave them without work. In the end, you have unemployed soldiers that are also mad at you, or at least disappointed. From here I see two options. The first is to join or form a mercenary camp in the lands of your rivals with the hope that they would be hired and fight against you. - A mercenary camp popups in enemy lands or is refilled with more units/men, Or it’s manpower pool is increased - Don’t have any idea how mercenaries work in KOH2 The second is to join the nearest active rebel group. - The rebels get reinforcements. In both cases you may get a nasty message saying - "These ungrateful soldiers did this or that..", ...just to make you feel bad about your decisions. Peasants 4 Life! From the unit description - “Peasants are non-professional soldiers called upon to fight in desperate times …” For me that means that when the situation is so desperate you go to the villages and tell your subjects - “There is a war you must join the army and fight!” So in theory when you disband them at some point they should be more than happy to return to their wives and children and live in peace and grow fat in their farms and villages (if they live enough to see that day). But in the game they are not called to serve their duty, they are hired as soldiers - Recruits so we go back to the previous scenario. If they were called to war there should be an entirely different mechanic. I imagine there would be a button, for example in town or in the king or on the marshal menu that would say Call the peasants! And what will happen will be to see some men armed with whatever they have travel from the villages and go to the marshal or the king. And they join the army as extra number of fighting men, not unit slots from the slots menu. When you don't need them, click again on the same button and they are released. Also, they may have weapons as well, some of them may have swords, others may be hunters and shoot pretty well. That’s details.. What could possibly happen if you click on that button besides that you will get some extra men with crappy battle stats? You would probably spend some food and gold on click and your expenses and food consumption will be increased. There is also now the Peasantry class and if you click that imaginary button you would probably lose opinion points with them. When you call the peasants there will be also fewer people left in the villages - mostly only women, children, elders (and the cowardly bastards of course) From here I see 2 negative possibilities for the person who clicked that button: First, the work on the fields and farms will be slowed down - your provinces will have less income - This may not occur immediately but to build up over time - "Called to war peasants - economy modifier" - starts from -1% and goes to -20% - why not?. Second - there are not any strong men left to defend the settlements, with less resistance the villages and the farms should be raided faster in game time by enemy armies or rebels. // Let's not go too much in detail about what could happen to the women left alone in villages during the war. There should be a cool-down on that button for 1-2 hours for example after you released the peasants - Why not? Something rings a bell from the earliest dev streams, someone said the more you stay in war the more your economy suffers. So it may work in a similar way, but right now the peasant is still a hirable unit and the peasant can be called to war not only in desperate times, but … anytime. I think both Upgradable units and Peasants 4 Life could exist in the game because they involve completely different approaches and mechanics and could create unpredictable situations, problems or different strategies, but this may also to reduce the huge peasant armies to some level. I know that this became a long one so if you reached this point, well thanks for reading. If you have some thoughts about that please jump in, I would be happy to read it. Cheers!

Actually, wait for a second. You are describing a potential problem - A player goes to a town and spam-recruit units in a matter of seconds(or something like that). But is it the recruitment time the source of the problem really? Or is manpower issue - like having too much manpower and not enough ways to use it. Is that really a problem-spam-exploit or a strategy. If I am neighbouring my enemy the most logical thing would be to keep my neigbouring provinces 100% full with soldiers and manpower. I would even move soldiers from another towns if I have to, to be prepared for emergencies. Was this one of the problems that you discussed earlier or I am missing something, because it's getting hard to keep up with this topic.

Recruitment time may fix some issues but also might create annoying situations just because units attached to a marshal. Imagine you send the marshal to a town to recruit and click on the recruit buttons. The marshal would be stuck to stay physically in the town until the process is complete. Someone can say that's realistic - the marshal is in the castle and trains people Other people may say it's annoying because it might become exploitable as well. You see that the AI or Other player is recruiting and use the time to raid their villages with small forces. Option - you click on the unit icon to train unit and get it instantly - It's just 25% filled with men but you are free to go and it gets filled up to 100% automatically - no need to stay in the castle. Edit: Alternative option - you get the unit 100% filled with men but with 0 Morale

The ideas are cool, but did you read my comments about that? How you would be able to handle battles like this in real time if you have 3-4 battles at the same time while you are being invaded and besieged and non-stop getting messages on the left side of the screen and popups. The mechanics that you propose would work if you pause the game and entirely focus your attention on the battle. Cheers!

@William Blake Sadly, I think I could agree with you about some of the things that you are saying. But I can't agree just from one five minute video and a dev diary to make conclusion that the game sucks at economics and trade. I don't think we have enough info yet about the most of the stuff going on. Even about battles themselves, I don't remember anyone talked anything yet. The auto resolve mechanic that you talk about. Well the whole purpose of that is to quickly complete the battle without you do anything right? Imagine the following situation. You are in the middle of a war with more than one enemy. You have 3 marshals, 2 of them are fighting, you are trying to navigate the 3rd to join a battle. In the meantime you are multitasking with a lot of other things like buildings,diplomats, spies, and on top of that the enemy is besieging your castles. So let's say that makes 4 battles at the same time. In situations like this I would click constantly from one battle to another, I would try to reinforce or retreat, maybe... But on top of that, if I had some options for strategy during the battle, how I would be able to concentrate on all 4 battles at the same time , in real time? The only possible thing that I think of is to pause the game every 10 seconds to check the battle, to think about strategy, dispatch orders, unpause, pause, repeat, repeat. Do you consider that fun? For me sounds like what you said in the first comment about the rts battle, you will do it twice and then you will hit the all in button. When you say I imagine some futuristic version of mount and blade with realistic VR fighting and real dialogs during the cut scenes. I don't think you can get that in a grand strategy game. Now about the things that I agree. Let's see the example with the battle resolving. If I am looking with the perspective of an old Koh player, seeing these fighting dudes feels like a huge improvement. On the other hand, as you said poking the air doesn't feel super exciting. Maybe if there isn't a gap and you can see the units fight in that window would look way better. Maybe that's not that hard to do, to çhange the position of the fighting units to have the impression that they are fighting in front of you in that window. Another thing, if I am coming from eu4 I would expect having some statistics in front of me that would show me my strength and the strength of the enemy. Also during the game I would ask myself what I should do to improve the stats of my armies. Should I research technology, should I invest books to educate my king. If I come from Mount and blade. I will recruit some peasants (yay) and after a few battles will start thinking. Hey why these peasants are still peasants. What do I have to do to upgrade them. And it feels like a waste to disband men only because they are peasants. There should be option to upgrade units, right? There is one thing that I saw in the video and felt old-school (not in the good way) So , again let's say I've never play KOH. I am playing with Serbia and all of a sudden My trading partner and friend sends me a message "Hey, I don,t have time and I don't give you anything,but can you attack France because I don't like them? That doesn't sound weird at all, right? I would imagine to see something like "Hey I am Naples your best friend. I am planning to attack France. Would you join me and fight with me. In return I will offer you gold and royal mariage" But in both cases, Serbia to attack France seems geographically irrelevant. There are some other things that I agree with you, but it's getting late and the post already too long. Beside that, I think the game is getting quite well overall.

So there are some questions that came up after the dev stream in my head: What happens with the castles(keeps on the map) if a town is sieged and conquered. Are they still enemy territory or they surrender after the fall of the town? There was a discussion about the randomness of recourses and province assets that will trigger the creation of zones (villages, farms, etc..) And the example of the stream was - if you have cows as asset you will have a cattle farm on the map - pretty cool mechanic. But raises the question If assets are randomly generated does this mean that the number of zones/settlements per province may vary between games, or they are already placed on the map? From the screenshots and the video I see that the settlements are placed very well on the map and that makes me think that they are done manually, unless there is a very powerful map generator that would create and place the zones so well, including the road connections, ha!

I don't have any questions this time. Maybe just.. can we see an overview of the entire map? Or if not the entire at lest the Bulgaria area? Cheers!

from DD 14 On the image the title starts with Rep - Republic of Venice

On my question on the dev stream Can a princess become the heir? , Brad didn't say straight No, so there is still hope 😄

I see that one way to play is to follow the path of greatness, get prestige, dominate over the map, become GP and EoW. Will be there some other ways to enjoy the game like Steam achievements that would create different scenarios with different levels of difficulty, based on the starting kingdom and the achievement objective? Achievements could be based on historical events and conquest Example - Start as Byzantium, conquer all of Bulgaria and get "Bulgaroktonos" achievement, or to be out-of the box like Start as Mamluks/Abbassids and be elected as the Pope I know that players could create their own conditions and be creative, but having the reward of the achievement feels more motivating. I guess by increasing the difficulty level to become more realistic and punishing would make sense.

I imagine it more like: If the king has only daughter(s), the player (or maybe the AI as well) to have in game options to request support from Nobles, Clergy to appoint a female as the heir to the throne. Request support could include: Favours, diplomatic talk, Bribing, threatening and murdering if you want 😄, and if the king has enough support will have the right to appoint a female as the Heir. And then those who opposed that decision might decide to rebel, even join a neighboring kingdom. I think both options - to stay Heir-less and to appoint a female as the heir should be bad in terms of stability of the kingdom. Just one of the options may be less worse than the other. And I don't say the devs should include this in the base game or add it as DLC option. It's up to them to decide if it's worth the time spend

Sorry, I don't think These two example would fit in the medieval timeframe. On the other hand I believe the player could have the tools and mechanics to do this if they want .. just for roleplaying and fun. However if you do this there should be some serious consequences. You cannot except for example all your nobles to be happy with this decision and stay loyal if you choose a princess to be the next ruler. What I think is if that would be possible, it should be done only for fun and to experience different scenarios but not happen all the time by default if there isn't a male heir.

not true. I am ok waiting and feel relatively sane😄

So now there is a digitalized playable early version of the game for Tabletop Simulator

You have it, lol

Here I can see that there is a pact against France, so in theory Naples and England may join the war on the Aragon's side if France attacks Aragon. From what I understand Defensive pact is made for protection against the kingdom for which is created and is not an universal defense solution. So in case, let's say Tunis attacks Aragon, none of these pact members will join to help them. Is that correct?

Thanks for the dev diary. I just have a question because I don't fully understand this. Does this mean that if you have a defensive pact and you start a war with someone you will lose the defensive pact that you have, just because you started a war, or because you start a war against a specific kingdom - the target?

Wow, is there an early release in Turkey, lol?

Thanks for the new dev diary. I see that like KOH1 trading is a full time job that require sending a royal court member to a foreign kingdom, but also noticed that if a governor is assigned Does this mean that there is a passive trade income on top of the income from the merchant? My second question is would it be possible to use trade as an excuse to start a war for example to force another kingdom to allow your merchants to trade in their kingdom or after winning the war to force the losing side to transfer part of their trade income for a certain period of time? And speaking of trade and merchants do you plan to add Merchant republics to the game?

Brad, Alex, thanks for the comments about my questions, I appreciate that

I want to have a spy with Sir Yavor's portrait. Sir Ivory on the other hand looks much more honorable. You guys should update your profile pictures.

That's different. It's not necessary countries to be friends or allies. They can be rivals or enemies to each other but still to form a coalition against you or other too aggressive nation. This is EU4 feature to battle against the aggressive expansion.