Knights of Honor II: Sovereign - medieval grand strategy with RTS battles

[Lacrymas]

I watched a friend of mine, who is a very big fan of the first one, play this game and we haven't laughed so much in a while. The kingdom descriptions are hilariously badly written, especially around the Balkans (Wallachia and Moldavia are highlights), they remind me of an 8th-grader's history class presentation. Numerous typos, unnecessary repetitions (funny example: Wallachia was home to many, many people from many different cultures.*), sentences that go nowhere or are not semantically connected to the rest of the text, historical inaccuracies (they say Byzantium adopted that name themselves), some dubious grammar, the formatting is like a poem, the style eclectic. What is even more funny is that some descriptions are ok and they are written like they are supposed to, but others are like aforementioned. What I suspect happened is they started from Bulgaria (their home country), wrote everything in the Balkans and some other major kingdoms themselves because they have an emotional connection to them, then copied everything else from a Wikipedia article. They are definitely worth the read before they hire a real editor to fix them.

*They probably liked the rhythm and were like:

 

[The Brazilian Slaughter]

Played it a bit.
Got fucking rekted the first time, lolz.

Some notes:

- What the fuck is that price. 107,35 R$ with DISCOUNTS. No, dude. I'm pirating this shit until you guys have a better price policy.
- Bit lame that we don't have 7th and 8th century start dates. Eh, probably something for the future.
- I like how we can choose an existing kingdom or just start from a province.
- In many aspects, it's A LOT like the original.
- Performance: The game seems to be well optimized, it runs pretty well on my Thinkpad T430 with slightly lowered resolution and graphics all on low. I get high-ish temperatures as up as 90 Cº but that's about it. You can probably run this game on any half-decent ten years old potato computer. This is incline.
- One annoying thing are the loading times. Did they assume everyone playing this owns an NVME? What's up with that?
- Battles: Still getting the hang of them. Seems mostly similar to the old version, except your arrows won't kill your own dudes any more (I think?). Also you can't "snipe" leaders anymore, you have to kill all their noble cavalry to kill the leader (I think). Also what is even the point of Capture Points? They're immensely annoying and distracting.
- The font is too small and faint in some screens.

- I like the improved royal family screen, through I think it could be even deeper. Say, include the Queen Mother if the King's mother didn't die previously.
- Is it just me or when warring early, pillaging is the way to go? Just pillage shit, get money, use money to build up your kingdom.
- I like the new Opinions mechanic, adds a nice if simple form of factions.
- Stability is better here, because its not just something you click and fix.
- It gets replaced by Crown Authority, which is more logical.
- Early on, workers will be a big limiter I feel, as you need them to recruit more men, especially for early peasant-balls.
- Is Noble Cavalry stronger here than KoH1 or is it just me? I remember battering them with two, three peasant squads which did barely anything to them. I'm pretty sure surrounding them in the first game like that would spell certain death. I do remember doing a lot of very silly "decapitation wins" in KoH1.
- The game doesn't tell you this, but NEVER declare war if one of your knights is in the target's land doing some mission (say, trading). They will get insta-arrested.
- I hope the game's border goes east and south in the future, the current game world cuts most of Persia out.

 

[The Brazilian Slaughter]

Anyone else getting bugs in which the game crashes when loading up battles? Haven't been able to fight a battle for a bit now.
Is this my computer being potato or something else? It seems to run the game with little issues otherwise

 

[Eyestabber]

Is this game actually any good? Saw a JT ad shilling it which is never a good sign...

 

[Grampy_Bone]

I am enjoying this and having fun, quite addictive overall. I maintain that TB is dated for 4X games and feel the real time map screen is 1000x better. I'm sure some Total War purist is going to explain to me in 17 pages why it is so much better for an enemy to move from outside the fog of war all the way to a town and besiege it in one turn without me being able to react, but whatever fuck off.

I have a trader who can't learn trading? and its a tradition. So effectively he's useless.

That has to be a bug, in my experience all traditions are available as skills to all knights.

 

[Grampy_Bone]

Game has plenty of issues, nothing modders can't fix but it feels a little wtf boneheaded in many ways now.

-Zoom. It's too close. I can understand limiting the strategy screen for performance reasons but there is zero excuse for having such a close zoom in the battles. This is not 1994 playing C&C, Rome TW came out 19 years ago and had thousands of on screen troops in cities rendered in 3d on a PC with 5% of the horsepower I have now, no reason why this AoE3-looking shit can't have my whole army on screen at once. They official word from the devs is "use the minimap" which shows a blob of overlapping circles with no detail but I've since read they are going to increase the zoom. It's such a dumbass decision to ship this way it feels like some egoist on the team made it their thing to have a 90's era level of battlefield view and can't admit they were wrong.

Right now it sucks so much trying to maneuver your whole army or set up formations I don't even bother and just simulate the battles which usually does fine in terms of losses anyway, but takes away half the fun.

-Battles seem to be based around hard counters. Cav melts archers, archers destroy infantry, spearmen murder horses. The only unit without a purpose are swordsman who are hardly better than peasants. For reference the elite swordsman unit has the same defense as the basic spearman and no advantages against anything; wtf would you ever use these? Overall it's more lethal than the more drawn out TW battles where your archers can blow their entire quivers on the enemy and take out maybe 5% of the troops.

-One complaint is that it seems the cost of armories and their upgrades are beyond the reach of most AI, even in the lategame I never saw elite troops. The cost of adding building slots is so high I often found it hard to justify the gold myself. It's generally aggravating and un-fun to dismantle economy buildings in order to build a fort, but then again the extreme limit on governors makes most of the provinces in a big empire pointless. I get they want to limit snowballing but a hard 90% cut in resources once you've past the measly 9 ruler limit feels super harsh. Other games use a sliding scale of corruption or inefficiency which works better IMO. So any town I don't govern I just bulldoze everything and build a castle and armory? Imagine the Romans coming to Gaul and just flattening every town in favor of a barracks. Some empire!

-Culture and loyalty is busted. I was playing Swabia and even though I was ranked number 1 in culture power my whole empire became loyal to Germany. My provinces were spread out along the southern border and apparently adjacencies compound the culture, so the game is punishing me for literally playing a 'wide' empire. This is after I even figured out Culture was a thing and how to boost it since the game practically hides it. Even more bizarre, all the countries to my south adopted Swabian culture and revolted constantly against their own lords. So I had an empire everyone wanted to be a part of except the people who actually lived there (kinda like America I guess). Turns out this may have been because I was still a vassal to Germany, which makes all kinds of no sense. On paper I'm sure someone thought it was fine to have vassals receive their lord's culture but in practice this means any vassal state will destabalize and revolt against their king constantly, which is probably not what you want when you make a vassal. This made no sense because Germany and I were bros with maxed relations as a loyal vassal, but my people were pissed because I wasn't the real thing. Ironically the way to stop my people from being disloyal to me was to be disloyal to the people they were loyal too. Clearly this whole mechanic is dumb and needs a rework, if your populace is loyal to your vassal lord you shouldn't get unrest as long as you stay in line.

 

[Eyestabber]

Lmao, no. This game really didn't work out for me. Battles are terribad, lmao at archers outrunning knights and swordsmen being 100% useless. Building paths are also unintuitive and arbitrary. And why tf does NOBODY start with barracks and some troops? It's very stupid to see OPMs starting on equal footing with France/Byzantines/England/Germany. The game is a CK/TW crossbreed that doesn't do either parent any justice.

 

[RobotSquirrel]

And why tf does NOBODY start with barracks and some troops?

I recall that the original game people added mods to fix that where each town started with random buildings. They really need to add that because that initial rush to get troops is a bit of a pain.

 

[Galdred]

And why tf does NOBODY start with barracks and some troops?

I recall that the original game people added mods to fix that where each town started with random buildings. They really need to add that because that initial rush to get troops is a bit of a pain.

In the original, you would usually face peasant armies for the whole game if playing without mods.

 

[Sarissofoi]

The game is fun but its also half baked. And TBH I am tired of the games 'with potential' that never get realized. Sure the mods will fix something(maybe) but lets see if we get any big ones.

 

[kris]

Overall it's more lethal than the more drawn out TW battles where your archers can blow their entire quivers on the enemy and take out maybe 5% of the troops.

Sounds like super decline to me. TW battles are super quick with armies just melting away and here you say its even quicker. Which TW by the way will a whole quiver only take out 5% troops?

 

[Axioms]

I am enjoying this and having fun, quite addictive overall. I maintain that TB is dated for 4X games and feel the real time map screen is 1000x better. I'm sure some Total War purist is going to explain to me in 17 pages why it is so much better for an enemy to move from outside the fog of war all the way to a town and besiege it in one turn without me being able to react, but whatever fuck off.

I have a trader who can't learn trading? and its a tradition. So effectively he's useless.

That has to be a bug, in my experience all traditions are available as skills to all knights.

Real time heavily limits the detail of the simulation. Total War type games don't have a strong sim though so it probably doesn't matter. But for games that are not just war games real time is a no go.

 

[Grampy_Bone]

They really need to add that because that initial rush to get troops is a bit of a pain.

It's not that hard, just build a barracks. What's random are the features present in each province like herbs or horses that allow you to access different trading goods. Everyone can save up and build a barracks at the beginning you just have to manage your money right. Armories cost too much for most of the game though and that's what you need for elite troops.

In the original, you would usually face peasant armies for the whole game if playing without mods.

The AI does spam peasants, it's the result of the levy resource. Increasing levies is actually kind of hard, so the AI recruits an army with all the levies it has, then fills out the rest of the slots with peasants. 1000 levies is 5 troops at 200 each and the natural resource rate is +10 per tick, so you can be waiting awhile to get another army. Peasants cost no levies though. They could at least build the militia "elite" peasant troop but that requires another precious building slot, and if you're building that you really ought to just build a barracks and a castle to boost your levies.

Real time heavily limits the detail of the simulation.

Maybe 20 years ago. Graphics are the limiting factor now. AI takes barely any processing power. Besides aren't all the Paradox grand strategy games real time?

 

[Axioms]

They really need to add that because that initial rush to get troops is a bit of a pain.

It's not that hard, just build a barracks. What's random are the features present in each province like herbs or horses that allow you to access different trading goods. Everyone can save up and build a barracks at the beginning you just have to manage your money right. Armories cost too much for most of the game though and that's what you need for elite troops.

In the original, you would usually face peasant armies for the whole game if playing without mods.

The AI does spam peasants, it's the result of the levy resource. Increasing levies is actually kind of hard, so the AI recruits an army with all the levies it has, then fills out the rest of the slots with peasants. 1000 levies is 5 troops at 200 each and the natural resource rate is +10 per tick, so you can be waiting awhile to get another army. Peasants cost no levies though. They could at least build the militia "elite" peasant troop but that requires another precious building slot, and if you're building that you really ought to just build a barracks and a castle to boost your levies.

Real time heavily limits the detail of the simulation.

Maybe 20 years ago. Graphics are the limiting factor now. AI takes barely any processing power. Besides aren't all the Paradox grand strategy games real time?

AI takes a huge amount of power if you are talking about map games like TW or Paradox. Simulation also takes times. The biggest factor preventing Paradox from adding non-wargame or economy stuff is that you can't afford a smart and interesting AI in a real time game.

 

[Grampy_Bone]

adding non-wargame or economy stuff

I'm confused, what more do these games need? Real-time forest propagation? Ocean current simulation? What kind of simulation are you lacking?

 

[Axioms]

adding non-wargame or economy stuff

I'm confused, what more do these games need? Real-time forest propagation? Ocean current simulation? What kind of simulation are you lacking?

Internal politics, better diplomacy, sneaky intrigue shit. It's all dumb timers and maybe some modifier stacking like some sort of shit mobile idle game. The AI has no goals, pursues no agendas, no long term plans. You can't have iconic relationships from fantasy or history like loyal vassals or w/e. Nations like the Ottomans are simulated with highly railroaded special bonus events.

 

[Grampy_Bone]

Internal politics, better diplomacy, sneaky intrigue shit. It's all dumb timers and maybe some modifier stacking like some sort of shit mobile idle game. The AI has no goals, pursues no agendas, no long term plans. You can't have iconic relationships from fantasy or history like loyal vassals or w/e. Nations like the Ottomans are simulated with highly railroaded special bonus events.

Are there any 4x/strategy games with that level of emergent AI, turn based or otherwise?

 

[Axioms]

Internal politics, better diplomacy, sneaky intrigue shit. It's all dumb timers and maybe some modifier stacking like some sort of shit mobile idle game. The AI has no goals, pursues no agendas, no long term plans. You can't have iconic relationships from fantasy or history like loyal vassals or w/e. Nations like the Ottomans are simulated with highly railroaded special bonus events.

Are there any 4x/strategy games with that level of emergent AI, turn based or otherwise?

No because everyone just wants to clone Civ or remake MoO/MoM/etc. And Paradox of course is trapped in real time by legacy engine so they can't make a good TBS easily anyways.

There *will* be a game that does that stuff next year, though obviously until lots of people buy and play it we can't know if it will actually be good. Still, trying is better than more trash remakes.

 

[Lambach]

There *will* be a game that does that stuff next year, though obviously until lots of people buy and play it we can't know if it will actually be good. Still, trying is better than more trash remakes.

Any group/team developing AI advanced enough to satisfy your expectations (or at least how I understood them) is almost certainly not working for a video-game company.

 

[Axioms]

There *will* be a game that does that stuff next year, though obviously until lots of people buy and play it we can't know if it will actually be good. Still, trying is better than more trash remakes.

Any group/team developing AI advanced enough to satisfy your expectations (or at least how I understood them) is almost certainly not working for a video-game company.

What? You don't have to do anything advanced. Just gotta be turn based and use some basic multithreading for the planning phase. There's a massive amount of space on the spectrum between "Paradox level AI" and advanced AI experts working as a group.

 

[Grampy_Bone]

I've seen countless 'advanced emergent ai' claims for games over the years all of which ended up being a series of if-then loops. I guess I'll believe it when I see it.

Meanwhile I decided to start as Jerusalem in the 1200s on hard, and it's fun as hell.

 

[Axioms]

I've seen countless 'advanced emergent ai' claims for games over the years all of which ended up being a series of if-then loops. I guess I'll believe it when I see it.

Meanwhile I decided to start as Jerusalem in the 1200s on hard, and it's fun as hell.

I dunno why ya'll keep saying advanced. It isn't advanced. It just has a more detailed representation of characters and uses the advantages of turn based and multithreading to give the AI much more time to churn through their structure and data. In theory anyone with a CS degree, or even without could write a good AI. You don't even need any super fancy programming tricks.

 

[Lacrymas]

AI could theoretically counter everу move you make - look at the older Mortal Kombat games for an infamous example - the art of creating good AI is to be limited enough so it's possible to be beaten, but not be a total pushover.

 

[Grotesque]

Hello friends and welcome to the first post-release DevDiary for “Knights of Honor II: Sovereign”! We hope all of you are enjoying your campaigns, as much as we are watching you play and explore the game for the first time!

The road to Knights of Honor II’s release has been long, but that doesn’t mean it’s over, and in this diary, we’ll hopefully shed some light on the immediate future of the game as we go forward.

For starters, we managed to address some of your feedback and already made certain tweaks to the game, which some of you may have noticed as part of the update which was rolled-out last Friday. Its main focus was to offer more variety to different difficulty levels when it comes to the game’s diplomacy and warfare, as we noticed that some of you had a tough time in the early parts of the game. These few key changes should hopefully shape the gameplay to be more approachable on easier difficulties, and then more challenging on harder ones, especially when player led empires grow big and with numerous vassals.


We also removed the gold cost for hiring mercenary troops, which belonged to your kingdom recently, as many players felt that to be too punishing. On the military front, AI army leaders should also no longer charge in to battle without support, which was an evident issue when their side’s estimations were really high. The update also tackled some immediate issues such as game crashes, low performance in tactical battles and various problems related to changing the game’s resolution. For a full look, check out the patch notes here.

This isn’t our only patch we’ve been able to get out, either. Earlier today, we also released a small patch which addresses some military related issues – we are planning to reduce the strength of Varangian Guards and all crossbowmen a bit and boost longbowmen and templar knights. Most importantly, at the moment the desert heavy archers are completely broken (they have the wrong attack values) and we are going to fix that by severe decreasing them to the correct values that were intended..

Also, to reduce the exploity tactic of quickly taking control of the enemy capture points, we are increasing drastically the time needed for capturing them when many enemy squads are alive. The AI already pays attention and tries to counter these maneuvers and there is a dependency between time needed and enemy squads alive, but with the current values it seems it was still too easy to achieve for some players. We are making this more difficult to restore that part of the challenge Tactical battles should provide.

As we are constantly reading your feedback and assessing it, we will continue to tweak and improve the game. With that being said, a bigger update with many more fixes and improvements (that still require further testing and localization) is currently under preparation and hopefully we will manage to complete it before the holidays. It will address many usability issue and bugs and also include additional improvements of AI behavior in battles like better protection of the army leaders on lower difficulties – we made the AI intentionally a bit suboptimal in its decisions, especially on easy and normal difficulties, but the balance here is not quite hitting the mark, so we’ll be increasing the difficulty.




There’s also a plethora of quality-of-life additions that we’ve planned to introduce in the upcoming months, ranging from better explanations for certain mechanics to improved visual feedback for various elements of the game.

One topic we’re investigating is additional zoom-out levels, as well as the possibility of directly transitioning from world view to political view depending on the zoom level. We know this is a highly requested area of improvement, and we’ve been doing analysis of both technical impact on performance as well as feasibility from an implementation perspective. No promises, but we’re actively exploring what improvements we can make here.

If you want to hear more or share your opinion directly with us live, be sure to join us in our DevStream on the 15th of December @ 4 PM GMT / 11 AM EST on the THQ Nordic channel: http://twitch.tv/thqnordic, where we will discuss these changes in further detail, talk about some future plans and gladly answer your questions about Knights of Honor II.

 

[RobotSquirrel]

One topic we’re investigating is additional zoom-out levels,

this should only take not even a few seconds to implement you're just adding a 0 to the existing limit so we can zoom further than the limit this should've already been done. If your engine isn't hopeless it should have some kind of built in simplification of meshes so that as the camera moves away geometry is culled. Most game engines do this.

Also, to reduce the exploity tactic of quickly taking control of the enemy capture points, we are increasing drastically the time needed for capturing them when many enemy squads are alive.

how about I dunno take out the instant win from doing it maybe. That's the problem and its a very creative assembly esque problem. Better fix would be if you attack the baggage then the enemy army can't retreat because without supplies they're dead anyway so it'd be a viable tactic if you wanted to assure the army was destroyed. Instant win mechanics suck. The opposition should still be able to fight their way out of a bad situation.