[Knights of Honor] Nachfolger angekündigt!

Erscheint am 06.12.2022

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The Rusty Sword
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Re: [Knights of Honor] Nachfolger für 2020 angekündigt!

Beitragvon The Rusty Sword » 21. September 2020 14:52

xD jo die CD habe ich auch noch rumliegen. Die in Original wird hoch gehandelt.
Hab mir irgendwann noch die Steam-Version geholt, dass es problemloser läuft. Aber so richtig smooth klappt halt einfach nicht bei so alten Games, ist einfach so.
Day1-KoH-Fan <3

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Re: [Knights of Honor] Nachfolger für 2020 angekündigt!

Beitragvon Galien » 21. Oktober 2020 09:36

Eigennützige Werbung für meine hier geschriebenen AARs:

England in HoI III: For Crown And Country!
Deutsches Reich in HoI III: Tagebuch eines deutschen Landsers
Karthago in Total War Rome 2: Alleine gegen den Rest der Welt!

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Re: [Knights of Honor] Nachfolger für 2020 angekündigt!

Beitragvon Galien » 5. November 2020 09:03

DevDiary 12 – Diplomacy Part 1 – Wars and Alliances

Hello friends, and welcome once again to 12th DevDiary for “Knights of Honor II: Sovereign”! In this diary we will begin to talk about one of, if not the most important, feature in the game – diplomacy. Since this topic is huge, we will split it in several parts, starting with Wars and Alliances. The art of war is the most common way to dominance and victory, and even if you prefer to play the “Swiss neutrality” style, chances are that sooner or later, you will be attacked by more aggressive kingdoms or get involved in conflicts by other means. As we say here in Bulgaria, “Around dry things, the wet ones burn, too”.

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War was one of the things we wanted to improve from the first game, mainly when two or more kingdoms are involved, fighting in alliances with each other. It is true that we had alliances in the original game, and we started with the same functionality in this one, but we naturally stumbled upon familiar problems. Alliances were practically permanent, punishing you if you ever decide to attack kingdoms you once allied with. Alliances also often felt tedious, forcing you into conflicts that you would otherwise want to avoid because of actions out of your control, and usually not in a fun way.

Initially, we tried to solve the problem by limiting them to one generation, meaning that alliances were dissolved upon the death of either of the kings who signed them (inspired by some historical alliances and texts). This worked in some cases, but in others – it didn’t work at all. Sometimes alliances were disappointingly short, other times they were still too long and the problem with participation in wars against unwanted enemies remained. Even we, the developers, primarily avoided using alliances when playing the game, so we finally made a rather big change – in “KoH2:S” they exist only in the context of wars and while it lasts.

Now, before someone gets awfully disappointed, we want to assure you we have a lot of “peace time” pacts – defensive pacts, invasion plans, royal marriages, vassal-liege relations and other agreements, for which we will very soon tell you about, but right now, we will focus just on the alliances in wars (or as we call them – just “alliances”). None of these previously mentioned pacts guarantees an alliance, though they usually make it highly probable.

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What helped us a lot was that historically wars were rarely 1 vs 1, and we had a ton of inspiration from actual events – from many medieval wars like the Anglo-French War (1213–1214), where France defeated the Angevin Empire, allied with the Holy Roman Empire, Flanders and Boulogne; to some older epic wars in the Balkans, like the defeat of the Arab invasion by the Bulgarian khan Tervel, that supported the weak (at that point) Byzantium and with this alliance stopped the Muslim advance in the interior of Europe during the 8th century, about the time when the whole Iberian peninsula fell.

So, in “KoH2:S” each war has two sides (alliances), and each alliance has one leader and possibly several supporters. The supporters can participate from the beginning of the war (depending on the pacts, prior to starting the war) or join in afterwards. Surely, players that prefer to gain strong friends through diplomacy will often use the options like “Demand support in war”, as this can quickly bring a lot of power to their alliance, especially if you have some of the aforementioned stances and pacts. Leaving or disbanding an alliance as the war goes is also a possibility, but the outcome is what you’d expect – your ex-allies will not be very happy about it and overall, your reputation and authority will be hurt, so it is usually a though decision to make.

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By this time, you are probably wandering how can you ever end a war, considering that you might have formidable forces against you and long wars lead to serious exhaustion of a kingdom. Indeed, you can destroy your enemies and this will lead to peace, but against bigger kingdoms, you often have to negotiate it earlier. A war can be ended with negotiations ONLY between the leaders. If they agree on the terms to sign peace, it is signed between the two alliances and practically everyone participating in the war – leaders and supporters.

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During the war, supporters are able to negotiate peace with the opposing leader “solo” and if the agreement is accepted, they exit the war. Yes, their ex-allies will be really disappointed, but at least their ex-enemies will be… ex-enemies. Supporters can never negotiate peace between each other, however: any kingdom participating in war is always in “war stance” with ALL kingdoms of the enemy alliance while they are participating in the war.

Now, we are considering adding an even more cunning diplomatic option – switching sides – but this can be (and, historically, was) extremely dramatic. It creates an awesome story indeed, but we are still unsure if it might feel too punishing for many players, when the Brutus’s dagger is in their backs.

What’s your opinion on that matter – should we go all-in “Game of thrones” style, or should we have more honorable factions with less unpredictable diplomacy and backstabbing? Do you like the concept of these alliances, limited within the war, or would you prefer to have just the long-lasting pacts between kingdoms? We’d love to hear about your playstyle in strategy games – do you like to gather a bunch of allies before even thinking of invading someone; do you prefer not to bother with that diplomacy mumbo-jumbo and straight out dominate everyone that crosses your path; or do you prefer something in between, like building a ‘safety cloud’ with no aggression pacts, but then marching into war alone?

We will talk more about Diplomacy (Wars and Alliances mainly) in our DevStream on Thursday, October 29th, @ 3:00 PM GMT / 11:00 AM EST. This time the original creator and creative director of both the new and the original KoH games – Vesselin Handjiev – will participate, so don’t miss it out. The Twitch stream will be hosted on the THQ Nordic channel: http://twitch.tv/thqnordic and we’ll be grabbing responses from this post as well as answering questions live during the stream.

Next time we will continue the subject of diplomacy since there is a lot more to share. Till then, we bid thee farewell. Go forth and conquer, our brave warriors!

-> https://community.knightsofhonor.com/in ... ances-r20/
Eigennützige Werbung für meine hier geschriebenen AARs:

England in HoI III: For Crown And Country!
Deutsches Reich in HoI III: Tagebuch eines deutschen Landsers
Karthago in Total War Rome 2: Alleine gegen den Rest der Welt!

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Re: [Knights of Honor] Nachfolger für 2020 angekündigt!

Beitragvon The Rusty Sword » 14. November 2020 16:50

Im Stream zum Diary gab es wohl ein kurzes Statment bezüglich Release. Habe das vorhin hier entdeckt: https://youtu.be/GpkS8fZfbjw
Bin mal gespannt, was sie nächstes Mal dann erzählen :D
Day1-KoH-Fan <3

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Re: [Knights of Honor] Nachfolger für 2020 angekündigt!

Beitragvon Galien » 14. November 2020 17:03

Zu den konkreten Informationen bin ich ja dann mal gespannt, noch steht überall dieses Jahr zur Veröffentlichung angeschlagen. Inzwischen bin ich da etwas skeptisch, 2020 ist in sieben Wochen geschafft, warten wir mal den 26.11 an, wenn sie den DevDiary veröffentlichen wollen.
Eigennützige Werbung für meine hier geschriebenen AARs:

England in HoI III: For Crown And Country!
Deutsches Reich in HoI III: Tagebuch eines deutschen Landsers
Karthago in Total War Rome 2: Alleine gegen den Rest der Welt!

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Re: [Knights of Honor] Nachfolger für 2020 angekündigt!

Beitragvon Galien » 24. November 2020 11:24





Leider erzählen sie noch nichts zur geplanten Veröffentlichung...
Eigennützige Werbung für meine hier geschriebenen AARs:

England in HoI III: For Crown And Country!
Deutsches Reich in HoI III: Tagebuch eines deutschen Landsers
Karthago in Total War Rome 2: Alleine gegen den Rest der Welt!

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Re: [Knights of Honor] Nachfolger für 2020 angekündigt!

Beitragvon Galien » 2. Dezember 2020 16:08

DevDiary 13 – Diplomacy Part 2 – Diplomat and Pacts

Hello friends, and welcome to 13th DevDiary for “Knights of Honor II: Sovereign”! In the previous diary we talked about diplomacy, mainly in the context of wars and alliances. Wars are indeed often desired and the main path to victory in the game, but in some cases, they’re better to be delayed or avoided altogether, and looking for allies once the wars have started might be a measure undertaken too late. So, in this DevDiary we shall continue on the that topic, but focusing on the agreements and pacts outside of wars, as well as on the role of the Diplomats.

Doubtlessly what everyone would expect from the Diplomat class in a KoH game is mainly improving the relations with foreign kingdoms. Initially, this is what we were focused on and, indeed, maybe a tad too focused. Diplomats had to be sent to a kingdom and there they had quite a few possibilities like gaining the king’s favor, fascinating the queen, and whatnot. Though these used different mechanics and resulted in somewhat different bonuses, they felt pretty much the same, considering the final goals. That made them feel more like periodical tedious action to perform, rather than making a strategic choice.

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We felt that we really needed to improve this class and in the recent months, we reworked it significantly. A big part of this was removing all that tedious micromanagement and instead adding new actions and effects that widen the range of problems Diplomats can solve, hopefully providing different strategies for the players to explore. One of the more significant things we’ve added are Defensive pacts and Invasion plans as something exclusive to the class. Each diplomat can form and maintain only a single pact or plan, so it is a tough choice. Both of those are targeting a selected kingdom and the diplomat can search for potential “friends”, which become “potential allies”, since their obligations depend on whether and how a war with the target starts.

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The Defensive pacts are visible to all kingdoms and they can be quite discouraging to a potential attacker, since they know that attacking any of the pact members means starting a war with all of them. The opposite is not true – if someone from the Defensive pact voluntarily attacks the target, the pact is broken and the members do not become allies, at least not automatically. So, it is a way to defend yourself from a formidable foe, but it is useless if you actually want to use it for offensive purposes.

That’s where Invasion plans come into play – they trigger the other way around. When the leader of the plan starts a war against the target, all participants enter the war as allies. These plans are normally kept a secret, since if the target finds out in time about them, for example by having a good spy network, there are quite a few strategies they can explore. They can form a Defensive pact in response; try to dissuade the plan’s leader from attacking; attack first to surprise the enemies and wage war only against one of the kingdoms; or even try to take out the diplomat that maintains the Invasion plan, in order to immediately interrupt it.

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In the image we see that Croatia participates in an invasion plan(s), together with Germany, Austria, Bosnia and Vidin, but Germany, Austria, Bosnia and Venice are in defensive pact(s) against it. Also, royal marriage with Bosnia and trade agreement with Tarnovo are shown.

Apart from forming and maintaining pacts, diplomats may also travel directly to another kingdom in order to improve relations passively, over time. This can be a particularly important order, in times which demand more cautious strategizing. If matters have escalated to war, diplomats may also be ordered to negotiate peace, which comes in handy when dealing with stubborn kings who refuse to step off their high thrones.

Another new addition to the diplomats is their more “civil” involvement in internal affairs. They provide significant bonuses when governing a province and are a good match in that direction, even when compared to Merchants. Indeed, merchants are the ones ensuring the highest income, but diplomats are helpful in improving multiple aspects for the development of a province.

While they are not on a mission, diplomats can be very helpful in improving the opinion about the crown of different society groups. These opinions are a new feature for the KoH series, which affects almost all matters of a kingdom, thus the timely intervention of an experienced diplomat can be crucial. We will talk more about Opinions in one of the future diaries, as it is a separate topic, and a large one at that.

Another new action, maybe a bit more unexpected, is the searching for a spouse for a member of the royal family. This can be manually done by the players as well, but diplomats can be helpful in speeding up and easing the process. Royal marriages have several important roles. The marriage of a king early on helps having a big royal family and each member is useful – princes are powerful knights in court and a king, dying without a successor, can truly throw a kingdom into chaos. Both princes and kings, married to a foreign princess, can also have territorial claims, if the father of the princess, the foreign king, dies. Marrying your princesses has significant diplomatic advantages on its own. While the marriage lasts, the foreign kingdom is more benevolent towards you (compared to having a prince or king, married to their princess) and you also gain part of their prestige. Of course, regardless the gender or position of the married royalty, a marriage always considerably warms up the relations between the two kingdoms.

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We’ll be glad to hear your thoughts on Diplomacy – do you enjoy spending time and effort on it, ensuring the best diplomatic affairs in grand strategy games, or is it just a final resort you reach for when the army fails you? Would you like to explore more elaborate strategies with the Diplomat class, or rather stick to the basics and focus on increasing your foreign relations?

We will talk more about the Diplomat and the pacts in our DevStream on Thursday, December 3d, @ 3:00 PM GMT / 11:00 AM EST. The Twitch stream will be hosted on the THQ Nordic channel: http://twitch.tv/thqnordic and we’ll be grabbing responses from this post as well as answering questions live during the stream.

Till then, we bid thee farewell. Go forth and conquer, our brave warriors!

-> https://community.knightsofhonor.com/in ... pacts-r21/
Eigennützige Werbung für meine hier geschriebenen AARs:

England in HoI III: For Crown And Country!
Deutsches Reich in HoI III: Tagebuch eines deutschen Landsers
Karthago in Total War Rome 2: Alleine gegen den Rest der Welt!

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Re: [Knights of Honor] Nachfolger für 2020 angekündigt!

Beitragvon Galien » 4. Dezember 2020 16:22

Gemäß der Gesprächsrunde von gestern, ist die Veröffentlichung von KoH II auf 2021 verschoben - man hatte es sich ja schon gedacht. Wer es mit eigenen Ohren hören möchte: https://www.twitch.tv/thqnordic
Eigennützige Werbung für meine hier geschriebenen AARs:

England in HoI III: For Crown And Country!
Deutsches Reich in HoI III: Tagebuch eines deutschen Landsers
Karthago in Total War Rome 2: Alleine gegen den Rest der Welt!

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Re: [Knights of Honor] Nachfolger für 2020 angekündigt!

Beitragvon Galien » 26. Januar 2021 15:05

DevDiary 14 - Opinions


Hello friends, and welcome to the 14th DevDiary for “Knights of Honor II: Sovereign”! In most of the previous diaries, we’ve been focused either on military related stuff, or on relations and interactions between different kingdoms, as those are, naturally, the essence of our game. In this one we will digress from that main course and talk about the “opinions” of different social classes. This feature revolves around how the actions, made by the players (or AIs), affect the different classes in their kingdoms and how the opinions of those classes, in turn, affect the kingdom.

In the first game, there was an important kingdom-wide parameter, representing how satisfied the people are with their ruler. It was called “Kingdom power” and we kept it in KoH2:S, renaming it to “Crown authority”. It still plays a major role in the game, but just a few months ago we decided it felt a bit flat and we really wanted to enrich the gameplay and immersion. So to address this, we tried to add more depth in the internal affairs of a kingdom with the “Opinions” feature. Our goal was not to make it too complex or overwhelming for the players to manage, but instead let it run a bit in the background. Opinions have a significant effect, but the control over them is primarily indirect. They reward players for doing what social classes would want from a king, rather than separately taking actions to increase opinions or simply paying gold for that purpose.

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There are 5 social classes in KoH2:S – Peasantry, Nobility, Clergy, Army and Merchants. Their opinions can vary from -10 to +10 each, and when they are positive, some benefits apply; when they are negative – so do penalties. Additionally, below or above given thresholds, the corresponding social class may take actions to support or oppose their ruler. In contrast to parameters like rebel risk and happiness, opinions are kingdom-wide, so even small changes may lead to very significant effects, especially in larger kingdoms. Explaining how they work will be easiest with some examples for each one.

Peasantry opinion is strongly related with rebellion risk and food production rate, but also affect the morale of peasant and militia squads in the army. It is relatively easy to increase, as many buildings, improving the wellbeing of the people and some basic religious buildings play a favorable role. The steps to avoid losing it are rather simple, though not so easy to do sometimes – the player must protect the common people from invasions and rebellions and when possible – not to enter wars voluntarily. After all, that’s what the simple folk fear most.

Nobility opinion affects things like crown authority increase costs, influence in neighbors, loyalty of knights, revolt risk… It is probably the hardest to increase, as there are very few things that can make the aristocrats happy, e.g. winning a war or crushing a rebellion. On the other side, there are tons of things that make them upset, like financial instability, military losses or even diplomacy decisions, depending on the influence of the kingdoms that they concern.

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Army opinion plays an important role for army morale and obedience and is one that is very dangerous to keep low, unless players wants their own armies to march against them. It depends on military successes, constant supply of provisions and not leaving men behind – abandoning wounded troops or a famous marshal to rot in the enemies’ dungeon is not the greatest way to win the sympathy of the soldiers.

Merchants’ opinion naturally affects the gold income in several ways, among which corruption levels, trade income, cost for buying supplies and others. As one could guess, they are happy when more opportunities for trade are created and maintained, e.g. constructing the needed buildings and making proper trade agreements with the other kingdoms. On the other side, things like going bankrupt, bad diplomacy with trade partners and wars are really bad for business and thus they are not accepted well.

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Clergy opinion we saved for last, as it is most complex to explain, since it depends on the kingdom’s religion. There are some common effects, like book production and religious influence in/by neighboring kingdoms, but also many other effects, depending on what the kingdom religion is. For an example, Catholics’ relations with the Pope depend on the clergy opinion and vice versa, same goes for the Orthodox and the Ecumenical Patriarch; pagan shamans, on the other hand, boost the army’s morale.

Events that can rise and lower the clergy’s opinion differ even more. Catholics are very concerned with good relations with the rest of the Catholic world and his holiness, the Pope. They really appreciate things like leading a crusade or defending Rome. Muslim scholars care about the relations with the caliphs and jihad involvement. For example, they can get really mad if their king decides to sign peace with the enemies of a caliphate in a holy war. Pagan shamans care a lot about military successes, as it was commonly considered that losing an important battle means the king has upset the gods and they have withdrawn their divine favor over him.

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In general, Opinions improve slowly and passively, where a player may not be able to do much to increase them directly with actions. After all, it will rarely be a good strategy to declare war just to make the shamans happy with some battles, and even if you do, this can backfire and decrease the opinions of other classes. In these cases, diplomats can be helpful, as their “Improve opinions” action can speed up the process – the more experienced a diplomat is, the more effective this action is, and if they have royal blood, the classes appreciate the attention even more. Even then, the results are far from immediate, and the best strategy may be to avoid unnecessary deterioration of opinions altogether.

We are still experimenting with this feature, adding and balancing causes of opinion changes and effects the different classes have. Feel free to share what effects and reasons for increase or decrease of opinions you think imight be interesting and immersive to be included in KoH2:S, or which do you think will be tiresome to deal with. We’d also love to hear what you think about this feature in general – do you enjoy a bit of focus on the internal policy of a kingdom in grand strategy games, or do you see it as unnecessary sidetrack? And do you like the selection of classes we’ve picked, or would you prefer them to be more, less or simply different?

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We will talk more about the Diplomat and the pacts in our DevStream on Thursday, January 7th, @ 4:00 PM GMT / 11:00 AM EST. The Twitch stream will be hosted on the THQ Nordic channel: http://twitch.tv/thqnordic and we’ll be grabbing responses from this post as well as answering questions live during the stream.

Till then, we bid thee farewell. Go forth and conquer, our brave warriors!

-> https://community.knightsofhonor.com/in ... nions-r22/
Eigennützige Werbung für meine hier geschriebenen AARs:

England in HoI III: For Crown And Country!
Deutsches Reich in HoI III: Tagebuch eines deutschen Landsers
Karthago in Total War Rome 2: Alleine gegen den Rest der Welt!

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Re: [Knights of Honor] Nachfolger für 2020 angekündigt!

Beitragvon Galien » 10. Februar 2021 17:19

DevDiary 15 - Evolution of Gameplay


Hello friends, and welcome to 15th DevDiary for “Knights of Honor II: Sovereign”! For this one we have chosen to take quite a different approach and tell you about changes in gameplay features we’ve already presented. The idea behind this is to keep you up to date in regards to the features, but more importantly, to let you in on how we iterate over the game, what kinds of reasons make us add, scrap or rework stuff, and overall give you a better look at the development process.

Let’s start with one of the major features that we covered many months ago – the Armies (DevDiary5). When we presented it, the default number of squads a non-marshal knight could lead was 6, marshals could lead 9 and there were additional bonuses on top of that as well – for kings, crusaders, pagans (depending on traditions they follow), etc. The absolute maximum was 18 or 21 in different versions of the game, and we should have in mind that often two knights per each side participate in a battle.

However, we decided to reduce the number of squads to 5 non-marshal / 8 marshal and these numbers being the maximal ones. Why? Well, first of all, by playtesting we found out that players usually use 1-2 unit types per army and having too many squads didn’t lead to actual gameplay variety. Also, we found that 12 or more squad was trickier to handle – the UI was busy and it required a lot of micromanagement to check your troops – e.g., how many exactly are healthy, wounded, dead; to merge or abandon some squads, to refill them, to check out their experience and levels. As we want our tactical battles to also be a bit more dynamic, compared to other grand-strategy games, controlling 20 squads in a battle (or even more if you have garrison or other additional troops) felt too burdening.

Having less squads makes the choice and handling for each one more significant. Of course, we didn’t want to lose gameplay features, so instead of the “additional squads” bonus, there are now bonuses on “units per squad” and on army morale. The gameplay choices are just as interesting, but everything is neater and tidier and easier for the players to grasp and control. As of now, one squad can vary quite a lot – depending heavily on the province the army leader governs (how many “levies” it has), his skills, kingdom’s traditions and other factors, you can double or even triple your squad size.

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Moving on to DevDiary7: Rebellions. We iterated a lot over the rebel features over the course of development and when we presented them, we felt that they were quite good. Since then, we’ve made several changes, though. One of the bigger changes was determining Rebellion zone, and allowing rebel armies to cross borders and affecting nearby kingdoms. It felt quite reasonable as an effect, and depending on other gameplay features, sometimes it felt fun too. However, players started complaining about rebels more over time, though, and for mostly two reasons. First, it doesn’t feel fair. You make great efforts to keep your citizens calm, you maintain high Opinions, crown authority, take care of religious and cultural assimilation and in the end – rebels are still coming, because your neighbors are chaotic. Is it realistic? Kind of, it is not unimaginable that some rebels and bandits will date cross in the other kingdom and pillage whatever they can there. “Life isn’t fair”, you might say, but in the end, this is a game and user experience and fun is what leads us (one of our pillars we talked about in DD1, if you can remember). The second reason is that this feature didn’t scale too well. Rebel spawn in neighboring kingdoms, which you cannot control, is still manageable for small or medium sized kingdoms and it creates interesting situations, but do you know what happens if you control 150 provinces and have 50 neighbors? We assure you that the rebel swarm could get very, very ugly.

We didn’t totally scrap this behavior, though. We made it more rare, exclusive to “famous rebels” and we might include it to some extent as an element for higher difficulty settings for players, that want more challenging experience.

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So, saving the big one for last… let’s go back to something we talked about in DevDiary4, Invasions. Here we basically scrapped the “occupation” state, which had a connection to diplomacy, pacing of the game and the way wars are led in general. At first everything about it looked very in-depth and interesting, but (as with number of squads) the numerous stages of overtaking a province seemed confusing for some players and (as in rebels crossing borders) it didn’t scale too well, getting a bit tiresome after you do it 50 times in a single game.

The process had three stages – taking political control (in the end of a war or before it), dealing with the disorder state of the locals and then the long process of cultural conversion. Of course, we didn’t want just to dumb it down, so we tried to simplify it, without losing essence.

Without having the “occupied” state, we moved some effects to the “disorder” state. Forceful establishing of order by an army now has a political effect and it can be harder to achieve the peaceful establishment of order while the war continues, unless the local population was loyal to you in the first place. In a way, the disorder state behaves as “occupation” while wars last and like the previous disorder state after they are over. The kingdoms that owned these provinces can also demand you to return their lands as a part of a peace treaty or even at some point later in time, and thus we represented that they still have a claim of ownership and the diplomatic part is well preserved.

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Of course, changes like these three are just the tip of the iceberg – surely, we change smaller stuff every day and make much more drastic changes for features we haven’t yet presented. Naturally, we are trying to make blogs and streams for the “finalized” ones and yes, this is one dirty word in the industry. Our policy is to rework something as much as it needs to be reworked, allowing the time for features to mature and grow to create the best experience we can craft. At Black Sea Games we believe that this is the right path for making really great games. However, we are getting close with KoH2:S and are very satisfied with how most of the things work as they are now.

We will talk more about the evolution of the gameplay systems and the dynamics of developing and iterating over them in our DevStream on Thursday, February 11th, @ 4:00 PM GMT / 11:00 AM EST. The Twitch stream will be hosted on the THQ Nordic channel: http://twitch.tv/thqnordic and we’ll be grabbing responses from this post as well as answering questions live during the stream.

Next time we will talk about one of the main goals of the game – Prestige – how do you gain and lose it and the effects it has in the course of the game and in its end. Until then, we bid thee farewell. Go forth and conquer!

-> https://community.knightsofhonor.com/in ... eplay-r23/
Eigennützige Werbung für meine hier geschriebenen AARs:

England in HoI III: For Crown And Country!
Deutsches Reich in HoI III: Tagebuch eines deutschen Landsers
Karthago in Total War Rome 2: Alleine gegen den Rest der Welt!

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Re: [Knights of Honor] Nachfolger für 2020 angekündigt!

Beitragvon Laudan » 11. Februar 2021 10:49

Dieses Spiel hat so viele Neuerungen und ich werde das Gefühl nicht los das das neue Knights of Honor sich sehr weit vom ursprünglichen Knights of Honor entfernt. Aber ich lass mich gerne positiv überraschen. Bisher habe ich das Spiel noch nicht live gesehen.

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Re: [Knights of Honor] Nachfolger für 2020 angekündigt!

Beitragvon Galien » 11. Februar 2021 13:04

Ich bin mal gespannt, wie sie das ganze dann umsetzen und wie es sich spielen lassen wird. Das sie sich ein wenig weiterentwickeln müssen, sollte wohl klar sein. Einfach nur die Grafik überputzen und die KI weiterentwickeln wäre etwas dürftig. Abwarten.
Eigennützige Werbung für meine hier geschriebenen AARs:

England in HoI III: For Crown And Country!
Deutsches Reich in HoI III: Tagebuch eines deutschen Landsers
Karthago in Total War Rome 2: Alleine gegen den Rest der Welt!

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Re: [Knights of Honor] Nachfolger für 2020 angekündigt!

Beitragvon Galien » 19. März 2021 17:36

DevDiary 16 - Prestige, Great Powers, Emperor of the World


Hello friends, and welcome to 16th DevDiary for “Knights of Honor II: Sovereign”! When we talked about traditions in DD10, we mentioned the concept of a kingdom’s prestige, and how traditions are unlocked as prestige increases. Prestige has а much greater impact in the game, though, and it even paves the road to victory, so today we will take a deeper look at how it is increased and what role it plays.

Measuring the greatness of a kingdom in KoH2:S is done by summing up two elements. The first element represents major events that took place in its history (fame). The second one represents its current greatness (prestige).

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Actions and events can lead both to increases or decreases of fame. The example that usually comes to mind first is battle and war outcomes – winning brings fame and losing reduces it. There are many ways to increase your fame however, like leading a crusade or putting an end to a rebellion. The ways to lose fame are broader, so the players might want to be careful with their actions – executing noble prisoners, breaking non-aggression pacts, attacking their vassals, etc. bring ill fame. The negatives of such actions, however, have a long lasting, but not permanent, effect and as time passes, the wrongdoings are forgotten, little by little.

Things that comprise prestige are control of important cities (e.g. Mecca, Constantinople, Venice, Alexandria, London), production of unique goods, important buildings, and rankings. Rankings are an interesting new addition to the series and a major factor here. They are always relative – it depends how well a kingdom is doing compared to the rest of the world – and the prestige bonus is awarded depending on the kingdom’s standing and not on absolute values. Currently there are 15 rankings in five categories (wealth, conquest, culture, society and politics) and the players can aim at topping those which best suit their strategy and playstyle.

Additionally, a kingdom also gains a percentage of the prestige earned by its vassals, as well as from kingdoms it has royal ties with, but only by marrying princesses. In the first game of the series players didn’t like marrying princesses, as that would only lead to potential claim of inheritance from the other kingdom, so to counter-balance that in KoH2:S, we added bonuses that only princesses possess, like the prestige bonus, espionage and counter-espionage bonus, and others.

As the game develops, we are iterating and balancing the events and actions that increase or decrease fame, as well as adding ways for fame to change when we introduce new features as well. The good news is that this feature is easily moddable as well and those who want to get creative can easily add or remove fame as a side-effect of a building or an action.

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If a kingdom’s prestige rises above a required value, and if it is among the nine with highest prestige, it starts being considered a great power. Besides the epic golden frame of the coat of arms, great power status provides significant bonuses like higher army morale, stability, and cultural influence in neighboring kingdoms. It also allows the kingdom to vote for becoming the “Emperor of the World”.

“Emperor of the World” (EoW) is an important feature we kept from the first game, representing rare gatherings of the Great Powers’ (GPs) kings who can vote to accept the superiority of one of the top two claimants, or abstain, if they want to support none of them. In the process, voters are not all equal, as each kingdom votes with the value of its prestige.

Players can even get bolder and try to proclaim themselves as EoW whenever they see fit, as long as they are among the Great Powers and have the required prestige for that action. This is very risky, though, since if the rest of the GPs deny the claim, a war starts between all who denied it and the claimants. In order to get their support, it is not nearly enough just to fulfill the requirements or even to lead the prestige chart and be the leading great power. The rest of the great powers would only support someone if they see them worthy for the title, but likeable as well. Here things like good relations, royal marriages, large scale trading, being caliphate, etc. play a huge role.

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Yes, this is a bit fictional roleplay-ish feature, which lacks historical accuracy, but it turned out to be quite fun in KoH1 and a good conclusion to a game – if you feel victorious, even though you’ve not conquered yet every single province, you have way to feel like you can win and claim victory and see whether you’re really the undisputed EoW. After all, the game is about becoming the dominant empire in the Old World and not always about “owning” it all.

In the situation where an AI kingdom wins such a vote, players can also singlehandedly refuse to accept them, but then they get in war with all of the GPs and results are usually not pretty. However, in multiplayer games such votes cannot be denied and the Emperor of the World is victorious, while the rest must admit their defeat.

We’d love to hear what kinds of things you think should bring or take prestige and fame and which ones you expect to be too restrictive for your playstyle. Would you prefer more realistic and punishing effects to make you play more carefully and respectfully to your agreements and common manners, or do you prefer more freestyle gameplay, without too many consequences?

We will talk more about Prestige, Great Powers and Emperor of the World in our DevStream on Thursday, March 18th, @ 3:00 PM GMT / 11:00 AM EST. The Twitch stream will be hosted on the THQ Nordic channel: http://twitch.tv/thqnordic and we’ll be grabbing responses from this post as well as answering questions live during the stream.

Next time we will talk about the emblematic class of KoH series – Spy and Espionage; what we’ve kept from the first game, what we’ve changed, added and why.

-> https://community.knightsofhonor.com/in ... world-r24/
Eigennützige Werbung für meine hier geschriebenen AARs:

England in HoI III: For Crown And Country!
Deutsches Reich in HoI III: Tagebuch eines deutschen Landsers
Karthago in Total War Rome 2: Alleine gegen den Rest der Welt!

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Re: [Knights of Honor] Nachfolger für 2020 angekündigt!

Beitragvon Galien » 20. April 2021 19:21

DevDiary 17 - Settlements and Province Features

Hello friends, and welcome to 17th DevDiary for “Knights of Honor II: Sovereign”! Though we initially planned to talk about Espionage and Spies in this one, we decided to change the topic, and cover some fundamental features that are high time we shed more light on. Settlements and provinces are at the base of the game’s economy, connected to the production of any resources or currency.

As we established in the very first DevDiaries we wrote, the world in our game is divided into provinces, more than 300 of them. Today we will take a look into the key elements of a province, and how those elements define a province’s potential and benefits to whoever controls it.

Every province has exactly one town, symbolizing its governmental center. Through that town the players can view a summary of everything important in the province, as well as make decisions about it. Besides the town, there are always several settlements around the province, usually around 5-6. In some locations there can be more or less, depending on the province’s size, but many fall into the 5-6 range. These settlements determine, to a large extent, the strengths of a province. There are 4 basic types:

- Villages represent larger population and commercial potential
- Crop farms are related to the production of food and other agricultural resources and goods
- Settlements with religious importance primarily serve educational and religious purposes, represented in our game by “books” and “faith”; they can be monasteries, mosques and shrines, depending on the province’s religion
- Castles primarily improve defenses and recruitment capabilities
- In addition to their type, some settlements can be coastal as well, which plays an important role if some naval related buildings are made

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All of these provide initial bonuses, but more importantly, certain buildings and upgrades affect their production and efficiency. This means constructing a building in a province which has several related settlements to it can be substantially impactful.

Many possibilities arise for players to explore – they can try to adapt their strategy to the provinces they have; or try to execute their initially planned strategy, picking the most suitable provinces among their own for each purpose planned; finally, they can also try to quickly conquer certain provinces that they find suitable for a given purpose. As an example, finding a province with 3-4 monasteries will definitely be a good goal for someone planning to build a cathedral and university – such territories are often worth fighting for.

In addition to settlements, each province is characterized by several “province features.” Some of them are represented by a corresponding special settlement, e.g. Flax Fields, Herb gardens, Cattle farms, Mines etc. Others are not represented by settlements and are considered to be either an additional resource in an existing settlement (e.g. gold veins, silver ore and lodestone are related to mines, but there are mines without any of those), or just as something that can be acquired in the province – rare game, amber deposits, salt, etc.

There are “geographical” province features as well, with the main difference compared to other province features being they are predetermined by the position of the province’s town and its surroundings. We love to randomize as many elements as we can, so the game feels different every time you play it, creating more of a “sandbox” experience. Settlements and province features are randomly generated each time within some rules and boundaries, but we can’t really say Venice is not a coastal town or that Vienna is not on a large river, right? Geographical restrictions do apply for some of the other resources as well, e.g. you will not see camel herds in Sweden, vineyards in Sahara, and you are quite likely to have horses in the steppes.

It is hard to say where the line should be drawn, as gameplay on one side and historical accuracy on the other can clash, but we are trying to find the best balance between them and create enjoyable gameplay without making the Old world look too crazy.

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But let’s get back to the function of province features. Most of them do contribute a little to the province’s economy, but don’t necessarily get significant bonuses from the regular builds. Instead, province features provide the possibility of constructing unique building(s) and upgrade(s. Often this leads to new resources becoming available for the kingdom, and in turn makes new buildings, upgrades and units available as well.

For example, “Herb gardening” can only be made where the Herbs province feature is available, and through it kingdoms can make upgrades like “Herbalist shacks”, “Dye workshops”, “Apiaries”, “Candle makers” etc. and thus produce resources like Herbs, Dyes, Wax and Candles, that have usage in textile, medicine, naval buildings and upgrades, etc…

As you see, we use the terms “buildings” and “upgrades” rather loosely, as these can represent industries, techniques, practices, organizations and what not. Buildings and upgrades are quite a large topic – they are over a hundred with interesting specifics, so we’ll need to leave them for another DevDiary.

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To summarize, province features are quite important and often a driving force for expansion. Supplied with well-tanned and hardened leather, iron and trained warhorses, a kingdom can recruit fierce elite soldiers; great naval advantages and discoveries are impossible without plenty of resources, from timber, tar and wax to maps and compasses. As we talked earlier in the DevDiary about merchants, some goods can be imported, but it is hard to maintain a kingdom’s economy if it relies too heavily on resources produced elsewhere – it can be rather expensive and sometimes trade relations can be ruined.

We’d love to hear what your preferred playstyle is in strategic games with such sandbox elements – do you like to adapt your strategy to the circumstances, or bend the circumstances, until they fit your strategy? To what level do you enjoy the random generation – would you prefer full-fledged unmanipulated randomization and thus – a new world every time; somewhat determined world, only with nuances; or straight-out predetermined one (if you pick the later, you’ve probably played “Lost temple” a lot, right?).

We will talk a bit more about Settlements and Province features in our DevStream on Thursday, April 22th, @ 3:00 PM GMT / 11:00 AM EST but more importantly, this time we will spare part of our streaming time to show a sneak peek at new in-game footage of KoH2:S – if you want to be among the first to see new gameplay, tune in! The Twitch stream will be hosted on the THQ Nordic channel: http://twitch.tv/thqnordic and we’ll be grabbing responses from this post as well as answering questions live during the stream.

Next time we will talk about the emblematic class of KoH series – Spy and Espionage; what we’ve kept from the first game, what we’ve changed, added and why. We are having a bit of Déjà vu with this last sentence…


-> https://community.knightsofhonor.com/in ... tures-r25/
Eigennützige Werbung für meine hier geschriebenen AARs:

England in HoI III: For Crown And Country!
Deutsches Reich in HoI III: Tagebuch eines deutschen Landsers
Karthago in Total War Rome 2: Alleine gegen den Rest der Welt!

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Re: [Knights of Honor] Nachfolger für 2020 angekündigt!

Beitragvon Galien » 27. Mai 2021 11:22

DevDiary 18 - Spies and Espionage

Hello friends and welcome to the 18th DevDiary for “Knights of Honor II: Sovereign”! As you are now well infiltrated in our development process, the time has come for you to eavesdrop on classified information about one of the most emblematic features in KoH – the Spy and Espionage.

We must admit that we were greatly inspired of the intrigues in Game of Thrones, amongst many other books, movies and games, and the concept that “everything (and every man) has a price”. We had (and still have) countless ideas around what could be achieved by espionage and how the system should work exactly. The bar we set for ourselves on the Spy class is quite high, since Spies are favorite to many of the fans of KoH and since the release of the first game, we’re humbled in how it seems to have provided a source of inspiration to a few game developers over the years as well. We’ve tried to preserve the “magic” of this feature, but at the same time build on it and add more possibilities and actions.

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There was also one very major difference to take into consideration – one of the pillars of the development of KoH2:S– the multiplayer. As people can be much more cunning than an AI, and players in one team can infiltrate several spies in the same kingdom, we had to be careful when designing and balancing what these knights can do and what strategies can the players explore. In result, espionage in KoH2:S has a lot of similarities to the one in KoH, but also at least as many differences and new additions.


Let’s start with probably the most significant difference – how a spy infiltrates a kingdom. Instead of waiting for the enemy to hire a new knight (which then turns out to be your spy, if you are lucky), you can now immediately infiltrate any kingdom and your spy never becomes a character in your opponent’s court. Instead, he can do his dirty deeds alone, or BRIBE some of the opponent’s knights. At one point of the development of the classes, we decided to make a very clear distinction between diplomats and spies and removed all offensive actions from the diplomat (like ruining relations between foreign kingdoms and such) and most defensive ones from the spy. As a result, they are now used for very different strategies.

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Upon arrival in a kingdom, a spy immediately “provides” vision over its lands, which includes the position of its armies – a valuable piece of information, especially in case of war. Additionally, he starts collecting various type of rumors about the kingdom he is in – its future plans, some weaknesses and problems, etc. Furthermore, for a cost/price he can start searching for a way to ruin the relations of that kingdom with another one. But these benefits are just the tip of the iceberg. As time goес by, various opportunities will arise for the spy like murder plots, provoking war, etc.

One of the most common and important among those opportunities is the Bribing. Any enemy knight, except the king, can potentially be bribed and if that is successful, new opportunity types will arise. These opportunities depending on the newly bribed puppets’ class, whether they are governing a town, whether they are leading an army, etc. For example, a bribed merchant can aid in robbing the treasury, a marshal can try to inspire a kingdom-wide army revolt and a puppet spy can aid in the assassination of otherwise unreachable targets like the members of the royal family. A governor can open the gates during siege, and a puppet, that afterwards becomes king… Well, we will let you imagine what opportunities might arise from that.

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Every spy action brings some serious risk, though. We can easily say that this class is all about “high risk, high reward” playstyle. If a plot is revealed, this has a negative effect on the foreign relations of the kingdom and can even lower its crown authority, depending on the action. Furthermore, the spy might be imprisoned if captured, or even outright killed. What the chances of success and revealing are depend on many factors, not just the skills and rank of the spies and what exactly are they trying to do. Some of those factors are traditions of both kingdoms, their crown authority, their kings’ espionage attribute, the rank of their best spy (thus spies also play a counter-espionage role), etc…

Besides the risk, most spy actions are very expensive, with their activities and bribes often requiring high upkeep and good preparation before they are executed. It is often a good strategy to combine espionage with other activities, in order to “tweak” the situation for the most beneficial results. Thus, espionage is useful mainly mid and late game for powerful kingdoms and if you want to build the “Ultimate Spy Realm”, well, a lot of dedication is required for ranking up your spies, getting proper traditions and ensuring stable economy, that can provide for spy activities.

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Well thought out and executed espionage can be really devastating for a kingdom and for some players, being the victims of these actions might not be so fun. We’ve provided an option for players, who dislike that part of the game – a host can forbid or limit spy interactions by their severity level, so if you are up for a “fair honorable” game with no sneaky stuff, you can set it up like so.

You’d better tell us what you think, or we will make you talk, one way or another! /evilgrin

Does the concept of such infiltration and bribery seem appealing to you, or do you remain loyal to the old concept of the spies, disguising as foreign knights? Are you fond of the espionage system at all, or do you prefer the more straightforward method of “infiltrating” your enemies with 50,000 feudal knights?

We will spread more deceitful rumors about Spies and Espionage in our DevStream on Thursday, May 27th, @ 3:00 PM GMT / 11:00 AM EST, so you can sneak in and eavesdrop on our conversation. The Twitch stream will be secretly hosted on the THQ Nordic channel: http://twitch.tv/thqnordic and we’ll be stealing responses from this post to answer during the stream. You can try interrogating us during the live stream, if you dare, but you will not find out anything out from us – we will not talk!

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We would have told you what we will talk about next time, but our memory is kind of fuzzy – maybe some gold might help us remember… You know where to find us. Until then, we bid thee farewell. Go forth and spread your network of spies!

************************************************************************************************************

P.S. CLASIFIED: Curious information from the recently opened top secret KoH dossier, do not read without the proper authorization!!! Note to Brad Logston – do not publish this segment!!!


Maybe you remember how in the first game to infiltrate a spy, you must send him in a kingdom and wait for a new knight to be hired there; this knight would then be your spy. The problem was that royal courts were getting filled pretty quickly as the game progressed, making hiring rare. Thus, it was next to impossible to infiltrate new spies during the mid and late game, rendering espionage practically useless. So, we implemented (unknown to the players) a workaround – knights, that were already hired, could also “turn out” spies. That led to an interesting side effect – your princes could become spies, sent from someone and players were wondering how is that possible. Well, that’s how.

We are not too proud for “cheating” the system like that, but sometimes ruthless decisions have to be taken for the greater good – the fun of the players. It is all about the fun…

-> https://community.knightsofhonor.com/in ... onage-r26/
Eigennützige Werbung für meine hier geschriebenen AARs:

England in HoI III: For Crown And Country!
Deutsches Reich in HoI III: Tagebuch eines deutschen Landsers
Karthago in Total War Rome 2: Alleine gegen den Rest der Welt!