Knights of Honor

If you’ve got a little time and like medieval strategy games, download the demo and check it out:

http://www.knights-of-honor.net/

I like it a lot. It’s a little bit Total War, a little bit Seven Kingdoms, a little bit Europa Universalis, a little bit Kohan, and a little bit several other games I can’t even think of at the moment. The potential strategies in the game seem numberless. It’s deceptively deep. And everything seems to work well, including the AI.

(Heads up: just don’t bother building the Fletcher or the Spearmaker, since you’re not allowed to recruit Archers or Spearmen in the demo. Not sure how they overlooked that, but they did.)

KoH isn’t out in the US yet, but Americans can get it through GoGamer if they want the full game.

EDIT: Hehe. Shows how much I know. For second opinions on the AI and some other things, check out the forum at the link above. The consensus seems to be that it’s a great game, but it gets old fast because it’s too easy to buy off the AI with peace treaties. Everyone’s waiting for a patch…

This game looks really fun, I’m downloading it now. But I’ve heard the “too easy” comment a few times now. How’s the multiplayer? Whats the developer’s track record with patches ( to fix this supposedly easy AI? )

Does “isn’t out in the U.S. yet” mean that the game is confirmed for the U.S. at some point? Last I checked, it was carried by EA Europe, but nobody else wanted it…? Any news?

No first hand knowledge on the multiplayer. From what I read in the forum, there’s not a lot of action in that area.

I don’t know about a US release, either. I just kind of assumed it would be released here, since it’s such a high quality game. But maybe not.

Update: the AI just kicked my ass. I was playing as Bohemia and the Papal States (“Papacy”) pretty much took over Europe. I tried every diplomatic maneuver I could think of to halt his advances, but to no avail. I had to quit before he ever actually attacked me, but unless something’s extremely broken, it was coming. If I was to base my purchase solely on the demo, there’d be no question about it. However, since you can’t recruit any but the most basic units in the demo, there’s no way to tell for sure how the full game plays out.

But it doesn’t matter. I bought the damned thing anyway. :)

Thre was another thread, but there is not much more info there, other than it seems to be fun. I have not been able to dig back into the demo, but what I saw I liked.

I really really enjoyed the game for a while, but I lost interest when the AI flaws started showing up and the game got pretty easy. It’s a shame as I think there’s a very nice game there; hopefully they will work on improving the AI.

One thing that would really go a long way would be to make the enemy AI stop accepting peace overtures just because you make them. This is particularly true when dealing with your enemies’ allies who declare war on you at the behest of the enemy nation. I have yet to have one of those declarations of war stick. All you have to do is, as soon as you receive the notice that they’re declaring war on you, offer them peace. They roll over every time.

This made it easy for me as Scotland to brutalize England, the most powerful nation in the game at that point. Because his knights were spread out on the continent, he had no one to defend his home castles. But his buddies could have made things expensive for me, or at least kept me on my toes by threatening to attack. Making immediate peace with those guys rendered England isolated and defenseless. What good were his treaties if his friends weren’t going to honor them? Silly.

RightWrong, here’s the answer to your patch question. It’s apparently due out at the end of the month:

http://forum.sunflowers.de/showthread.php?t=2768

Finally, someone’s giving this game the attention it deserves:

http://pc.gamespy.com/pc/knights-of-honor/570741p1.html

After reading the review, I’m a little baffled as to what the fifth star was withheld for. The interface is, imo, not nearly as clunky as the review would lead you to believe (although it does have some clunky aspects), so I find it hard to believe a whole star was taken off for that. The reviewer does mention that he felt the tutorial was insufficient, so maybe that’s the other half of the star. (For my part, I had no trouble picking up the game at all. There is a lot of ingame help available–waaaay more than in most other games.) The only other complaint voiced in the review was the lack of mutliplayer support for the full campaign game, but I’m going to assume he had the integrity not to deduct for that, since it doesn’t seem to have been marked against Rome: Total War.

At most, I would have deducted half a star total. KoH is one great game.

Yeah, it’s a really good game but I hope a patch will boost the AI.

The patch is out and it does.