As you get more military buildings, you'll have access to more advanced troops.
To start with, you'll only have peasants at your disposal. Once the battle is joined, you'll switch to the real-time tactical game where you can lead your individual units against those of your enemy.
There aren't any local militias to defend your territories unfortunately, so you'll need to keep an eye out and send reinforcements out as soon as the enemy crosses over your borders. When your enemies attack, they'll hit you where you're weakest. The AI in the game is quite aggressive on the medium setting and you'll often find yourself being attacked while you're still trying to puzzle out where your towns are and where best to appoint your marshals, merchants and priests.
While the presence of lots of buildings allows for a level of detail not seen in many other RTS games, the fact that they all pretty much look alike means you'll have to rely on the mouse-over popup windows to make sure you're picking the building you want. The presence of numerous smaller holdings around the towns is tactically significant but since the minimap doesn't place icons to show you where the central towns are, you may find yourself actually unclear about where your towns are or even how many of them you have.Įach town produces a variety of resources and there's a wide variety of buildings to choose from here to improve a town's resource production. Moreover it's not that easy to spot the towns on the map. For instance, while there's a somewhat useful town summary screen, it doesn't show the presence of important things like garrisons or leaders. One of the more aggravating problems with managing your empire is that you'll spend too much time trying to build the big picture out of the details the game throws your way. It might take you three days to get your forces from the center of your kingdom to it borders but you can form an alliance, set up a trade pact and get your allies to declare war on your enemies all in the time it takes to take a breath. You can even negotiate deals with far off rulers instantaneously. You can appoint marshals immediately and raise an entire army in a few seconds.
Though the game runs in real time, the mechanics seem somewhat inconsistent in their adherence to this system. If the ruler hires them, you'll have an inside man who can foment rebellion or play a number of other dastardly tricks. You can promote your knights to spies and send them to try to find service among a rival ruler. The same can be said of the clerical appointees who increase a town's happiness. That you can increase the profits of a town by appointing a merchant manager is fairly obvious. Since some of these agents are members of your royal dynasty, you'll need to preserve them, even in war. In times of war, for instance, you may have to let your clerical and financial obligations slide a bit. You can only have nine of these managers at a time so you'll have to plan to focus your attention on a particular aspect of the game. Your knights and agents are your managers in the game and getting them appointed is a big part of the enjoyment in the game. A very thorough tutorial takes the player through most all of the game mechanics in a clear and concise manner. The really cunning player will even make use of spies from time to time. Acts of outright war are the most blatant way to expand your power but a cunning player will also make use of economic and diplomatic options. Sadly this breadth causes the game to lose some of its focus.Īs in Europa Universalis players are thrust into the position of the leader of a nation, large or small, and trusted to find their own point to it all. By mixing the real-time empire management of games like Europa Universalis with a tactical battle system that seems drawn from Impression's city-building games, Knights of Honor tries to offer a wide variety of experiences. Black Sea Studios has just released their own medieval-themed strategy game, Knights of Honor. We were pretty excited when we first previewed Lords of the Realms 3 a few years back and, though the title itself was a bit of a disappointment, the concept is still sound.