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

[Grampy_Bone]

Those are the patch notes from a month ago.

 

[Infinitron]

 

[thesecret1]

Well, gave it a spin. It's not bad, but it's not great either. Basically a Total War game with more thought put into some areas, and less into others. Far too easy even on highest difficulty (once you manage to scrape together two stacks of highest tier troops, you're basically unstoppable. Once you make four, you're litarally unstoppable), and there's basically nothing to do other than map painting. There's quite a bit of potentially fun ideas that are however not developed into anything worthwhile... Religion doesn't really matter save early game (once you have a piety income set up, you can just convert the whole world in like half an hour with a cleric or some shit, and if you don't, it just means you'll have a lower piety income), culture uses a completely ahistorical but rather fun influence system, where the more you pump your "culture" power (and the more you paint the map), the more you'll culture convert provinces. At lightning speed, too. Of course, what it actually does is just that a province belonging to a different culture has a chance to spawn a rebel army if the place has low stability. Only you will never ever have low stability past early game, and the rebel armies are too pathetic to do anything. Basically, they're an annoyance. It is rather funny to see the ridiculously mismanaged AI kingdoms dealing with basically nonstop uprisings of my culture. They'll never amount to anything, but it is funny. There's more stuff in this vein – a fun idea that, however, doesn't end up going anywhere meaningful.

All in all, it was fun for a playthrough, but I'm not gonna give it a replay.

 

[Axioms]

This game has roughly one tenth the average hours player count of Victoria 3. Which isn't terrible but isn't great either. Maybe they'll fill some stuff out with DLC Paradox style lmao.

 

[Grampy_Bone]

Eh, playing any 3d game on an intel integrated chip is always a shitshow.

I did have a blast playing as Jerusalem on hard, going to war with the whole world 5 minutes into the game, and winning. Quite fun. The amusing thing is as long as one of the great powers is islamic and you have the holy land, they will never support you for World Emperor and you'll have to crush them no matter what. But you put together all the trade goods and that's an instant win. "Oh Shit! This motherfucker has maps AND beer AND candles?? Fuckit, give him the crown."

Unfortunately they just patched the game and still haven't addressed the zoom problem, so I'm shelving this for now.

 

[Harthwain]

It's a very chill yet addicting game. It has that "just let's do a one more thing" syndrome, which makes me lose hours every time I play.

I especially like how even a relatively small country can be a threat to a larger one simply because there is a limit on armies (due to the inherent limit on the number of knights in your court) and you need peasants as well as men-at-arms to refill the losses. So even if you keep winning battles you can drain your manpower reserves quite rapidly. It is a very interesting way of balancing things out. I also love that you can hire mercenaries as temporary armies when you're at war. It helps throwing more bodies at the enemy if you have the money for it.

What I absolutely hate are the marriages. Makes me not want to wed my princesses to anyone, ever. They should've come up with a favour/hook system AND a guaranteed non-aggression pact, but without the option to inherit anything. That way marrying your princess to someone would offer some extra options, rather than being a giant risk with very little in terms of benefits.

I also dislike that knights are immortal. Although I guess that's OK, because it looks like spies are no longer able to impersonate knights and become kings, so you don't have to worry about that anymore. Bribe sort-of works in the similar way, which is a good workaround in my opinion.

All in all, I have a lot of fun with it.

 

[Konjad]

Not addicting to me. It's not terrible, but the developer clearly wanted to make grand strategy game with battles and had budget for none. Battles play like shit (kinda like that Hegemony game, both vastly inferior to even Shogun: Total War) and are without much tactics except rock-paper-scissors (which fits more braindead ADHD games like Starcraft) and the grand campaign is too simplistic to engulf as well, being a retarded version of i.e. Crusader Kings, but with less random stuff and with a completely braindead AI that you can outplay while being drunk so much that you barely see.