izigame.me

I cannot recommend this in it's current state. As a fan of strategy games and the original Knights of honour, this game has serious flaws...
The moment I gave up was when I made an army of heavy swordsman, feudal knights and heavy archers across 2 marshals (costing a literal ton of gold and food upkeep) and sent them to attack an army of light swordsmen, peasants and bowmen... I outnumbered them and had a much better trained army, I even had 2 Marshals vs 1 marshal... The gold value of my army was about 10x the amount...
These peasants, light swordsmen and bowmen absolutely wrecked my heavily armoured army.
Just so you know how bad this is, here is the process to lose such an army:
1) You need to build a barracks, upgrade it 4x, this costs thousands of gold and takes a long time.
2) You need to build the royal armoury and then upgrade that a few times, this costs THOUSANDS of gold and takes a VERY long time.
3) You then need to build the farming/food economy to feed such an army, this costs THOUSANDS of gold and takes a very long time.
4) In total, as a rough minimum, you need to dedicate 5 building slots to make this work. Each settlement only has 4, with the additional 4 slots costing THOUSANDS to unlock as you expand your settlement. Dedicating this many slots, as a minimum, is a HUGE investment for smaller factions. Those slots could be used to generate gold, commerce or religion, defence, workers, tools or population for army.
5) In order to generate enough gold to buy all of this, you will need merchants and economy buildings. This means you then need to dedicate some of your court slots to generating gold via merchants. Another huge investment. Merchants also need time to build larger trade routes, so this also takes a very long time. Furthermore, the economy buildings required to make commerce also cost THOUSANDS and take a VERY long time. You need commerce to make merchants trade. So that's maybe another 20k of gold + a couple hours of time and planning + another 2-4 building slots. (total of 6-8 buildings lots, absolute minimum)
6) Once you have the literal tens of thousands of gold, the food economy and spent the hours of time to make all this, you then need to hire your marshals, who can only field 6 units...
7) That's another investment into your court, so this is maybe 2-4 court slots MINIMUM dedicated to this.
8) If you want siege equipment, you better hope you randomly get offered the siege craft skill. Yes, it's RANDOM chance you get the opportunity to build siege. Oh, don't forget the thousands of gold for this too. Oh, and if you want more than 2 siege slots, you better hope you RANDOMLY get offered the logistics skill!
9) Once you have fielded your army over the course of hours and invested probably close to 100k to make and feed this army, all while juggling the other demands of your kingdom and planning attack alliances, you are almost there.
10) Proceed to get destroyed by an army literally made up by a majority of peasants, even though you outnumber them.........
In total I had 6 heavy swordsmen, 3 heavy archers, 1 heavy spearmen, 2 feudal knights, 2 marshals, 2 catapults and a trebuchet. All fed. All high morale. My rankings were all good. My marshals were educated. Total cost ~16,000 gold + 30 food upkeep + 100 gold upkeep for siege. Total building cost, close to 60,000. Unit count was about 4800 from memory.
This got eaten up by 3 peasants, 1 light swordsmen, 2 bowmen, 1 marshal. Total cost ~1500 gold + 9 food upkeep + 0 gold upkeep. Total building cost, close to 10,000. Unit count was about 4200 from memory.
THIS IS NOT BALANCED ONE F-N BIT.
I tried out the RTS mode... It's a cringe mess of unbalanced units, needlessly sped up combat and all tactics and strategy have been removed in favour of a design to increase the pace. The AI is terrible as well. Not to mention the RTS maps on the original knights of honour had a much larger scope, were thoughtfully made and allowed time to breath and use strategy and tactics. This feels inspired by total warhammer battles but without the strategy or tactics.
Look, there is a lot this game has done well. It has expanded on a number of elements that made KoH1 a great game. And in that sense, it does capture the original's essence and improve on it greatly.
But this has been rushed out. There has not been enough playtesting. The direction they took the RTS is shoddy and a devolution of the original. The interface has been completely butchered in favour of simplicity (where the hell is my kingdom rankings page?) The balance is laughable.
A lot of this can get fixed with patches and mods. But there are some core design choices I can't vibe with.