izigame.me

I have played the first Knights of Honor since I was a little kid. That's over 10 years now. It's my all time favourite game. I waited years for this sequel to come out and I didn’t even bother reading reviews before I purchased it.
I tried to like this sequel. I tried really hard, but I couldn't. This game has major design problems that make it absolutely tedious to play. I’ll list just three major ones for now.
1. I didn’t realize it at first but the game is really balanced around books. In the first game, your court members level when you feed them books. Except marshals, who gained skills based on experience. The more you fight, the more exp and you gain levels. In this game? They just merged everything into books. Marshals need books to gain skills. So it doesn’t matter if your marshal fought 1000 battles if your kingdom sucks and doesn’t have any books. There are three levels for each skill, and they require more books per level. So just learning a new one costs 200, the next level is 500 I think? This makes it impossible to max out skills for normal knights early-mid game. Except your king. His skills magically grow to level three so you just pay 200 for each skill. If you have a full stockpile of 1000 books, you can instantly max out your king marshal. In this game, you can magically spam books to make your new king, who just ascended the throne as a juvenile, into a war god with max skills. Needless to say you should never train your king to be anything other than marshal for this reason. I don’t know why they decided that this was a good idea.
2. City building is… well it's not logical. It's quite fun to watch it grow but it's just horribly thought out. In this game, cities have 4 slots of buildings. (8 total, but you have to pay 2000 for the 5th, 4000 for the 6th etc. so it’s just dumb to bother). There are several upgrades in each building. Sounds good. Well, actually it’s the worst economy design I’ve ever seen, because if you upgrade a building, the game makes it so that every other same building in a different city obtains the upgrade. Past, present, or future. Sounds op? It's actually a massive debuff, because constructing the building in another city now costs extra for the upgrade! If you want to upgrade one city’s building, it takes into account how many other same buildings you have across your kingdom. You end up with a massive behemoth of a building cost, with half of the upgrade stuff you can't even use in other cities. What this does is completely warping city planning to something impossible to do in a logical way, because everything costs crazy amounts. You can’t plan out military cities to pump out different units because every single barracks just has all the upgrades. So I can’t have a city just for ranged units, or a city just for a simple log camp. If you max out the logging camp it costs like 5000 gold. Eventually all your basic buildings, which start off as 500 gold cost, cost like 3000 each. There’s zero logic behind this design. You can only play tall if you want to build upgrades, which means just turtling behind 5 cities and mass importing goods you need.
The city economies are built around merchants because half of the goods bonuses and economy buildings only grant commerce points. Hiring a merchant allows you to build one trade route, which usually amounts to 20 gold for 10 commerce points. But then the game doesn’t allow you control over the merchant. It just gives you random events like “secure larger trade volume at the cost of 10 more points”, or “export 10 food for 20 gold at the cost of 10 more points”. Why would you design city buildings to give you commerce points if you can’t really control how the trading is done? You really can't rely on building/city income because each upgrade of around 1000 gold gives you a measly 4-8 gold boost. That means it takes 200 income ticks just to recuperate. Eventually your building costs skyrocket so much you have to balance everything around maxing commerce points for better trade deals. BTW, my last playthrough I realized that the navigation skill (gives like 1/3/5 gold per coastal city of the kingdom the merchant is trading with) on a merchant trading with a big maritime empire like byzantium generates like almost 30% of my kingdom's income. Its literally way more effective than me dumping 10k worth of gold into my cities. If you need cash, just dump 200 books on your king to max the iron fist skill (gives 100% more plunder), build one or two light cavalry and go spam plundering enemy settlements. It gives like 600-1000 gold each. If you see an enemy coming just click stop plundering. Since your stack is full cav it moves faster than enemy infantry/mixed armies and they can never catch up. The economy desperately needs rebalancing.

3. The UI design in this game is bad. The RTS camera is just one of the worst things ever. You can’t zoom out enough to control your army well. I can barely see a quarter of the forces. I can’t tilt it, I can’t go into a lower view, I can’t even rotate it. I sure as hell can’t manage it in the minimap either because it's completely covered with horrible green and red circles and stars. The entire color scheme is terrible. When you select units it has white outlines around the light blue background of the unit card, so basically you can't see what you selected because its all bright coloured nonsense. Oh did I mention everything is in the ugliest bright green and blue color scheme? They basically copied the modern total war UI color scheme without putting any work into the camera, so its the worst of both worlds.
You can’t find your marshals. He doesn’t appear in the overmap, there’s no icon that says ‘hey! I’m garrisoned here’. I have to either press into the city or double click the marshal icon on the very top. Why? Why is it so unintuitively difficult to find my marshal?
I can barely figure out just who the hell is at war with who. In the old game you opened the political view and you saw the ‘big swords clashing with fire’ symbol when someone was at war with another. This one? They made everything red for ‘I hate you’ and slightly redder for 'at war'. I can’t really figure out what’s the difference. You have to click into their coat of arms and check political relations for “enemies”. Why? Why is it so unintuitively hard to check?
I don’t know why they merged the book and religion production details. Why didn’t they just keep it separate like in the old game? The entire thing is cluttered with both religion and culture and book spreadsheets and you still have to hunt down the row just to hover over it to show more details about what’s producing books/piety. Why? Why is it so unintuitively hard to read?
What do I like about the game? It's pretty much a design clone of the first one. That’s really the only reason I enjoyed playing it. The narrator and voice actors say similar lines, the UI is fundamentally the same. The resource types haven’t changed, and the court system of hiring max 8 knights is the same. Is there anything that’s improved? So far, diplomacy is more complex, but they removed the king’s personalities so it plays more like EUIV now. They changed composers but Borislav Slavov had way more memorable themes. The graphics are obviously better but the old game had more flavour to it. I’m sad to say this, but waiting 18 years was not worth it. My advice is just buy the first one and download the Ultimate Edition - HD Patch & Overhaul mod. It's 1/3 the price, and 3 times the fun.