izigame.me

The original Knights of Honor was a favorite of mine. Still is. I was still playing it off and on when KOH2:S came around. I was a little puzzled for only an instant when I saw KOH2 is effectively a remaster, not really a sequel, but then I got over that because I think the gameplay holds up very well. There are only a few mechanics and statistics that I feel are too opaque - when I look at other 'medieval grand strategies' that I've put too many hours into, I see more opaque statistics and mechanics than not opaque ones. In KOH most things are decipherable, which may make it a lot more approachable. You rule a nation during the time of the crusades, you develop your court (who are 'Knights' though that term is used for several different things in-game), your family, you'll eventually die and play on as your successor, you form relationships with other nations, you develop your provinces, you'll figure out your relationship with religion and the papal state and how that relationship alters everything else you're doing, you smash your desk a little bit because if you chose to start as a big nation you get absolutely smashed by literally everyone spontaneously declaring war on you much the same way as that occurs in other more modern medieval grand strategy games, you commit to playing as a vassal nation in the region where you'd rather be playing the larger body, you eventually grow more powerful than your overlord, you weasel out of vassaldom or you outgrow it or you wage a war for independence, you realize that just chasing that goal led you to conquer about fifty other provinces and become a Great Power (this is a mechanic that unlocks one of several victory conditions), you realize you had a victory condition all along that wanted you to take over your high king and plant your culture in all of that historical region's provinces, you eventually claim 1 of the victory conditions and 'win,' you diabolically cackle as you click 'keep playing' then claim your second victory condition, then your third, then you're spending most of your time manipulating other nations into falling apart rather than wasting your money on direct confrontation, then the game crashes because there's a huge memory leak problem and also you got a bit annoyed at how scrolling over the ocean causes the game to lock up about 10% of the time which is all literally exactly the same as it was in KOH1 just with much better textures and a bunch of cool added art, then you have to physically fight your PC because the game is eating 99% of your memory and you can't even get the application to close, then you look up how THQ Nordic is doing to see if a KOH3 is on the way, then you're sad, you go to bed because you played until 4AM and it took you until 5AM to finally get task manager to let you kill the processes so you could close the game.

Also rather than a built up casus belli system that the NPCs totally ignore to repeatedly mass declare war on you and suffer no penalties, you have Crown Authority, so you can absolutely act like a mad king, but you lose Authority when you start a war for no reason. You pay a pretty straightforward cost. Having higher Crown Authority gives you buffs on most things. You buy it back with some clever actions or just spending money and other points. I much prefer this over the casus belli system present in some other popular grand strategy games. It also makes it so if you are a tiny nation with high authority surrounded by big nations with low authority, basically everything you do is more effective than what they do, which feels more authentic to real life.

Also you can totally save scum as much as you want if random events are wrecking you. I know in some other peer games it often feels like you have nonstop bad things happening to you even if everything in the nation is peaceful and prosperous and cogent, but KOH has a sort of die roll for things to happen. Your stats and actions will increase the odds of rational things occurring (events will usually correspond to what you've been doing) but there is never a nonzero chance of some curveball coming in.

A couple tips for people who haven't been playing KOH for twenty years:
Check your royal family periodically. Once a kid is juvenile, they can be married off. Try to get them married early, where possible, as that will give better odds that they have kids of their own soon.
Your knights give various stat buffs to the provinces they govern. Try to link them up with provinces that have synching bonuses - put your cleric knight in a province with churches, unless you need that cleric's stability buffs somewhere else.
Pick knight skills that give you bonuses on things you want to be doing.
Keep your merchants, clerics, and diplomats busy. They have mission opportunities frequently but there are default ongoing missions that can help a lot if you can afford the upkeep, and if a good opportunity appears in a random event, you are free to withdraw the knight from their ongoing mission so they can go do the one-off mission. Merchants' ongoing missions are different, they have to be embedded and stay there, but then they can do secondary missions on top of their trading commitment with your allies.
Conquering Rome is very hard. If the pope keeps irritating you, go after his allies so he has less political power. If you're working for Rome, you'll need to keep a lot of money and food on hand for sending an army off on crusades or defending Rome from all the 4000 nations it provokes.
Too much of any one focus can leave you wide open in other areas. Always consider diversifying your notes over having 7 dudes with the same class.
Use the province menu from the button on the bottom left to quickly check your building counts and look for places to add more upgrades. Scrolling around the map from province to province gets difficult once you control a large region.
Even if you're trying to play "without save scumming" there will eventually be a random event that 100% means your nation may fall apart after it causes a cascading series of collapsing statistics. I think the game actually wants you to do this, based on my many years of experience, and having tried to iron man the game a few times. Reloading doesn't mean you gave up, it means you reroll the dice. Also do a manual save after any choice that leads you down a new path - you may realize that you have no idea how to make that path work, and it's better to just reload than give up your 40-hour playthrough to start over. It's more rewarding to see the whole game than to start over a bunch of times, in my opinion, but you can absolutely try a bunch of different provinces and have a bunch of different campaigns active. The save/load menu categorizes your campaigns by which starting provinces were picked, which is convenient.
When all else fails, boost your economy. With more money and supplies, many other things become possible. From farms, all things may grow.

FOR VALOR, ATTACK