Knights of Honor II: Sovereign Review (thawks14)
TLDR: Barely a thumbs up. Bad balancing but promise as a game. Mostly strategy, little combat
This game has a simplified strategy game with real time combat. The combat is incredibly lackluster (and repetitive) unless you are doing a siege battle then its fun. Now I only fight battles when I need a decisive win to save troops since the AI is dumb and you can generally destroy their troops easily. Using spies is a lot of fun. Diplomats seem mostly useless but diplomacy as a whole is modestly important and not complex. vassal system is alright actually. There are 2 reasons its barely a thumbs up, and the reason I am uninstalling after 2 campaigns. 1) The 'start' is incredibly slow and by start I mean the first 60% of your campaign time. You are generally just waiting for things to happen that you cant progress faster. This gets boring FAST. 2) Total lack of balance around, control of, and options around getting new provinces / towns under control. There are a few mechanics in play here: disorder after conquest, religion, culture, loyalty, and a then settlement happiness. Disorder is fine as is as its the only one you can actually control. religion is a problem. the time it takes to convert naturally is incredibly long. i took a province under 1 hour game time and at 3:30 hours game time its still not changed. The mechanic to ATTEMPT to convert it costs 1k religion resource but i only make +4, and its used for other stuff, so I cant use the only mechanic to convert the religion. Culture and loyalty are pretty much the same except the convert mechanics for them dont allow you to target 1 province. This means your provinces have a massive negative happiness bonus and spawn rebellions. You put it down, then as i said before, you simply wait for it to happen again because the wait time for that stuff to go into your kingdoms side just doesnt happen. So I end up taking 3 provinces on a new game and can never do anything other than rotate my single army around those provinces to put out rebellions. This was on normal. On easy I had less of an issue but I also only attacked provinces of the same religion and mostly the same cultuer, where as this medium campaign is close to kingdoms of different culture and religions. All and all my campaign is not truly stuck, but its going to take hours of game clock time to progress and i've lost interest.
There are a few other mechanics that I dont like / aren't explained. Such as if you marry away a princess and the king / dad dies, the faction that you gave your princess to can claim an "inheritence" aka several of your provinces. You can give them up or decline and go to war and get massive relation penalties with other factions. IMO i don't like this mechanic but also why is it NEVER EXPLAINED. Its avoided by never marrying daughters away which just means you dont get a small marriage bonus to your kingdom fame.