Sequels That Should Have Been: Knights of Honor 2

Knights of Honor (2004) – what a horribly cheesy title – can best be summed up as “Crusader Kings for denser people”. That’s not a bad thing, because it made it far more accessible than practically all of Paradox’s games. I could sit on the throne in my Hungarian empire, and feel like the God-Emperor I was, without having spent hours figuring out how to make my armies invincible. That’s not to say that Knight’s of Honor lacked challenge, it was simply intended to be played in a more – gasp! – casual manner.

At the beginning of the campaign, you chose which realm you desired from a wide selection of such, be it wide-spanning empires or tiny duchies, seemingly forever stuck in vassalage. And from then on everything was up to you. You chose your own path to glory. Brute force, diplomacy or trade? The choice was yours, and with clever play all three could lead to victory. However, most of the time the game required you to combine them, and not focus merely on a single of them. After all, in the middle ages alliances weren’t forged out of friendship or loyalty, but rather out of practicality. As soon as you became a liability to your allies, your head was suddenly a little looser.

In contrast to Crusader Kings’ world map perspective and little actual control in the countless battles you’d undoubtedly be fighting, Knights of Honor had a real-time battle system, comparable to the Total War series, but bland. Engaging in combat, you entered the field of battle with as many soldiers as you had assigned to that army, and faced off another enemy army. Sounds simple, easy enough, yes? Well, the glaring issue with it was that it had very little depth. Send own soldiers after enemy soldiers, smack them, and win/lose. You could almost always be sure that the army with the most and best equipped soldiers would win the fight. And while that is generally how battles and wars work, the game never required as much as a modicum of the strategic and tactical knowledge the Total War series occasionally does. There were none of the evocative heroic victories or smashing defeats that one can experience in TW.

Instead, the joy of the game was to be found in the main campaign, which you could thankfully focus all your efforts on, as the battle sections could be skipped so one of your Marshals took over in instead. Marshals are precisely one of the things that made Knights of Honor a unique experience, because instead of just being able to do whatever you wanted whenever you wanted it, you were dependent on which specialists you had in your nine-man court. Fill it with Marshals, sure you could be invincible on the battlefield, but you’ll be broke in a few months. Fill it with Merchants, you’ll be rich in seconds, but envious powers will quickly destroy all hopes of victory. Fill it with Landlords, well, they’re by and large useless, but I’ll enjoy watching your walls fall!

The appeal of the campaign map was also to watch as the borders of Europe shifted constantly. While you were focusing on the war in your own region, an empire could have fallen, and a new one risen to take its place. This often caused some rather odd placements of the kingdoms, like the last remnants of Byzantium barely holding out in the northern reaches of Sweden. That the game unfolded in real-time and that there was no time-limit to this completion only added to the organic feel of the world. Unlike in Total War, there were never any arbitrary ulterior goals that you had to reach. Has your biggest dream always been to unite Spain and Ireland under one banner? You can! Go for it!

Aspects like the combat and the sometimes quite banal approach on the campaign map, which often led to repetition, as you simply had to rinse and repeat the same strategy until you were Emperor of Europe, highlight that the game was made a first-time developer. KoH was made by a small Bulgarian developer, Black Sea Studios, which was recently bought by none other than Crytek.
In essence, there are two major elements that must be changed in a hypothetical Knights of Honor 2. Firstly, the combat needs improvement or be left out entirely. Personally, I had far more success letting my Marshals handle the combat, as long as I supplied them with superior units. Although it may be too much to wish for, Black Sea should look to the Total War series for inspiration. If they could successfully make a similar combat system for KoH 2, I guarantee you it would be near perfection.
The other part that has to be changed is the enemy AI. As mentioned, it was extremely easy to win through military might if you simply used the same strategy again and again. Mine could usually be: Mobilize 2-3 armies, declare war, capture 2-3 territories, sue for peace, and recuperate. And it always worked! Even when I was fighting against stronger kingdoms than my own, they still blindly accepted a white peace during a war they could easily win. Militarily, the enemy acted competently, but on a grand, political scale, the incompetence was at times staggering, with them showing not even a glimpse of strategic reflection. Fight a six-front war? Why not!

Fix those two problems, Black Sea, and you’d create a gem of a game. Then all you need to do is make people actually buy it.