Knights of Honor Impressions

We were recently visited by representatives from Sunflowers Interactive, who showed off their upcoming real-time strategy game, Knights of Honor. Developed by Black Sea Studios in Bulgaria, the game seems to resemble Age of Empires and other medieval-era strategy games, but, delving just a little bit deeper, we began to see that the similarities are largely superficial, thanks to the game's broader scope. According to Sunflowers, Knights of Honor won't be a conventional real-time strategy game so much as it will be an "empire-conquering simulation."

In Knights of Honor, you attempt to rule Europe.

The goal of Knights of Honor is to rule all of medieval Europe using such strategies as war, diplomacy, and espionage. The game's world map encompasses just about all of Europe, from Portugal in the west, to Norway and Sweden in the north, and over to the westernmost fringes of Russia to the east. What's interesting is that everything in the game happens seamlessly in real time. At one moment you might find yourself in the world view map, issuing global orders to your various provinces, or "realms" as they're called in the game, while in the next moment you may find yourself zooming in to get a tactical level view of the map to examine your realms in more detail or to closely manage battles as they happen.

Sunflowers was careful to note that Knights of Honor's focus is on global strategic decisions as opposed to low-level management. You're supposed to take the role of a king, after all, and kings do not worry about the placement of every last farm or dock in their lands. As such, you're able to obtain the services of knights to help manage each of your realms and armies. Each of the game's 1,000 unique knights has a handful of special attributes to differentiate them from one another. One example of these special attributes is "dread." Any army led into the field by a knight with the dread attribute strikes fear into the enemy and imparts morale penalties. The "leadership" trait allows a knight to march an army across the land faster than normal. Other abilities may impart economic bonuses on the realm governed by a particular knight.

Though the knights handle the low-level economic decisions, you're still able to dictate the production priorities of your various realms. From the game's close viewpoint, you'll see woodlands, farms, and mines surrounding the central castle. If you shift production focus to food, additional grain icons pop up over the farms, whereas focusing on stone mining reveals more brick icons over the tops of the mountainous areas. These little visual cues are reminiscent of city management in Civilization.

The game's resources are divided into three categories: basic, valuable, and exotic. The basics include food, wood, stone, and metal, all of which can be harvested from your lands. Valuables can be plundered from captured territories, while exotics require you to build an advanced harbor or capture a territory that contains one; this allows for trade with the Far East.

The game won't require you to micromanage every last detail.

Aside from economics, you also manage the advancement of castles, which serve as the center of your realms. They all start off as small wooden stockades, and, as you spend resources to upgrade them, they grow in size and eventually become impressive stone edifices, complete with walls, towers, and internal keeps. Upgrading the castle also opens up additional tech upgrades; you can purchase siege factories, markets, and/or other buildings to increase the functionality of the castle. You can also add battlements and other defensive emplacements. From the close view mode, you can see a lot of visual detail in and around your castles. Peasants scurry about doing their daily work, while archers and other soldiers man the walls and keep watch from defensive emplacements.

The level of activity you see in and around your castles is one of the aspects affected by the game's day-night cycle. Superficially, the game changes in appearance. You see your castles and towns lit by torchlight as darkness falls over the land. On a more practical level, the darkness cuts down on the line of sight of your enemies, so moving armies and fighting battles under the cover of night creates some new wrinkles in gameplay. At this early stage of development, Black Sea hasn't yet decided how to balance the length of the day-night cycle or even the ratio of daylight to nighttime hours.