Knights and Merchants.net Forum

I like many of improvements in KaM remake, wanted to come back to this game for years, but I can't. Why, please expain to me why you set the difficulty of original campaign to "Ruler of the Galaxy"? About a decade ago I reached mission 9 or 10, now I'm stuck at fifth. How am I supposed to survive first 30 minutes if I am attacked by heavy cavalry every FIVE minutes and start with no buildings in my village except for quarry? What is it? How many of the playerbase can get through it, 10%? I guess less.

Attacks in TSK05 always were like that, first several minutes there were attacks from purple's cavalry. However, after few tries you should be able to beat it.

Hmm, but now when I played it, it seems that those attacks are too strong, like in the first attacks there is also second attack from purple.

Vatrix, you should check it out!

I never heard of "Ruler of the Galaxy" campaign for Knights and Merchants. The original campaign is "The Shattered Kingdom". Assuming that you are talking about the correct game, just know that the remake isn't balanced the same as the original game.

Vatrix and others have dedicated a lot of time to improve the "compatibility" of campaigns and single missions to match how they were in the original game, but it's still an "inexact science".

Again, assuming you are talking about the correct game, please download the newest remake release (r6720) if you have an earlier version (such as r5503, r4179, etc.) because ranged units (bowmen and crossbowmen) have more power in this version. (I believe the effectiveness of arrows is now comparable to the original game.)

Lastly, you can "work around" the difficulty as necessary during single player gaming.

For example, despite that a player loses the initial battle in TSK 20 quite often (if he or she does nothing), here's a video me beating it in 0:05:58. Knights and Merchants TSK 20 Map Won in Under 6 Minutes. You can also see the replay by clicking the link in my signature. (You must first become a member to be able to download it though.)

You should check my Topic for The Shattered Kingdom fixes, I have tested and fixed most of the problems in this campaign, so there should be no issues unless you find some new

Fixes here: http://knightsandmerchants.net/forum/vi ... f=5&t=2414

With this "Ruler of the Galaxy" i meant the difficulty level, not a title of a game. Like in Civilization series: "knight", "king", "deity" etc. What I meant is that it is suitable for somebody smart enough to rule a galaxy :] I am running the latest version of Remake and have Steam version of KaM.

@Hiro: Download the file in Vatrix's topic, all missions (for TSK) are fixed there.

@Vatrix: I tested it and it looks okay, but shouldn't your fixes be in newest RMK release by default?

IIRC, some of the changes Vatrix initially made to TSK (before the release of r6720) were not agreed upon by everyone. For example, he gave the AI in the starting village in TSK 04 double the army it had in the original game, etc.

Therefore, although he could have did this, he got mixed messages and thus not all of his fixes got put in the release.

Wait, so the fix from Vatrix is not included in the last release? I see. Ok, I installed it now, but I have something to do, I will let you know if it helped in about 3, maybe 4 hours. Thx! :]

You're welcome!

I did that mission not long ago.

It's actually one of the easier ones....

at the beginning, let your lancers protect your barracks
set your axeman with the bowmen to protect the left of your storehouse (between the mountains)
if you win that you'll have a bit time to build some things

you can make some lancers through the barracks (create / train components needed)
put those lancers with the yellow lancers, and put the bowmen behind them.
then you'll kill the horsemen.

Then just build further.

You should be able to get a decent army and destroy the top armies.

then just destroy everything working your way down.

It's much better now, thx (I think with a fix number of attacks in first 30 minutes is halfed).

I am sorry guys, but... No. Don't get me wrong, your work is amazing, but I no longer have patience for this game. Maybe I am too old, but I just spend 4 hours on 8th mission (the one with barbarians charging in 8th mnute) and after those 4 hours I discovered that I need to restart entire mission. I spend too much time polishing my economy and only after 60 minutes I started building smithies and barracks, when 15 minutes later I was attacked by northern enemy. I know, I know, my fault. I should start making an army earlier. Now I know that. But to spend another 4 hours just for that... maybe next week. I'll let you know. And next time I WILL make a to do list: "1. build a f##king army!"

Hiro, I share your frustration.

I cannot express with words how much they annoyed me back in the days (1998-2000). I either had to keep a savegame made every 10 min and revert to those in case of attack, or just play by a walkthrough ("prepare for attack at 1:05 and 1:20, then every 40min"). This is miserable - playing without knowing that in next 30min you gonna be smashed .. in such a slow-paced game is a killer.

I think KaM should include a countdown timer for these attacks (can be done with scripts).

Lewin once mentioned enabling the "save game" button in replays... wouldn't this be the same as having a save every X minutes?

Example: you got smashed 4 hours into the game; save game -> load it in the replay viewer -> save again some time before the attack and prepare properly.

Oh, and by the way what about a "jump to" function for replays? If you know you want to watch the replay from minute 30 onward, you just set it to "jump to" there; then the program automatically runs at 300x, you go and take a walk, and when you're back you find it paused at the desired time.

Exploiting replays for that is just a half-measure. It would be much better to resolve the initial issue "such slow-paced game should not do bad unpredictable things"