New KaM Remake Demo r2411

[GreatWhiteBear]

How about we make the host decide what buildings he wants to leave out?

[Lewin]

Thanks for your opinions Ben. To be honest I like the idea of siege equipment to speed up destroying towers/buildings. I think they would add more strategy to the game as they are slow and would need good protection.
It would be nice to have a recruit pushing them, although they already take up the entire tile of space so it might be hard to fit it in. It would also be a lot of work creating all the images.

How about we make the host decide what buildings he wants to leave out?

We will be adding options to the lobby like this eventually. The person who made the mission could probably also define a few different game modes which the host could select from.

[Ben]

Last night, I decided to edit a mission in the Remake so I had no enemies for the sole purpose of testing how large a city the Remake can handle.
I must say that I'm quite impressed. The game would lag a lot at some points, but even after building hundreds of buildings, the game ran smoothly for the most part. I also would like to point out that I'm thrilled that the size of the map is the limit of how large my city can be since I can now purchase stone and gold at the market.
The only problem I did encounter was that I couldn't build anymore than two storehouses. At first my serf would only send wood to my second. I thought I'd delete it and rebuild to see if that would help. After trying to reconstruct it, my serfs wouldn't send anything to it. I eventually couldn't expand my city anymore since my buildings were getting too far away from my storehouses.

I can't express how happy I was to be able to make such a large city. I always wanted to build and build and build and build and build...now I can.
I might sound like a dork who is too obsessed with a video game, but I don't care. I am just so thankful for what you, Lewin and Krom, have done with the Remake. Thanks!

[Lewin]

There is a bug in r2411 which causes wood and stone to not be delivered to new storehouses when those resources are blocked in the players FIRST storehouse. You can fix it by unblocking those wares in the first storehouse then cancelling and reordering the second. This bug is fixed for the next release.

I quite understand wanting to build as much as possible, I used to do that in original KaM sometimes
Glad it worked!

[RiT4LiN]

After the 4v4 we played yesterday I think we can conclude that siege equipment is not needed for a fun game of knights and merchants.

But there is another problem that I have with the multiplayer. I play competitive Starcraft 2 and in starcraft you have all kinds of crazy rushes like the 6 pool and cannon rush. In Starcraft game i like the threat of early rushes because it promotes scouting and thus multitasking which highers the skill level required to play the game.

Yesterday I've been militia rushed and tower rushed. In Knights and Merchants these tactics do not make sense and are extremely annoying. It's very annoying to see your town, you've been building in the past hour, burn down to 10 guys with an axe. The same goes for people disconnecting. Knights and Merchants is a game i enjoy for the casual and economy focused play and I think that an economy focused opening should be rewarded in stead of punished.

The multiplayer needs two mechanics in my opinion.
1. An option to replace a player who left a game with someone looking for a game. Without having to save it and recreate the lobby. (I realize this is hard at the moment)

2. As much as I hate it in competitive games, this game needs a way to prevent people from attacking each other before establishing an economy. If a player decides to open with 10 farms before barracks, okay that's retarded and greedy but rushes in KaM are clearly overpowered and create a coin flip situation where if only one player does it he is guaranteed to win. And if both players do it you'll both die to bad econ.

Or getting barracks before farm has to become a generally accepted strategy

[Siegfried]

This is a good description, but I think that it is only a temporary state in the kam multiplayer story.

At the moment you are right: the first player who trains a miltia and sends it to an opponent can greatly reduce him.

But - there is already one chance to avoid this situation. And this is the tower. We have to learn to build towers inside our villages and not only on narrow points of the map.

You have no chance with a limited amout of troops to destroy towers, so this works.

But this makes the game more defensive. And I've heard that walls are already accepted to be introduced into the game. I don't like the idea because this would make the game even more defensive. The same goes with fog of war, which forces you to put more effort into defense to avoid surprise attacks.

In my opinion, we need more offensive elements in the game.

[Lewin]

I agree with you. Here is our plans to combat this: The host can select a "peace time" in the lobby. During this time you cannot equip soldiers, or there could be territories which you are not allowed to leave during this time, defined in the mission script. But that's a lot harder.

Replacing disconnected players automatically would be really awesome. Maybe when a player disconnects there can be a "return to lobby" option which saves then game then goes back to the lobby automatically and allows you to let new people in before loading again. Of course once we have file transfers it won't be a problem to send saves to new people.

Thanks for your comments

@Siegfried: It is not possible to protect you entire village with towers, so the militia can always find a place to kill serfs and destroy buildings. I think enforced peace time is a better solution.

Walls are NOT accepted, they are still just an idea and we have not made a decision on them. I agree with you about offensive/defensive tactics. I think fog of war will be okay, because all you need to do is build an outpost at your front line, then you can see attacks coming from a long way (and we might make a way for it to sound a warning when the enemy is within sight) Remember that fog of war will be optional too.

And yes, this is still early days for the KaM Remake and multiplayer will be much different in the future. Please look upon this as the beta stage in development.

[Encaitar]

To be honest I like the idea of siege equipment to speed up destroying towers/buildings. I think they would add more strategy to the game as they are slow and would need good protection.
It would be nice to have a recruit pushing them, although they already take up the entire tile of space so it might be hard to fit it in. It would also be a lot of work creating all the images.

Just a question of KaM Remakes engines sake, is it a problem if a unit took two tiles instead of one? If you ever would find such an artist, i could be handy to know.

---
If the siege equipment is implemented, maybe you could also add a option to the multiplayer that buildings can only be destroyed by siege weapons. I did always think that destroying a building with a sword/axe/spear is just unrealistic. Cossacks did that better IMHO: when a soldier attackes a building, he trows torches at the building instead of hacking with his sword a it.

[RiT4LiN]

Peace time would be a perfect solution. Also if a player would be able to create walls I'd never play the game again. The charm of the game is the fact that you're not able to build walls and you need to make clever use of the terrain to defend your base.

If you want to have a wall make a custom map with walls..

Also since I do server hosting now, a feature to blacklist IPs would be great. Since this game doesn't require payment or even an account you have to have some mechanic of keep some people out of your server where banning a simple name doesn't suffice.

I so wish i could help you guys out more

[Lewin]

Just a question of KaM Remakes engines sake, is it a problem if a unit took two tiles instead of one? If you ever would find such an artist, i could be handy to know.

Yes that will be a problem, it would require a massive rewriting of our code unfortunately. The only way I can see it working is if it was made of two units (recruit or horse and siege equipment) where the siege equipment follows along behind, or vice versa. Even this would be a lot of work to make it work well and look nice. But making them actually stuck together units occupying more than one tile would be very very difficult. If you can find someone it would be much appreciated

If the siege equipment is implemented, maybe you could also add a option to the multiplayer that buildings can only be destroyed by siege weapons. I did always think that destroying a building with a sword/axe/spear is just unrealistic. Cossacks did that better IMHO: when a soldier attackes a building, he trows torches at the building instead of hacking with his sword a it.

I think this is a too greater change to the game mechanics. We'd also need animations for torching a building. Possibly we could add an option to make archers not able to destroy buildings as THAT is truly weird (I can imagine smashing up a building with an axe, but not with mere arrows!)

@RiT4LiN: That's exactly the problem with walls, they REALLY don't suit KaM's style. But maybe they could be allowed in some special missions only. As I said, they are certainly not accepted and I agree 100% with your points.

Blacklisting IPs doesn't really seem necessary yet but I guess we'll add it eventually. We'll certainly allow you to ban players from your lobby, but that is a client side change, the server would not know about it.

[RiT4LiN]

As for the siege units, if you really want to put them in the game, isn't it possible to make the original sprite a little bit smaller so the recruit can be fit in. But then again, i strongly believe the game DOES NOT need a siege unit.

1. Buildings are relatively hard to get and shouldn't go down too fast because of that fact.

2. The map we played the 4v4 on had a huge defenders advantage and yet we didn't have too much trouble to breach their defenses with archers. I've not encountered any situation where it was so hard to breach defenses that siege equipment was needed.

3. I think the player with the most siege weapons will always win as long as he as a decent army to back them up. This means that your army composition no longer matters. You could easily counter a large army of sword fighters with pike man and siege weapons. And thus remove the mechanic of countering unit compositions.

It'll only introduce an imbalance to the game to have an even stronger archer (normal archers dominate unit compositions hard enough right now). Other games with siege weapons like age of empires 3 also have huge imbalances revolving around this unit (they pushed it to far though).

Also, I think the 4v4 yesterday was a perfect game of Knights and Merchants and should be used as a role model when considering future changes. (YOU KNOW IT )

[Encaitar]

If the siege equipment is implemented, maybe you could also add a option to the multiplayer that buildings can only be destroyed by siege weapons. I did always think that destroying a building with a sword/axe/spear is just unrealistic. Cossacks did that better IMHO: when a soldier attackes a building, he trows torches at the building instead of hacking with his sword a it.

I think this is a too greater change to the game mechanics. We'd also need animations for torching a building. Possibly we could add an option to make archers not able to destroy buildings as THAT is truly weird (I can imagine smashing up a building with an axe, but not with mere arrows!)

Wait a second, I did not suggest to add the torches to KaM Remake, only that Cossacks did a better job with soldiers vs buildings than KaM in my opinion. What I did suggest was to add a option to destroy building with only siege equipment. Now I think of it, maybe archers shooting flaming arrows could be nice too. But again, it should be an option, for indeed i changes gameplay a lot!

P.S. I can imagine smashing up a building with an axe, but i did not see the flames coming .

[pawel95]

What?s about my flag idea :
[/quote]

One problem i had seen, is that for example:

I play with 3 other players...than one player?s PC is hanging and there is the "waiting for player xxx" box.
And if THAN someone others save the game....and than the host Rehost the game...there is a message as named: "player xxx hasnt the current version of the game"
I think it was nice, if there is no possibility to save wile the "waiting for player"box is up, or is it an stuipid idea!?!?

[T*AnTi-V!RuZz]

What?s about my flag idea :


One problem i had seen, is that for example:

I play with 3 other players...than one player?s PC is hanging and there is the "waiting for player xxx" box.
And if THAN someone others save the game....and than the host Rehost the game...there is a message as named: "player xxx hasnt the current version of the game"
I think it was nice, if there is no possibility to save wile the "waiting for player"box is up, or is it an stuipid idea!?!?

I think your idea is the best idea I've seen yet... for a mod.

I don't think this should be part of the Remake, but should be a mod that can later be added, because it adds nothing to the gameplay..

[The Dark Lord]

I like it, too. It would be awesome to design your own flag!
But as you said Krom and Lewin (and Danjb right? I can't seem to remember who's contributing) shouldn't be in a hurry implementing this (if possible at all, it doesn't seem easy to me).

I think it was nice, if there is no possibility to save wile the "waiting for player"box is up, or is it an stuipid idea!?!?

That is practically impossible as the player you are waiting for has lost his connection and won't receive the save. If I'm correct they will work on a 'automatic reconnect system' though and that should pretty much do the job I guess.