Knights and Merchants.net Forum

Indeed, the game became very difficult...
What about making a new tutorial? A more advanced one, would that be possible?

I agree that we need to find ways to make the game easier for new players to learn and enjoy. If somebody makes a good tutorial/guide/tips video we'll help promote it on our homepage (and maybe in-game). A new advanced tutorial might also be a good idea, possibly done in a more interactive way using our new scripting system. If anybody has suggestions for these please write about them.

Regarding replays, we are planning to add these features:
- See the replay from a players perspective (their fog of war view) which can be switched between players or "reveal all" while you watch.
- Jumping forwards/backwards through the replay in 10 minute intervals (true rewinding/fast forwarding isn't possible for technical reasons)

I'm not sure about drawing things, since that's only useful if you're making a video. There are plenty of overlay programs that let you draw on the screen as far as I know. I don't see why it needs to be implemented in-game.

Our most popular languages seem to be English, Polish, Dutch and Russian (no order or stats behind this, that's just from hits on our site and my personal experience). That makes it quite hard to make videos that most players can understand, although I'd recommend using English because it seems to be the most commonly shared language.

Hi, first time here!

How about this: troops that are hungry should retreat from the battle field. Moreover, the troops will walk the halfway path to the nearest storehouse filled with food. Let me illustrate this.

Current KaM Behaviour: Suggested Remake Behaviour: The 75% condition for getting a food delivery is increased to 100%: every warrior in the troop gets food. The warrior stops moving towards it's delivering serf, once he has received food. He will not walk back to original formation.

Possible impact on gameplay (-/+ = cost in terms of, respectively, less or more player effort):

• * Retreat is faster and automatically (-).
  * It reduces feed-time (-).
  * It impacts the whole economy positively (-), as serfs get back to work quicklier.
  * Serfs won't die from lazying about in combat zone (-).
  * The backline is distorted more predictable and controllable (-), as the troops retreat immediatly.
  * Players have to reposition troops after dinner (+).
  * It may waste food if warriors are not hungry, e.g. when used as fast-retreat (+).
  * Enemies can intercept retreating troops (+).
  * After dinner, the troop has no formation and is weaker (+).

Possible impact on semi-realism:

• * Hungry men don't want to fight, but want their food as soon as possible.
  * Never skip breakfast.

Possible overlap/variation:

• * Combine with other idea "spliting hungry troops from fit troops": only hungry troops retreat and are split. Fit troops will reposition according to the original formation.
  * ... (suggestions?)

This feature simply solved some standing discussions on how to feed. Some suggested the ability to build camps, which I don't like. Others suggested splitting, but this makes the game less balanced and challenging. This suggestion will not make the game easier or harder, but it makes battle tactics (fast-retreat vs. intercept-retreat) and a stable food economy (uniform condition v.s. food waste) more interesting.

Your feedback is welcome!

After rereading my own post, I forgot to make clear that one still requires to give an order to eat:

Troops won't go eat automatically, or during battle.

This suggestion I came out now is actually quite simple, and could be implemented way earlier.

*Squads in multiplayer show the number of units they have, exactly in the same way as it is shown in Map Editor.
Yellow numbers displayed in the center of squad formation.

It surely saves time while fighting instead of "eye counting" with [horizontal x vertical lines, -empty slots].
Sometimes with big squads, it is difficult to know exactly how many soldiers you have selected.

Eye counting will be applied in measuring opponents forces, however for own army, you will quickly know by reading the number.

Random ideas part XXX.


Lets start with swine farms/stables. As Lewin mentioned in the other topic their production is somewhat random - there is certain number of "slots" which have several "stages", the animal breeder will put the corn in one of the slots, when it reaches "mature" stage you will get a swine or a horse (Lewin talked about swine farms but I assume stable uses the same formula). Some players actually complained that it's too random and while I agree that random factor should stay I think we should normalize it a bit and in order to do that we should change probability distribution. The idea is to assign "older" stages higher probability, e.g. 1.5 * "stage" / sum of all probabilities, the factor obviously needs some tweaking/testing.


Second idea concerns delivery of goods, mostly weapon (iron) production. Long story short, serfs should prioritize buildings which have something to make, e.g. armor smithy with an order for 5 shields should have priority over another one which already finished production, perhaps second one shouldn't receive any iron at all, the reason being - it's annoying to do this "by hand"

Some quick suggestions after a long (5 hour) game, which featured building two almost seperate cities.

• * Allow one to place a roadblock to cancel all serfs from entering danger-zone, when second settlement is under attack. Now I had huge casualties because my serfs were redoing the job of one that died because of an invasion.
  * Allow one to send resources to specific warehouses. I.e. warehouse to warehouse transportation.

And some small suggestions on serf delivery:

• * Allow two serfs to swap a delivery at any point in time, when that's more efficient. In the case of two seperate cities, the behaviour is most easily explained. What if a serf from town A goes to town B to pick up a good, and later a serf from town B goes to town A to pick up another good. These two deliveries can be swapped, meaning the traffic between A and B is reduced only to good transfers that are unwanted in one town.
  * As with serfs delivering building materials: when the site is demolished, they return their wood or stone to the nearest storehouse. Whenever I close the doors of a workshop, it is best that serfs delivering to that workshop immediately cancel their delivery and transfer the good to the nearest storehouse.

I think of a serious issue from serfs feeding troops. Still a fail in Kam design (maybe should have written this in BUGS).

If a squad asks for food, serfs feed all soldiers having less than 80% health condition!
Besides the serfs not even priorize those with lower health, they can just feed the soldier with 70% condition over 1 soldier with skull above. That's quite a mess since there is no button to split units which are really hungry for those with almost full condition.

At least I suggest a change to lower that value to 33% -> value of minimum condition to receive the food from serfs.

@Jeronimo: Just lowering to 33% would create a situation, where you can't pre-feed your army, because they come out of barracks with much higher condition. Sometimes you might want to give them instant boost to 100% before sending them out.

Maybe if every unit in the group has higher condition than 33%, then everyone with lower condtion than 80% will be fed. However this would be some-what confusing and extremely uncomfortable, if your newly trained units were added to a group with one starving member.

So maybe kick out one of the semi-useless exploit-only buttons, like attack And replace it with second food icon for either "feed the starving" or "separate starving from the group".

Like, when? ;o I believe food is such a worthy thing that you shouldn't feed your soldiers if they have 70% of health... when you will possibly send them into a fight soon and some of them might die. Although I'd say 50% would be a better value, not too few, not too much. Or, just like you said, remove one of the useless buttons.

Maybe not in multiplayer but in singleplayer I often fed my most-likely-to-survive ranged troops up to 100% before sending them to final battle. The battle often lasted long enough for everyone to starve, unless they are pre-feed to 100%. Of course you can send serves later to feed them but then, on some maps, the serves need to walk like 4 minutes before reaching anyone. Also extremely annoying in cases where you some-what slip by enemy towers, for example when the recruits go to eat. Later, when your army has passed by and enemy towers have reqruits again, the normal feeding procedure is hard. You would want to pre-feed the army. I don't know... It might sound like im constructing scenarios but I pre-feed parst of army all the time in singleplayer.

What do you think about horizontal lines in stats screen, just as visual reference line?

I support this idea... pretty hard to see the exact amount of troops/wares/etc. without them now

Yes this would be nice indeed.

And Sado it isn't that hard for you

Your Idea Thomas is cool... and I'd like to suggest again a rework in Economics.

Left column resources, right column players names: If you want to compare a specific ware (such as number of axes), then you just click in AXES, and the players lines will show only axes produced by them.
The current graphs force you to untick everything in order to see what you want, and tick in every player by separate to know their production.