Building up effectively
By Litude
Version 1.1
Introducion
This is a guide that will give you a some nice tips that will sure help you when going through the campaign. For further help you should also read the General Tips & Tricks as those will also help you when you play the campaigns.
The campaign missions in Knights and Merchants are not that hard to defeat because of the stupid AI, however if you still have problems defeating the campaigns after reading the walkthorughs that probably means that there's a problem with the general strategy you're using. For that case I've written this guide to give you some insight on how to make the campaigns a lot easier!
Some of the tips are probably well known, but there sure is also some stuff you didn't know you could do.
Economy
Having a very strong economy is not required to win the campaign, what you should do is to first only build about 2-3 farms and few of all other economic buildings so that you can get an army to defend yourself. Here's a list on how you should build up:
- 1 School house
- 1 Inn
- 1 Quarry
- 1 Woodcutter's
- 1 Sawmill
- 3 Farms
- 2 Mills
- 2 Bakeries
(1 Gold Mine)
(1 Coal Mine)
(1 Metallurgist's)
- 2 Vineyards
- 1 Swine Farm
- 1 Tannery
- 1 Weapons Workshop
- 1 Armory Workshop
- 1 Butcher's
- 1 Barracks
By building the above you should have the basic economy working, albeit producing leather armors is really slow. Now you can make yourself an army to defend yourself (and even attack) so it's safe to start making your economy stronger.
Now that you have an army you should build another quarry and a woodcutter's so that you won't run out of wares when you're building. Strenghten your general economy by building yourself three additional farms, one additional bakery, two additional vineyards and one additional swine farm.
Now you shouldn't run out of food so why not make your military stronger when you have the chance? Make one additional weapons workshop, two additional armory workshop and if you want, a stable. After that you might start running low on timber, so build two woodcutter's and one sawmill to make sure that doesn't happen.
Then it's time to get the ultimate soldiers, the iron soldiers! Build two iron mines, three coal mines and one iron smithy. Now you can produce iron, so build yourself a weapons smithy and two armor smithies. By doing that your production of armors and weapons will be more balanced than by having an equal amount of them.
Make sure that you always have enough serfs carrying around your wares so that your buildings are effective. Having enough (around 12 is a good amount) laborers is also important as otherwise building up will take too much valuable time giving the AI time to launch an attack against you whilst you might still be defenceless.
Battles
In Knights and Merchants it's very important to not delay your attacks for too long as your enemy will become stronger. There is however a bug in the AI which causes the AI to stop producing weapons and armors after a certain amount (255?) of them have been made. Exploiting this bug is generally considered quite lame, so be a real man and don't do it!
In most cases when you attack, direct attacks will not do that much damage. It is therefore recommended that you do the famous ambush tactic by taking out a single archer and firing an arrow on your enemies. That will cause the fact that the troop will start following the archer and you can lead them to your army. Using this method your losses will be significantly lower and theirs will be a lot higher.
NOTE: Usually the enemy will sooner or later send their whole army after you soldiers using this method!
Also one problem that many people that are new to the game do is that they have way too few archers. Let's face it, archers completely dominate in this game! You should always try to have more archers than you have normal infantry units. This is because the archers do a lot more damage to the enemy soldiers than any normal infantry would (excluding the barbarian). Can I make an army of only archers then? Nope you can't, because once an enemy soldier reaches your troop of archers they can no longer fire at this soldier. So it's also important that you have infantry to keep away the enemy from your archers until the battle is over.
Another point worth of mention is also how and when to use mounted units. Before making the decision as to make mounted units or not you should try checking if your enemy has any lance carriers or pikemen in his army. If it seems like the AI is making a lot of lance carriers or pikemen you should not by any means make mounted units, but if they only have a few of these units you should try making some mounted units. Mounts are very good at killing enemy archers which are as I previously explained the most dangerous soldier in an army.