Knights and Merchants

gut

I played quite a bit of one of the campaigns before growing too bored to continue. This gameis essentially Settlers II but with two major twists: Combat is now real time and every person now requires upkeep in terms of food. Unfortunately this does not make the game better than Settlers. Rather it's a lot more cumbersome, and requires tedious micromanagement for e.g. construction and army upkeep. The real time combat also just doesn't really bring much fun-factor to the game. Winning a battle is more about pulling the enemy into a fortified position, or knowing the scripted sequence of the AI for each mission by having already lost that mission previously. Music is OK but not great and gets repetitive rather than enjoyable. Stability was mediocre on Windows 10. I saw repeated lockups on some levels in particular, which would see the game become completely unresponsive. All in all I would say the positive reviews here are very much driven by Nostalgia. This is not a great game.

Nothing else to say.

Ive played this game time ago, i still got the original box somewhere and im a bit surprised to see so many hi scores from users around. This game for a half is about menaging and building your villages with a sim-city like menagement, you have to care about production, economical stuff etc. This part of the game, the managerial one, is the nice part, anyway this game wanna combine also battles in rts style, and sadly this combat part of the game is prolly one of the worst ever seen in all rts history, laggin, bugged, inexistent pathfinding, AI completely absent, its really frustrating and pointless. The feeling is really to have in hands an unfinished product, where after builing up a tycoon style game which were not enough appealing alone to be played, devs decided to add at all cost something that were out of their programming capabilities resulting in ruining totally the game experience. Too bad the game had nice graphics and could have been developed to be a tycoon/menagerail only game, but this mix of genres is really not working here for lack of programming quality.

Those of you versed in the history of this game may come to realize that this was a product rolled from the same cloth of the Settlers series. With this tapestry, came many of the same issues. Unlike the Settlers, your serfs exist and have one need. Food. So unlike the mass campaigns of terrain conquest, the fastest way to axe the AI is to starve it because... ...The AI scripting is very simplistic; BASIC even. Your opponents will make no efforts to rebuild (and hardly any to expand), meaning the fastest method of defeat is not a thrilling war, but to simply stomp out a chain of supply and wait. There is no priority system for the units. I cannot tell my labourers to set their mind to one building over another; once they (or anyone) has set their mind to something, there is no turning them back. Meaning, if your serf delivers the last stone to a site before the quarry is built, you are shafted. And yet, there is a mystical charm aside all these flaws; the way the music flows endlessly even during tense combat situations, or the leisurely pace though which everything occurs, and the slow build of unlocking new buildings, leading up to the formidable looking castle. Alas, as others have mentioned, there are games which fill specific niches far better and do the management/building aspects with far less fiddly nonsense. I would call the game just barely above average, but only on the merits of stylistic beauty alone.