Knights and Merchants

K&M belongs to the small but satisfying genre blending townbuilding and combat, of which Stronghold is the most known. This title cannot escape comparisons to its more modern counterpart, and unfortunately it simply doesn't come close. The economy is interesting, even a little broader than Stronghold, and watching your villagers go about their business is enthralling. The dated graphics are surprisingly good, with detailed 2D towns, less cutesy than Settlers but still charming. This aspect of the game is great, and would be worth the price of entry alone. The only flaw is the effect of limited space on your town, which leads to cramped and bizarrely unrealistic layouts. Sadly, what would be a pleasant sandbox game is rendered effectively unplayable by the combat system. Combat is always these games' weak point, but here it is so fiddly and frustrating that it actively prevents you from completing levels. Some nice ideas, like formations, are trampled by awful pathfinding, clumsy melee and the insane feature in which archers have to be 'aimed' at opponents; but since they only turn in large increments, whole ranks of enemies walk happily into your lines. Unacceptably un-fun; and since in K&M resources are limited, even one such unfair defeat leaves you no further chances. I want to recommend this, since it is full of heart and charm, but the truth is that Stronghold is a far better way to scratch the pikes-and-peasants craving.

This is one of my old-time favorites: beautiful graphics, well-developed economic structure, intricate detail, and a decent selection of music. I became hooked on this game because I marveled at it's economic structure and began to try to develop new economic strategies; all of which eventually fell back to the same basic structure that the game requires for survival. This was slightly annoying, but made it more challenging to get up to speed as quickly as possible before trying anything tricky. There are some improvements over the original K&M game, such as speeding up time, new units, etc. but I still find some faults. 1) Retarded AI - In the original game, the AI was set to attack at certain time intervals to make the game a constant rush for advancement and added greatly to the strategy. In the Peasant's Rebellion it may begin a scenario where you are being attacked, but that's about as intelligent as the AI gets. If you ever attack it forces the AI to become retarded and randomly send a line of troops into your base that kill peasants, stand still for minutes, leave, and then return. This continues for the rest of the game. Many times it happens by accident when the enemy army gets too big and a stray soldier attacks some random unit, which triggers the enemy to empty their base of all military units in an all out war to destroy you. 2) You can't control your units - This is a blessing and a curse. I came to enjoy the fact that your non-military units did their own thing, and there is still some control over what they do in modifying their priorities (distribution of wares, etc.). However, the military units are very difficult to control. You may tell your military to perform an action, but one unit starts walking off randomly in a direction until your army comes to a halt. If one unit touches an enemy unit you lose control of your units and they begin attacking until they all die or until the enemy army dies. You can't call them off. It's too late: you lost your army, and now the AI acts as I explained above. This problem forces you to NEVER attack until you are certain you can maintain enough troops to keep the enemy out of your base until the end of the level, or win the level right then and there. 3) You can't capture an enemy storehouse and take its wares. - It made me sad, but I got over it. 4) Random bugs - Buildings and their workers becoming idle, even after resetting the build que for that building. 1 or 2 military units don't get fed when you feed the army. A unit doesn't get triggered to enter a building of his type and just stands around aimlessly until the end of the level. I still enjoyed the game, and give it 4 stars despite these discrepancies. I enjoyed the first of the series slightly more for its AI, but I also enjoyed having the new unit types of The Peasant's Rebellion. Overall, it's worth a try. You may love or hate how different it plays from your typical RTS.

It's always possible to get better in this game, even after years. There is no levelling up or something, but you can still improve. The city building system is detailed and requires a good understanding of the game to manage a city well. The game is a little similar to Settlers, but I find it too simple compared to KaM. Most people think this game slow. If you know how to play it, it is actually fast even in x1 speed. It's really hard to get the city working well, and it can go wrong very easily. You need to recognize the problem and correct it to get better. Don't just wait for the resources and speed up the game. TPR has many bugs, so I would recommend to download KaM Remake. It's free and almost the same game and it requires TPR to run.

I bought this and start playing this about two years ago. And then I still haven't finished this and still in mission 12. But bear in mind that I am not really a gamer, I play game may be even less than one time a week. But when I play it, I can put quite some time on it each time. Some games when you stop playing for some time, I will lost interest of it and stop playing it forever. But this game doesn't, I will continue the game may be two weeks or months later. Some claim the game is slow, but there is F8 to speed up the game speed. On my side, I didn't use it because I find that I often don't have time to build or control my army. However, I do agree that the AI such that each troop after eating won't fall back to their original formation and direction is really annoying (even the cutie machine troop). And when the fisherman caught all fishes in the pond, they will still go on fishing without generating any food, and the fact that you can't kill your people means at the end those fisherman are just burden that eating up your food only. But overall, I very admire and enjoy the game, as there is no other game makes food so important and you can really execute a real starving strategy. It is also a beauty to see how all the economic chain goes, lumberman not only cut the trees, but also plant the trees. Each person NEED to eat. You need serf to deliver food to your army. The enemy will attach you from time to time, so you have to prepare your army for defense while you are building your city. And missions are also challenging which makes me must make saves frequently with roll back and play in order to finish missions.

This game defintely didn't get enough attention when it was released. It is a very good mixture of both heavy combat-focussed unit management and some build-up-your-own-village part. This package contains both the original game 'The Shattered Kingdom' and the re-release extra content 'The Peasants Rebellion', which basically adds a second campaign, a new building and new troops. Story/campaign: The campaign (The Shattered Kingdom) hasn't got a creative story, but it is not very important anyway, because nearly every mission has the same setting: build up your village, kill the enemy. Some missions are 'units only', which means you have to defeat the enemy with the soldiers you get in the beginning without building a base at all. The later missions require a lot of time to finish, eight hours isn't unusual at all. The second campaign (The Peasants Rebellion) has better designed missions and is a little harder, but doesn't come up with really new ideas. The story is continued. Gameplay: The build-up part at the beginning of a mission is necessary to create a wide variety of soldiers. When you have a threatening army, you move out to kill the enemy. Unitl then, you have to defeat your village and gather more ressources. That's it. That is what you do every mission. It sounds boring, but it isn't at all, because you always have to make decisions: Where do I build my structures? How do I build the streets in order to connect the houses? Is my mixture of soldiers deadly enough to kill the enemy? Can I deliver enough food so they don't starve? Sound, graphics, control etc: The soundtrack is okay for its time, it has some medieval touch. The graphic actually is pretty good, because of its lovely designed 2D animations. Activating autosave is strongly recommended and can be done via the ingame options menu! Tips: - Save every mission at the beginning, because your game progress isn't saved in any other way (except autosave). That means if you click on the 'start new capaign' button, you restart the game -- and don't continue where you have stopped. - There are fan patches availlable on the internet. They fix a lot of bugs. In total i recommend this game to strategy fans who want to experience combat-focussed missions. Also you will need a lot of time during the missions. I don't recommend it to strategy fans who like to build up a village and want to focus on economy, because in this game economy has the purpose to support your army and nothing else. But if you think this game could be interesting, just don't wait any longer! Like i said in the beginning: It didn't get enough attention when it was released.