Knights and Merchants

Still the best medieval city-building strategy game ever! Feels and seems better than Banished game, but have a lot of old-school game problems that make the K&M:TPR experience more embarrasing and painful. And major problem of the game - the AI units. Most of your citizens will work to death but never even try to save themselves. The guard AI will not protect your territories without direct control, they not reacting on enemy squads. Well, otherwise it's the wery pleasant game for city-building relaxation some time. You know, it's worth even full price, but use cheats and don't try to be honest with obsolete gameplay, it doesn't worth it. p.s. Only The Peasants Rebellion expansion cheats working in this game, don't try to use The Shattered Kingdom resource combination.

The game is fun and has beautiful animations. However, the slow weapon production tree and the terrible servant pathfinding makes every scenario an endurance challenge that can take 6+ hours to beat. In order to fix this, get KaM remake community patch, where you can speed up the game (among other QoL improvements). With that option, you can enjoy both the initial building phase and the later fighting phase, without being bogged down by the boring middle "weapon stockpiling" phase.

This is a good game if you have the time and patience. Just to get your army up it takes a while. I like the graphics and the movements are done well. There are a few bugs though and I'm not sure if this version still has them or not. The most annoying is you'll have housing that will not get occupy or workers that will not do their specific tasks. This becomes really annoying because you have already wasted precious resources to build them. I've tried many times to see why this would happen and I think it's particular to how you build and layout your town. Other than that it's a good game to try. Again, you have to have the time and patience for this game.

Knights and Merchants is a 2D real time town building/strategy game much like the more well known Settlers games. I have not played the newer Settlers installments, but of those I have played I have always preferred K&M's gameplay. Setting up a good economy with efficient production chains is the goal of the game and it also has a surprisingly robust battle engine as well. This package includes the original 20 campaign mission plus the 14 campaigns added in the expansion. Some missions are battle only, but most involve plenty of town building. Overall I'd say mission average 2 hours, with some taking upwards of 6 hours for me, so plenty of play time here. Graphically this game is beautiful... if you like bright well animated 2d, which I do. When the game first released I was floored by the graphics, lol. Aurally it fairs just as well. The original release was better with its CD music, but the mp3's sound great and get the job done. The music is super fun and catchy and never seems to get old. Overall the game does have a few flaws, the GOG version tends to crash a lot on my XP system for instance... grr. Despite this I continue to launch the game attempting to finally compete the expansion campaign! I recommend this game to fans of the genre who are willing to play a slower paced game and who love city planning and building. There is a demo available on the internet, so give it a try!

I start this review with this statement: "Knights and Merchants is not a regular RTS game"! This is extremely important, and it will change the way you will see and play this game. Why this game is not a RTS? Because is far slower than any RTS games I know, and is focused on resource management, base building and economy rather than combat and expansion. This game is more like Settlers or the later Cultures, than a real time game like Red Alert or even Stronghold. The battle is there, together with a complete unit list, from militia men to knights and even catapults in the expansion. You got formations, you got various units that can be mixed depending on the enemy forces making you feel like a real general, but the combat is not what you will do for the most part of the game, far from it. In most missions you start with a hand full of workers, couple of serfs and a storage house. From this you must build everything you need. And I mean everything! Basic resources like stone and wood are the backbone of your small village, then comes the farming sector with grain farms, pig farms, mills, bakeries, butchery, and even whine makers, all are interconnected and need a constant flow of resources between them so they can deliver the most important resource of the game: The Food! Yes, in this game everyone needs food! Serfs need food, builders need food, farmers, lumberjacks, stonemasons, and of course, the soldiers need food! You don't feed them, they starve. You let them starve too much, they DIE! Imagine your mighty knights that cost a huge amount of time and resources to build, starving away because your farms cannot deliver enough grain to the mills that cannot make enough flour for the bakeries., and they DIE of hunger! Everyone can die of hunger. If the builders die, you cannot build until you recruit more, if the serfs die the entire transport routes get slower, and if the army dies you're defenseless! Yes, it is this complex, and yes, I love it!