Knights of Honor
RTS game where you can play as any country in Europe/North Africa. It has an overworld map, and a battle map. The overworld is sorta like Empire at War's and the battlemap plays like a mix of Total War and more traditional RTS games like C&C or AoE.
Yeah, a lot of KoH is very Total War-ish. The problem is that you effectively cannot have a large empire, because of how knights are handled.
Knights are your nobles, your agents, and your war leaders. A single knight can be a warrior and lead an army of up to nine units, a merchant who can handle a trade route, a spy who infiltrates the enemy, or a priest of your given religion. Your king is a knight, and his heirs are knights. Knights can also govern cities to make those cities less terrible.
The problem is, you can only ever have 7 knights... That's it, hard cap. This means you could
theoretically have up to seven armies at once, but only if all of your royal lineage is on the battlefield and only if you have no infrastructure whatsoever, because knights are needed for that as well.
This, plus just how
huge the map is, makes dealing with rebels a completely insufferable nightmare. Even if every city is booming with industry and everyone is at max happiness, there's always a minimum chance for rebels to spawn in a given province, and this cannot be avoided except by waiting it out (a process that takes several decades). And if a rebel party shows up to "reclaim their heritage", they'll promptly set about burning each and every building in their home province to the ground.
Only way of dealing with them is to send a war party outside the gates, and the only way of doing that is -you guessed it- knights.
Even your wartime diplomatic efforts are hindered, because when you capture and enemy knight or noble in battle,
they occupy a space in your roster of knights. if you already have seven people working in government, you physically cannot take prisoners.
And don't for a second think that you'd ever be able to afford seven armies, because the tax system is borked. In my glorious empire spanning all of Scandinavia and Rus, my total low-tax income per year (high tax cannot be maintained in a city without a governing noble to provide happiness) was around 30 crowns. High tax (again, unsustainable. Rebels
everywhere) would have been around 42 crowns, and I could call a war tax (lump sum with cooldown and heavy happiness penalty that slowly decays) worth around 4-500 crowns.
You know how much a single merchant can make in a year while handling a steady trade route?
200 crowns. With zero happiness penalty.
Merchants are your only way of paying for anything, nevermind the fact that you
must have them in order to claim special resources in order to get enhanced empire benefits.
So once you've got 14-20 provinces in your empire, it becomes nearly impossible to do anything with them since you can't have enough armies to keep the rebels down, either because you don't have enough merchants making money, or because you literally just can't hire more captains because your table only has seven chairs.
And I didn't even have to deal with religion!
Normally, when you conquer an area, you need to assign a priest there to help quell unrest and slowly spread the True Word so you don't suffer the massive "foreign religion" penalty to happiness and productivity. This takes
many, many years, and you need a priest in each province. Yes, out of your seven total minister-knights.
So, how did I avoid this? Play pagans! The pagan religion is only available to a couple countries and only in the oldest possible start date, and once you convert to a "real" religion, you can never go back. Ever. Also, pagans suffer a 30% penalty to all income from any source forever.
So why go pagan? Well, first of all, no pope! No patriarchs or high imams or whatever either, which means you not only don't need to send your precious knights of on mandatory crusades or jihads, you also can avoid the whole power play aspect of trying to get your guy to be top dog, which needs even more knights.
Additionally, and more importantly,
pagans automatically convert provinces. If a Christian/Orthodox/Whatever province comes under pagan rule, the religious freedom will cause everyone to eventually revert to paganism on their own, which bypasses the messy conversion mechanics and leaves you with a lump swapping of beliefs, and suddenly everyone is happy.
How long does this "eventual" conversion take? I've seen chapels poof into Stonehenges
while the city was still burning from the siege. And then once they go au naturelle, they get just as ornery about converting back to a monotheistic religion as any standard religious dispute, making a nice buffer (if the AI were ever actually affected by that, which they are not).
Eventually I just got too big to do anything, despite having the income of roughly the entire rest of Europe and northern Africa combined. So I stopped playing, and haven't been greatly inhibited by the loss.
Fights are fun though.
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Topic: Games you probably haven't tried; the best games no ones ever heard of (Read 2367 times)