Knights and Merchants [CD-ROM]

Joymania (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 16, 1998

Real-time strategy. Battle and empire building game. Highly detailed and visually accurate for the period. Players assume the role of an ordinary Captain, then captain finds he is responsible for the defense of the last royal providence.

Editorial Reviews

Review

..." a strategy game with something for everyone, Next Generation. 4out 5 Stars

"Great graphics, intricate resource-management model." Happy Puppy -- A- graphic rating,PC Games

Product Details

• CD-ROM
• Publisher: Interactive Magic; 1 edition (April 16, 1998)
• ISBN-10: 1893890252
• ISBN-13: 978-1893890251
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #7,398,199 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars It's the greatest game of all, July 23, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Knights and Merchants (CD-ROM)

Knights and Merchants astounded and captivated me in real time strategy.(I made it to the Barbarian Level) It's up there with StarCraft! Tell Me: IS THERE ANYONE WILLING TO BATTLE ME IN KNIGHTS AND MERCHANTS! BRING IT ON!

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Hooked on this game, May 9, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Knights and Merchants (CD-ROM)

This game was great fun and proved hard to walk away from. Whenever I had time to play it I found myself playing late into the evenings. My sons and I were all hooked on the game. We went nutz when the CD got a crack in it (someone sat on it). Every since I've been looking in the "used software" sections of every software store I could find. With no luck, I finally checked out the Internet and found it at Amazon. I've ordered a new copy and can't wait until it arrives. K&M will retain a place of honor on my software shelf (far away from the chair)! I just hope I can get the spare time to really enjpy it soon!

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars So much potential..., June 8, 2006

By 

Bryan Lemke (St. Johnsbury, Vermont) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Knights and Merchants (CD-ROM)

I love Real-time strategy. I read mixed reviews on this game and thought it sounded interesting and worth spending a few hours on.

There are some wonderful elments, including:

1. I love the inter-connectivity of the buildings in the city. I love the dependence of one good to produce another, then another, and so forth. (Example: To build a bowman you need a suit of leather armor, a longbow, and a recruit. To get the recruit, you train him in the schoolhouse for 1 gold. To get a gold, you need a metallurgist to produce it from gold ore and coal ore, which come from a gold mine and a coal mine, respectively. For the longbow, you need two timbers, which comes when a sawmill takes the raw timber from a woodcutter's shack and cuts it. Leather armor has similar requirements from different buildings working together). Everything is very interconnected and very fun.

2. The graphics are very fun (and funny) to watch the townmembers doing their jobs. The sound is really neat as well, as you can hear everything happening when your screen is looking at the town (houses being built, horses in the stables, anvils being struck, trees being chopped down, etc) and it gets softer as you move your field of vision outward. It gives it a very active and immersive feel when you are in the town and when you look elsewhwere it feels like you are leaving to go into the woods! Very well done on both graphics and sound.

3. Very addictive when you first start playing it. The town-building is thoroughly entertaining and keeps you involved for a pretty good stretch of time.


And now for the things that make it a 2 instead of a 4 or 5:

1. Combat control is not good. It is hard to get your units to attack, as they will walk around randomly after you have instructed them to attack an enemy and often the enemy kills your soldier while he is walking around for no apparent reason. The AI on units is awful! Sometimes your soldiers attack enemy units who approach and sometimes they will allow the enemy to walk up to them, past them, even fight them without attacking back! Too often you click for your unit to attack and they do nothing. Once your units are involved in attacking, you cannot bring them back. This is bad if you realize the enemy force is too big, they have a tactical advantage, etc. Once you click on attack, your units are committed to be there until they are dead or they have killed the enemy squad. This makes it difficult to change tactics once you have engaged. Very frustrating.
The combat element of the game in the weakest part of the game, and unfortunately critical in solving every mission I played.

EXAMPLE from my own experience in the game that illustrates many of the problems:

During one mission, I had an enemy archer standing in the middle of my town, IN THE MIDDLE OF A SQAUD OF MY OWN ARCHERS, shooting my units while nobody attacked him. I did not see the archer sneak in to town, and my own archers did not shoot him when he approached. The enemy archer walked past a solid line of my archers, to the point that my archers moved to let him through, and started shooting at my townspeople. The only way I became aware of it is because I checked on the tannery and found an enemy archers in town shooting away. When I noticed him, I ordered my archers to attack him and they shifted positions around him but did not fire on him. Thinking it was a range issue, I moved the units away and ordered them to attack. My squad moved back around the enemy archer and continued to do nothing. I could not control my townspeople to keep them away and they continued to die while the archer kept shooting them! I created another archer in the barracks, moved him down to the enemy, and this archer shot the bad guy! Very frustrating lack of combat control and a very frustrating example (of many) of why it made the game frustrating.

3. Some elements of the game are just too slow and you will almost assuredly find yourself waiting for periods of time. If I want to build a new building, I need to build the road first, which means I lay out where the road goes, then wait for serfs to brings stones to the laborers to complete the road. If you lay out three different buildings, you need to build three different roads to the buildings, and ALL UNFINISHED ROADS MUST BE COMPLETED before laborers will start work on buildings. Too often you are waiting for a road to be finished before you can do anything else. You have no control over townspeople either. I cannot manually tell a serf to bring gold to the schoolhouse if needed. Instead, I have to wait until that comes up on their queue of tasks. Once you start to get a large city, you will find yourself waiting for serfs more than anything else. Even if you have an excess of serfs, you will wait for them to complete tasks for 5-10 minutes sometimes. Very frustrating.

4. Did I mention how poor the AI is? The enemy would not be difficult to defeat in battle because of the poor AI, except for the poor combat control mentioned above.



BOTTOM LINE: The game has SO MUCH POTENTIAL, but a few elements made it just too frustrating for me. THe town building section is super fun, and the game would be a 5 if combat wasn't required. Since combat is integral to the game, it brings the overall score down and makes the flaws in the town stand out.