Customer Reviews

Knights and Merchants

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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!

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!

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.

This is a great little game most people have never even heard of. An import from Europe it follows games like Age of Empires. While this is in no way as great a game as that, it is fun and very absorbing. If you love RTS and have played everything out there, this might be a nice game to pick up to pass the hours.

Well, I first found this game about 2 years ago, and it's such a fun and yet aggravating game to play. Be forewarned, do NOT attempt to play this game unless you have several hours of free time available, preferably multiple blocks of several hours of free time. The game is so completely absorbing that six hours can disappear without you ever realizing it. You play several scenarios, each one adding in new units and new buildings, so you can slowly develop your use of these items. Unfortunately, the opposition seems to have access to all of these items right from the start, so sometimes things feel a little lopsided. But if you're clever and pay attention, you can prevail.

My only complaint is that everything depends on your serfs doing what they're supposed to do, and they seem to have the collective IQ of a box of rocks. I don't know how many hours I've spent literally screaming at my computer (like they can hear me... duh!) because something is going wrong because the serfs are off doing something completely stupid instead of what I want them to be doing.

Altogether an incredible game, and I hope that eventually there will be a sequel.

This is one of the best games I've played. Besides the fact that it is very realistic when it comes to food production and building it is very funny just to see the small workers do thier job. Compared to Warcraft and Starcraft this is outstanding in this sector. When it comes to battle there are some thing that could be changed. The strategic is great, pikemen shuold only attack knights and so on, but feeding the troops not the better part of this game. If youre planning a big attack, which is very fun to plan, with 100 - 150 soldiers, it is hard, not to say impossible, to get food to the troops before the attack and run the village at the same time. But I can live with it. I have completed all the 20 missions twice, so it is possible to do attacks in spite of this. The key is just to fill your barrack with recruits and weapons and then train all the soldiers in a matter of minutes. Then you might not have to feed them at all before the attack. Now, back to the subjekt; This is a really good game and I'm looking for Knights and Merchants II. (If there already is such game please mail me and tell me where to find it)!!!