Knights of Honor II - Patch 1.8.0

Update Overview

After more than two years, we’re back with Patch 7! This update marks the beginning of a renewed commitment to supporting the game.

We know it’s been a long time since the last patch, and we’re incredibly grateful to everyone who has continued to play, support, and stick with us. We’re motivated to keep improving the game and, going forward, our goal is to bring you regular patches, improvements, and fixes as we continue developing the game together with the community. For this patch our focus was on the Espionage and Mercenaries mechanics, together with some bugfixes and quality of life changes.

Changes to Espionage

We’ve redesigned the Espionage system by rebalancing the costs of the actions available to Spies. Some of the more powerful actions will now require a greater investment, while weaker or more situational actions particularly those that were previously too expensive to justify outside of the late game have had their costs reduced. Our goal is to make Spies a more viable and interesting tool throughout the early and mid game, especially for smaller kingdoms that can benefit greatly from carefully chosen covert actions. We feel that espionage is at its most impactful when you’re still building up a small kingdom, or later in the game when kingdoms have become much more powerful, and these changes are intended to make Spies feel more useful across that progression.

Mercenaries rebalanced

We’re also redesigning the Mercenary system to make mercenaries a more meaningful strategic option throughout the early and mid game. Mercenary groups will now spawn less frequently, helping prevent the world from becoming oversaturated with them, while their hiring costs and merchant costs have been significantly reduced to make them a more accessible option for kingdoms that need some extra strength early on. At the same time, mercenary squads can spawn as a higher level/rank , giving you the opportunity to encounter powerful groups that can provide a valuable boost as you progress into the mid game. While the reduced spawn rate may limit the total amount of mercenary firepower available in the late game, we want every encounter with mercenaries to feel more unique, meaningful, and fairly priced rather than something that is always available or prohibitively expensive. The cost of hiring mercenaries to protect your kingdom has also been reduced, but be careful as their salaries remain unchanged, so maintaining a mercenary force can still be a significant commitment. These changes also make merchants more viable in attracting distant mercenaries via their "Entice Mercenaries" opportunity.

Quality of life Improvements

• Added an option in the settings that allows for a smooth camera zoom in and out.
• Added a new icon indication for new opportunities available to knights in their court slot.
• Added a tooltip when hovering over the “Declare War” option, that displays pacts that will be affected, who joins which side and other potential repercussions.
• Implemented a cooldown for repeating diplomacy offers of the same type from the same kingdom.
• Added an icon for kingdom stability and updated the tooltip to show all possible factors affecting the kingdom and not just the currently valid ones.
• Added text on the tooltip that pops up when you cross borders that tells you the relation drop is temporary.

New Feature - Alternative battle UI visualisation

Added an alternative mode for the battle simulations where instead of 3D units we show the actual unit slots with health bars.

Balancing

• Adjust the spy plot action prices across the board (a very noticeable change would be the spy plot through merchant puppet to steal gold having its price increased).
• Spy actions base costs were adjusted to take into account income differently, resulting in more consistent prices for both smaller and larger kingdoms.
• Mercenary initial hire prices across the board were reduced between x2 and x3 times.
• Spawn rate of mercenaries has been decreased by roughly 33%.
• Spawn chance of tier 2 units has been decreased by by roughly 33%.
• There is a now a a chance for units to spawn at higher level (60% - level 0, 24% - level 1, 10% - level 2, 6% - level 3).

Bugfixes

• We fixed an issue that was causing conquering the entire world to not be a win condition for the “Rags to Riches” achievement.
• The in-game tips no longer restart on loading a saved game.
• No longer receive incorrect messages of escaped "{prisoners}" due to “Help Friendly Prisoners Escape” spy actions.