Knights and Merchants.net Forum

Well, I was only planning to hide the graphs lines of enemies, you would still be able to see your own lines in the graphs. Not waiting for the AI to destroy you is a good point. The question is, does it give away important information which could make the mission easier when you resume playing it if you are able to see the AI players' army graphs?

Yes, knowledge about your opponent's strength always helps you. I think it would be best to remove AI graphs completely, except when the game was won.

I suppose the most interesting information is your own graph lines, comparing to the AI isn't very useful anyway since the AI usually has an advantage over you. When you quit or get defeated you could still see your own graphs to compare to how you did last time (e.g. see how your army count changed over time)

Hello folks

While playing over the past few weeks, I noticed that your first coal mines all start te get empty around the 1hour mark, of course depending on when and where you started to build them.
Of course, Around the 1h mark is also when peace time ends. So what happens is, during peace time you often find yourself with nothing to do except for waiting for things to get built and planning out your base, but after peace time is done, suddenly there is so much to do: organize your military, attack or defend from an enemy. And then these messages "Your coal mine has run out!" keep on popping up, getting in between all this war-stress. I find it hard to keep track on how many coal mines have run out and how many new ones I have to build to replace them. On top of that, it's a pretty tedious task to replace coal mines, especially considering you have about 8 of them in an average game. Once they start running out, it's something that keeps on looping for what feels like the rest of the game.

Also, most players have their bases fully built by the time PT ends, so builders will often be idle during this time.

So I started to think, and I don't know if this is a good idea or not, but what if you could check an option in your coal mine to "Rebuild Automatically". If you click it, as soon as a coal mine gets empty, your workers will place the paths and the foundation for a fresh mine, near the depleted one.
Conditions for this to work could be:
-It needs at least 6 tiles of unoccupied coal to build on.
-It needs to be in a proximity of ~12 tiles around the old depleted mine
-(eventually) At least one of your builders must be idle

And of course you should be able to uncheck this option so that you can build the coal mines yourself. And if you do decide to check it, your workers will keep track of your coal operations while you can fully pay attention on the battlefield.

Do you guys think it is a good idea, and furthermore, would it be possible to implement it in the game?

Well, I think the solution you proposed isn't a good one, just look at AI's' building Maybe some message is sent to you whenever you destroy a mine saying "You have x less gold/iron/coal mines than the maximum yet." And it could be switched on/off, and also there are cases when you don't have further deposits of iron, and the number of your running coal mines fall to 3-4 (and you don't trade for iron ore/iron ----> no more coal needed than that), you could reset the counter to the present value which the game compares your mines' amount, this way it would remain useful very late game, too.

We could add a checkbox to make the game build your entire village for you too, and even attack the enemy automatically when you have enough soldiers, but then you wouldn't be playing an RTS game anymore
I don't think it's necessary. Managing resource collection while fighting is part of most RTS games.

I could have seen this coming haha well point taken, you're absolutely right! And I guess it isn't *that* necesary, just a bit tedious

About graphs, I think they are all okay. We do allow replays and player can see whole map from there, so no big deal

But the player must choose to view a replay of the game he just played. The army graph is the first thing he sees EVERY time he quits the mission. So it's forcing the player to see what the AI has whether he likes it or not. Maybe some players would like the AI's army size to be a secret, but would like to see the graph of their own army size to see how they are going? Knowing how many troops the AI has when you'd rather the campaigns be surprising would kind of spoil the fun IMO.

Some suggestions:

I know its on the Open for discussion list: Shared control. Whats the status on that one? Because what I saw was a post from Lewin about a year ago saying its planned? No stress, just wanted to voice my support for this idea

Suggestions not on the list:

Archer attack rework: As far as I recall and what a short 30 second test confirmed is that when you use the attack function for archers to attack a group they will run into them melee range instead of moving into archer range. This results in archers not attacking when you order them to attack. While there is an easy workaround to this it always bugged me and annoyed me a bit. Id like to see some improvements to this but its not really required.
My suggestion: If archer is in range of selected enemy: Attack from current range. If archer is out of range, move into range, then attack.

Archer range indicator: League of Legends style, I personally love indicators tho this has absolutley no priority. Would also like this for towers. If you like the idea and find yourself with too mcuh time at hand, I would like this ^^

Replay improvements:
I love to watch replays. There are some problems with this replay watcher compared to other games so I just want to voice them and Im happy if anything gets implemented at any point ^^
- Have an info tab where you can see player names and corresponding colors (Just remembered the beta, tested it and its already IMPLEMENTED (The fog of war toggle)! Thanks!)
- Make it possible to "jump" in time? Since you already have the time bar, might be possible? Or just be able to set speed to -1x etc.
- Fog of War (Implemented in beta)
- Team view toggle? Warcraft 3 style, be able to easily distinguish between teams by having all teammembers wear the same color (in replay only).

Seems like a lot of this is implemented already ^^ Awesome.

Stuff for new players like me: Resource finding.
I dont know any map. Nor any spot. So when I start a game for practice purposes I frequently dont know where the gold and iron is, sometimes I dont even see stone from my starting location either. So before I could play a multiplayer on any map, Id basically have to practice each spot on any map I want to play. This seems a bit complicated. Is it possible to have a larger view on the starting spot you have? Or get some help as to where the resources are? Or in matchcreating screen have an option to view the map in big?

Thats it for now ^^ Thanks for everything, your doing a fantastic job guys!

While running KAM in multiplayer, it's possible to open up a second KAM client and load the map you're playing in the map editor. So you can check out all the positions you like a handy trick I just learned myself last friday.

Do note that you can only go online with 1 KAM client at the same time, but you can do singleplayer stuff all you want in the second client

Small question from myself:

How would you guys feel about rearranging the barracks-icons to be like this:


It seems easier for me to see exactly how many soldiers of each kind I can train when respectively the leather and the iron requirements are all in one line. Hmm and maybe the armors should be standing on the far left. Not going to redo my beautiful paint image for that though =P

@Kris: I'm not sure if I like the new layout better, it takes time to get used to and there's not much change mechanic-wise - you still have to check for outlined boxes having numbers. Maybe change the order to axe-pike-bow-armor-shield-horse. What Lewin says?

@Galahad:

Shared control - we have little advance, we have abstracted spectator entity that could possibly control several players, but that second part is still only in plans. With RC we have much more boring tasks like bugfixing )

Archers: Fixed in current RC.

Archer range indicator: please attach a screen and explain how it works, maybe it will be a good fit for KaM? or maybe not

Replays: little progress, maybe after RC

Resource finding: Try contacting mapmakers and ask them to make maps with more terrain fow opened at the start. I fully agree that starting without seeing nearby resources is unfair advantage to players who studied the map.

Thanks for writing! =)

The proposed layout does make more sense than the original, I think we should consider it. What do other people think?

I would imagine Galahad means something like this:


Of course with a better looking graphic than a simple MSPaint oval

It would indicate the targets the front line archer can reach in a radius around him. Honestly, I don't know if it fits in KAM? Range for towers and archers has always been something that plays on your intuition. Maybe it would be nice, I honestly don't know