Knights of Honor

Knights of Honor brings together many genres. Although the game is mainly a real-time strategy game, it offers much more than the typical RTS game.

You start the game in one of three time periods. This will determine what Europe looks like at the beginning of the game and, as such, will determine how the game develops. Each time period has different choices for countries to play as because Europe's countries don't stay the same for long.

You have the opportunity to play any country that is part of Europe, as well as a few of the countries that border Europe (northern Africa and western Asia/Middle East). Choose to play a major power like Germany, or a minor power such as the Highlands (northern Scotland). No matter who you are, you can become the biggest power in Europe.

The game offers enough different options that you could play the game for a week and still come across something new. For example, if you unite Scotland (north and south), the nobles will give you 5000 gold if you rename the parts of the country to Scotland rather than keeping your current country's title.

You control most aspects of a country. Your king and queen will have children who you can marry off to improve relations. You can choose your heir if you have more than one son. You can also promote knights to the royal family to use for various tasks (merchant, landholder, cleric, marshal, spy, and builder). Each type is important. Marshals lead your army, while merchants improve trade. And, if you're lucky, your cleric could become Pope which allows you to excommunicate countries and send crusades against them. Spies can do more in this game than in many other games. They can do everything from stealing gold to assassinating the king.

Use diplomacy to help expand your borders, or just have the biggest army and bully everyone into submission. If you're winning a war and want to offer peace, you might even be able to have a country become your vassal.

Battles can be handled yourself, or by the computer. It's much faster if the computer does it, but you can use strategy to win if you do it yourself. When you control the battle, you will control each squad of units. Use the land to your advantage as you try to take out the knights that are leading the enemy. As long as you're not attacking a town, you will win by defeating the knights, no matter how many other units remain. If you're attacking the town, you must defeat everyone. You can improve town attacks by using siege equipment.