KaM Overview

Welcome to my blog about the classic old PC game, Knights and Merchants (The Shattered Kingdom). When I say old, I mean old. According to my tattered old manual it's copyrighted from 1998 using the flower of pixel-colour technology. The system requirements say it all really, 24 mb of RAM and only 85 MB which wasn't a whole lot back in '98 either.

I'm writing this blog mainly because I am absolutely bored, but also in part because I love the game and most of the information about it around the 'net is in German. This makes sense seeing as Joymania Entertainment (the developer) is from Germany, but for some reason I don't speak German (it wasn't an option at high school, I go Indonesian instead, go figure). Frankly this is the only Joymania game I've got or ever heard of, nor have I heard/seen anything from Interactive Magic (the publishers). That said, they did pretty well with this one, at least in my opinion.

Okay, to start you need to know a few things:
First, this game is a total ripoff of the Settlers game(s). We know it, they know it, but who cares? I've never played the Settlers before so I couldn't care less which one came first, I'm KaM through and through.

Second, the AI is stupid. Really really stupid. Like dumber than the dumbest 6 year old you've played multiplayer against. I just can't emphasise how stupid it is. It will let you sneak in, burn, rape, pillage and raze it's base while it's massive armies guard the main entrances. They will just stand there and do nothing while while you are doing your death and destruction thing.

Third, the game has bugs, issues that will drive you insane. They aren't game breakers, but they'll spoil it for 10 or so minutes every once and while. Sometimes your serfs will just refuse to collect wood or stone. A pickle you might think, but seeing as your buildings only require 2 resources you should be fine. But wait, they require wood and stone. Oops. The other bug I've found is that sometimes serfs just refuse to drop the wood and stone off at the building sites. Generally building a new building shakes them out of their stupor, but sometimes their union just says "Nein!" to a particular building.

Other than that, it's a pretty fun and engaging game. For those of you who know nothing about it it's pretty much a build a base, train the troops, kill the enemy sort of thing (aka a Real Time Strategy game). However it is different from its rivals from back in the day, Age of Empires and the like, and even modern day games too, in that it has a complex economy. You need to collect the individual resources before you can build/train anything, which means most of you time spend in this game is in town planning. I can't remember my peasants having traffic jams in AoE2. The same can't be said of my serfs in this game, they are naught but total dumbasses.

To sum it up think of it as a slightly more realistic Anno 1404 with better fighting but worse graphics (it was made a decade earlier after all). Toss in a bit of Sim City, Age of Empires and a hell of a lot of The Settlers, and you have Knights and Merchants.