The first mission I ever cheated in (just so I could get to Mission 07), for a time I couldn't complete this one, but now it's just a cakewalk. Time to use the newest and most deadliest weapon possible, starvation.
First, they are comin', fast. Like in 10 seconds the fighting begins. Split your archers, send half of them to the north to support your allies, send your lance carriers to the far east next to your castle as the purple horsies are about to attack it and kill the blue axes with the rest of your guys.
But wait, there's more. First attack done, but more purple horsies are on their way. In the intervening 5 minutes move all of your archers to support the yellow troops, train some lancers and keep them next to your castle. Kill the knights when they arrive.
Now it's time to kill the blue boys off (north west corner). Use a decoy archer to drag their covering force of 3 axe fighters, 1 scout and 2 scouts away from their positions. The 2nd and 3rd group of axe fighters are far to the north, don't advance until they wander down to you.
Burn 'em all. It's fun.
Once the blue town is rubble, you can try to rush the purple storehouse but you generally won't get it in time. The best way is to send some archers to kill all their serfs so that the horsemen starve to death. In the meantime a valiant last stand by your men against their mounted soldiers is, well, useless, but it saves feeding you having to feed your troops later. Eventually their survivors will starve without the serfs so then send in a soldier to knock down the storehouse and that's it, mission over.
A new mission so a new tactic, which I like to call the "disable". It means you attack the enemy and destroy a few select buildings so that he cannot attack you while you build up a village a leisurely pace. You start with a town partially built, but it's layout isn't exactly stellar. 
Get building the basic buildings as our soldiers prepare to wipe out their main town. Our attack will exploit the AIs love of chasing your men, usually your archers, while you lead him straight into an ambush. In this case your archer plays bait, and first his scouts do the chasing (and dying)...
...then his axe fighters and lancers come up to assist them dying.
The archers are tougher with some nice enfilading fire but storm attack works well here. Bring everyone up and enough of your men will survive (the least I've ever had is 2 archers and a lancer).
Burn all the buildings if you can but focus first on the usual 3. Avoid attacking the tannery and inn next to the towers as that provokes the soldiers of the other town. Ignore them though, and they will happily let you raze their buddies to ground.
Now it's time to spend an hour or so building your town up. Enjoy, this is what this game is all about. Do change the standard distribution of goods though, whichever retarded monkey thought the defaults up was especially daft. Only 3 planks of wood for the weapon's workshop yet 5 for the leather armoury, really? 
Build up your troops until you have around 60 or so spread around archers, lancers and scouts. Attack the line of towers to provoke the scouts and axes defending them. Lure them into an ambush, kill them and burn the towers with your archers (or just use militia to rush them).
Then raze the town to the ground and the yellow dudes now decide to come onto your side, how nice.
In theory this mission should be the one where you start building a town from scratch. In practice, you can win with just your starting forces. Yep, your 8 axe fighters, 12 militia and 6 archers can wipe out the entire enemy and his town. Let me introduce the awesome power of the archer! In this game archers literally make all the difference (even more than in Shogun 2 Total War which I also play and everyone is complaining about how overpowered the archers are in that. They ain't seen nothin' yet!). With archer support a group of soldiers can win a fight with 5:1 odds against, easily.
Take your starting troops and deploy them on the bridge/ford like this. The bridge offers a natural choke point which your outnumbered men can benefit from. Deploying them in long thin lines enables them to bring as many axes to bear as possible, and splitting them into groups allows you to plug any gaps in the line. The key thing to note is that archers are a few paces behind your line, which means they will focus on the enemies engaging your soldiers instead of the ones waiting for their turn to fight, this makes all the difference!
You are warned that the enemy are on their way, but they take a few minutes so no need to rush. Once they start to pour down the bridge, watch the fight and plug any gaps with your second line of militia. The enemy is a group of scouts, 2 groups of axe fighters and one of militia.
So long as a couple of your axe men/militia survive, then you can win. If not, you're almost certainly screwed.
Once the enemy is dead, make a line and storm attack the archers who are just out of sight. Kill them and the town is ripe for the burning.
Burn down the three target buildings (castle, store/school houses) and that's it, mission over already. If wanton slaughter is more you type of thing, feel free to hunt down every living soul, or try starving them to death by destroying the inn, you heartless bastard.
Ok, let's play. According to the main screen I have the English 1.3 version even though it's fresh off the CD. Go figure. Not a lot of menu options, but 1998 was a simpler time. The lack of settings menu is slightly off putting though.
Anyway I won't bother going through the tutorials. I've never played them before, though I played the demo for hours on end before getting the real thing. Let's just get straight to the campaign. It's been so long since I've had a game that loads in less than a second, how quaint. Gotta get used to the 256 colour pallet again though. What happened to my cut scenes? I'm sure the game used to have them. Oh well, onwards!
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.
Your allies are advancing, so send 1 axes and 1 archers with them.
First, they are comin', fast. Like in 10 seconds the fighting begins. Split your archers, send half of them to the north to support your allies, send your lance carriers to the far east next to your castle as the purple horsies are about to attack it and kill the blue axes with the rest of your guys.
But wait, there's more. First attack done, but more purple horsies are on their way. In the intervening 5 minutes move all of your archers to support the yellow troops, train some lancers and keep them next to your castle. Kill the knights when they arrive.
Burn 'em all. It's fun.
Once the blue town is rubble, you can try to rush the purple storehouse but you generally won't get it in time. The best way is to send some archers to kill all their serfs so that the horsemen starve to death. In the meantime a valiant last stand by your men against their mounted soldiers is, well, useless, but it saves feeding you having to feed your troops later. Eventually their survivors will starve without the serfs so then send in a soldier to knock down the storehouse and that's it, mission over.
Get building the basic buildings as our soldiers prepare to wipe out their main town. Our attack will exploit the AIs love of chasing your men, usually your archers, while you lead him straight into an ambush. In this case your archer plays bait, and first his scouts do the chasing (and dying)...
...then his axe fighters and lancers come up to assist them dying.
The archers are tougher with some nice enfilading fire but storm attack works well here. Bring everyone up and enough of your men will survive (the least I've ever had is 2 archers and a lancer).
Now it's time to spend an hour or so building your town up. Enjoy, this is what this game is all about. Do change the standard distribution of goods though, whichever retarded monkey thought the defaults up was especially daft. Only 3 planks of wood for the weapon's workshop yet 5 for the leather armoury, really? 
Build up your troops until you have around 60 or so spread around archers, lancers and scouts. Attack the line of towers to provoke the scouts and axes defending them. Lure them into an ambush, kill them and burn the towers with your archers (or just use militia to rush them).
Then raze the town to the ground and the yellow dudes now decide to come onto your side, how nice.
So you start off marching down the road headed straight for an ambush. Stop when you reach the little hill, and we'll make our stand here. Then enemy comes from the east around the hill, due south and south east. Deploy your units similar to this. It's important to have your small group of archers ready to dart onto the hill as their mission will be to kill the enemy's archers.
Scouts, axe fighters, militia and archers will stream at you from the east, militia from the south east with axe fighters and lancers from the south. Pretty much keep your archers behind your men and you will prevail.
Take your starting troops and deploy them on the bridge/ford like this. The bridge offers a natural choke point which your outnumbered men can benefit from. Deploying them in long thin lines enables them to bring as many axes to bear as possible, and splitting them into groups allows you to plug any gaps in the line. The key thing to note is that archers are a few paces behind your line, which means they will focus on the enemies engaging your soldiers instead of the ones waiting for their turn to fight, this makes all the difference! 
You are warned that the enemy are on their way, but they take a few minutes so no need to rush. Once they start to pour down the bridge, watch the fight and plug any gaps with your second line of militia. The enemy is a group of scouts, 2 groups of axe fighters and one of militia.
So long as a couple of your axe men/militia survive, then you can win. If not, you're almost certainly screwed. 
Once the enemy is dead, make a line and storm attack the archers who are just out of sight. Kill them and the town is ripe for the burning.
Burn down the three target buildings (castle, store/school houses) and that's it, mission over already. If wanton slaughter is more you type of thing, feel free to hunt down every living soul, or try starving them to death by destroying the inn, you heartless bastard.
The mission opens and bang, the yellow troops are burning your village down. So that's a nice welcome to a game that is 9 parts peaceful village life and 1 part fighting. The militia streaming up from the south will save you, and if you move the group to the east fast enough you can save the towers. Clear the village and send everyone alive up to the bridge.
You can rebuild the town if you like, but really this mission won't take more than 10 minutes. The only important thing to do is to crank out recruits as fast as possible and build bows in your weapons workshop. Quite nicely you are given 20 pieces of leather armour to use so get the bows made in order to make archers. Don't bother with lancers, trust me.
March all your axe dudes north west, not due north into the valley of quick death. You don't want to get ambushed on your first mission do you? In your way are a bunch of blue axe men. Just march your men towards them and kill them all. There are 3 more increasingly smaller groups of blue axe men who come streaming down to help their comrades. Too bad for them. Once they're all dead, send a group of men to burn down their storehouse in the north-west corner.
You should be able to see into the valley at the yellow ambush party (archers and lance carriers). Don't attack them just yet. First go back to your castle. Remember those bows and recruits? Train as many archers are resources allow and march them along the same path are your axe men and militia took. Set one group up to attack the units in the valley, the rest should be facing east waiting for more enemies to come charging in. Let the carnage begin.
Once the soldiers are no more, burn down the castle, schoolhouse and storehouse and the mission is over. Always remember your objective in each mission is the same; burn down all of these three buildings and kill all enemy soldiers. Generally you can ignore every other building (though inns are good strategic targets and guard towers tactical targets).
Anyway I won't bother going through the tutorials. I've never played them before, though I played the demo for hours on end before getting the real thing. Let's just get straight to the campaign. It's been so long since I've had a game that loads in less than a second, how quaint. Gotta get used to the 256 colour pallet again though. What happened to my cut scenes? I'm sure the game used to have them. Oh well, onwards!
