The Charm of Knights and Merchants
Every now and then, a nostalgic itch beckons me back to the cherished pastime of my youth: playing those beloved games from days gone by.
In the realm of gaming nostalgia, there’s a treasure trove of titles that we fondly remember from our past. Yet, upon revisiting them, the experience often falls short of our nostalgic expectations.
It’s a bittersweet journey, where the games of our youth may not quite live up to the rosy memories we’ve held onto for so long.
However, Knights and Merchants defies this trend. It stands out as a medieval strategy game crafted with precision, designed to rival the likes of The Settlers.
Within the realm of Knights and Merchants, you assume the pivotal role of leading a village of humble peasants. Your primary objective? To thwart the ambitions of the formidable baron who seeks to seize your lands. Yet, your journey doesn’t end there; you must also set forth to conquer the very lands the baron once held dominion over.
To do this, you will need to build up your village, raise armies, and march towards them. However, this is not just a simple standard real-time strategy game as you are used to.
The economy plays a pivotal role in Knights and Merchants, underscoring its significance and adding layers of complexity to the gameplay.
For example, if you would like to have some archers in your army, you will need to prepare several things.
Archers are equipped with a bow, leather jacket, and of course, you will need someone who will take these equipment on them.
To craft bows, you will need wooden planks. To get wooden planks, you will need to get wood from trees. Trees are limited, so you will need a forester to grow them back.
So, for a sustainable production of bows, you’ll find yourself requiring the operation of at least three distinct buildings.
The leather jacket is the second part of the archers’ equipment, as you will need cured leather for them, and leather itself is taken from pigs you can grow. And the pigs will eat grain which is grown on farms.
So again, for jackets, you will need another three different buildings.
Lastly, you need to assign some peasant to become a conscript, and this is done in school, and school to produce such specialists requires gold.
Luckily, you will not need to produce gold from the start as it is once again a bit complicated process, but in later phases, you will not dodge it.
Next to the archers, you can have arbalests, men with axes and shields, and even knights on horses. So, you can imagine that your economy needs to be really complex to sustain all of these.
Every single product needs to be also delivered between these buildings, so you need to build clever production chains, otherwise, everything will be too slow.
And I haven’t even spoken about the fact that all your people need to eat regularly. Your peasants who do delivery jobs and who work in specialized buildings will simply go to the tavern (which needs to be supplied with foods like cheap wine, bread, or sausages), but your armed forces need to be fed directly in the field, so someone needs to bring the food for them.
The armed conflicts are fun but sometimes a bit tedious. In Knights and Merchants, the rock-paper-scissors rule is applied — I mean one unit is good in fighting another unit but is weak against another one.
For example, archers are good against infantry but weak against horsemen. Horsemen are good against archers but bad against pikemen and so on.
What I love about this game is the graphics style and the original soundtrack. Unfortunately, the true original one was already replaced with a bit different songs — and it is just not it. It was most probably due to some rights or something; I have not done any research on why that happened. There is a way to get the old one though.
The graphics are really nice, handcrafted with all the little details. You can watch your workers mash wine with their feet in big barrels, observe the blacksmith work on the swords, or follow all the peasants in their travels while transporting goods.
Knights and Merchants is one of my favorite games from my childhood, and since it is still really good and well playable even today, I can only recommend you to try it.
You can get it for just a couple of bucks, but it can provide hours and hours of fun.
So, here we go, brave axemen and fierce knights, to battle for honor and more wine!
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