A truly amazing game. It is one of those games that will hold your attention for years to come.

I remember walking into a very old Poundland type of shop when I was younger, about a year or so after it was released in the early 2000's, and there it was, lying in a discount basket. We bought it for our almighty Windows 95/98 machine. It was one of the best games I had ever played, although I was very young, 6/7 years old, and not very good at it, but it was epic and still is today.

Betrayed by one of your own, you must set out to defeat the enemies of your land with those still loyal. Building villages, towns and cities, to defeat your enemies. This is no easy game. It requires time, patience, knowledge and did I mention, time?

Strategy is extremely important. You cannot mass produce the same troops, not unless you want destroyed by archers and militia. Speaking of armies, it is important that you keep a steady flow of resources, as your serfs are the most important people you can create. They take raw resources to buildings so that food and weapons can be created, to then be transferred to your castle or storehouse. Every character you can create serves importance, resources are limited and sometimes time is as well, as the enemy A.I. will attack and will be ruthless towards you the further into the game you get.

I must mention KaMRemake.com here, not because I've been asked to, but because of the work they have put into the Remake. Coded from scratch, as the original code was never released, Krom and Lewin have recreated this masterpiece, fixed bugs, allowed speed up buttons, a pause button and some new maps and a totally new and improved multiplayer! With the Remake you also get 3 new campaigns created by players, for players, that are very challenging and not for the feint-hearted which include dynamic scripting and many improvements over the original campaigns in terms of difficulty.

Download the Remake, you will not be disappointed - the steam release of the game is very unfriendly and barely functional, not to mention that it doesn't even have the original soundtrack.

Update regarding the KaM Remake:
If you want the definitive vanilla experience, download the r6720 version which includes extra campaigns and multiplayer.

If you want to experience new changes and experimental features:
Download the latest beta versions which contain changes to units (such as weaker archers as they were originally overpowered), further AI improvements, troop changes, QoL additions and more maps and campaigns.

If you are into strategic fighting and building games, you NEED to get this now!

Things that caused that I liked this game:

- Real presentation of the manufacturing and transporting process of goods (farm need land of soil -> soil is watered and seeded -> crops grow -> crops are cut and then transported to the mill -> mill makes flour which is transported to the bakery -> bakery makes bread)

- Great building process . Every stone and plank added to any building is carefully built piece by piece, and best part is you can SEE that happens. Buildings DO NOT just pop up from the ground, but they are built categorically.

Even today, there is no game in the world that presents that kind of reality in building and micromanagement of goods.

Knights and Merchants, or KaM to those of us that have played the game on and off for decades, is a fantastic and fun game in which you build and fight in a variety of lands. Each 'mission' has it's own goals, however they do tend to blend together and every new map seems to have the same goal. Battle missions, where there is no building, are quick, and you will find yourself on the losing end if you're not paying attention. First time players will see themselves restarting a battle mission a time or two.

KaM is an old game indeed, and this release on Steam finds you with the original, "The Shattered Kingdom" and the next release "The Pesants Rebellion" (both known to the community as TSK and TPR respectively. The Steam version also includes an "HD Version" which modifies the graphics a bit and the game speed. It also opens up all buildings starting at mision 1 which is not what the orginal game does.

If you are into strategy build sims then KaM is a game you will want on your list!

That said, if you buy this game from Steam or from GOG, I would recommend you play TSK and TPR missions 1-3 only. That will give you the fundamentals of the game and how it works. You'll also see several issues with the game and you may encounter a bug or two. Even with the bugs in the original game, it is worth playing, and worth your time. Why only the first 3 missions you may ask. Well, that's because as awesome as the game is, it gets better with the KaM Remake.

Once you see the game in all its original glory, you simply MUST go get the KaM Remake from www.kamremake.com to enjoy the game with today's computer capabilities.

The good folks over at KaM Remake have rebuild this awesome game from scratch and added some enhancements, such as better AI, a map editor and the ability for you not only to create your own maps, but make your own missions or even entire campaigns. They have truly taken a great game, and made it better using all the original game pieces such as the units, environments, and animations, and recreated the game code to support today's computing power and screen sizes. My personal favorite, is the ability to zoom in and out with the mouse wheel.

While the KaM Remake has removed two building types for game balance, they added the Marketplace, which was part of the original game but never implemented. The Marketplace adds a new factor to the game, allowing you to trade one type of resource for another. This opens up a TON of options for map, mission, and campaign creators.

Additionally, the KaM Remake is FREE. Yep, you heard me, FREE. However you must own KaM in order for the Remake to install and work. Details can be found at www.kamremake.com

Buy this game. Get the remake. You'll be glad you did.

It's going to be difficult to explain why I've played this game for a while. I started it up the first time completely confused as heck wondering why no one was listening to my commands and quickly stopped. Decided to give it another shot and am quite happy I did... as I ended up playing for four hours straight.

The AI is interesting to note on this one. Rather than telling peasants (or serfs as their called) or builders (laborers) to do exactly what to do - you are a planner and the serfs and laborers do your bidding automatically. Yes, that means that serfs and what not micro manage themselves. It can be a bit of an issue as I've noticed building 3 or more buildings sometimes can halt production, none the less though once this is addressed there shouldn't be issues. Roads need to be built to interconnect the city as well as allow serfs to travel to the job site to drop off materials for the building to be built. Laborers and serfs work closely together to accomplish the building - serfs mostly look after distribution of resources. There are A LOT - of different resources which get stored at a supply house. Bows, swords, shields, flour, corn are just the beginning of what is stored.

There are different types of units military wise but the civilian crowd delivers stability to your village. Bakers can be trained, animal trainers, farmers, carpenters, wood cutters, miners etc... It can get quite crazy and overbearing at times early on in the campaign to see how much can be done with the diversity of the units.

Battling is interesting and is as cool as an old style RTS can get. What is neat though which I wish other games would follow is when holding down the right mouse button, you can actually choose 360 degrees which way your troops should face. When you select a band of your troops, you are able to link up units with other units (conjoin groups) and are able to unite a bunch of units under one banner. Be it under one banner or not, you are able to rotate and position in HOW MANY lines the troops are allowed to be in. This really helps keeping a long line of infantry while keeping a band of arrows behind the infantry line.

I got this game extremely cheap on sale and figured why not? Somehow for some reason, I like this game. Some of the in game perks as which way the soldier should face I found absolutely brilliant even though simple. I found myself mesmerized watching the AI serfs and laborers do my bidding and build.

Is this game for everyone? Not really - you may get sucked into it like I did or you may think this is some stupid old game that should stay buried. I will recommend it as someone who is consistently looking for action in games, found myself happy with the eventual build of my village.



RATING : 7.4/10







Soldiers need to be fed as you can see on the right (condition) while a button needs to exist to give peasants crap for standing around and pretending to not look busy

Knights and Merchants! So many childhood memories I have of this game. I remember playing this years ago and sucking horrible at it because I was too young to be any good in strategy games but now im older and somewhat better at strategy games, spent over a 100 hours in this game because its so addicting and time consuming :)

Upon purchasing and playing this game, the game kept crashing and crashing for me when using windows 7. Luckily fans made a HD remake mod for this game and I can play at without any problems, even though the remake version isnt 100% complete yet and it need some tweaking here and there. But thanks to that mod I had so much fun playing this game and the new custom maps that came with it.

I defenitely recommend this to play if you like strategy games and have ALOT of time at your hands :)

Back in 1998 I spent a lot of hours playing this marvelous game. The city-building part is fun and easy, but battles are even more fun and, despite game's simplistic looks, challenging (at least sometimes). It's hard to recommend this 15 years old game with something like "Settlers 7" released, but it still could deliver a lot of fun if you don't mind outdated graphics.

I bought this game for my father since he used to play back in the days.
He worked as a baker before he got unimployed. All he did was play Knights and Merchants.
Now he is unimployed and whenever I see him, he is still playing this...
I've tried making him play many other games, yet he always comes back to this... On the same day.
It has been many months since then, and he still plays it.
Nothing but Knights and Merchants.
He doesn't seem to know how to save a game. He always restarts and enjoys it alot.
I told him to play this on offline mode though, otherwise I can't play my games on steam.
However, it is not exaggerated if I say he played atleast 1000 hours. If not more.

My father is 55. Only plays Knights and Merchants.

This game brings back such memories.. Ah..
Anyway, nostalgia trip over, here's my views on this game.

Pro's and benefits:
This game has an indepth resource management system. Seriously, it's way better than anything to date. Your army can drain your economy rapidly depending on how big it is, so fielding smaller armies can be mutually better, if it may take longer to defeat your enemy.
Strategy is actually required for this game. No really, it's not a case of throwing a large army of 50 spear holders against a small force of 10 swordsmen with some archers behind, because that'll just get you murdered and that's a whole bunch of gold and resources gone. It's better to have small squads of 6, 9 and 12 with occasional 16 squads appearing now and then.
The nostalgic feel of this game is incredible! This game was made a good 10 years ago at the very least, maybe even earlier. Because it was made earlier and during the time that game developers actually had the balls to step outside the box and try something now, it created this game as well as many others.

The Cons/painful stuff:
Crash crash crash landings. This game SUCKS with the amount of crashes you can get. Seriously, there's an amazing amount of things you can do, and half of them will make you crash to desktop faster than the speed of light. (Note: this can be remedied via downloading the remake version on modDB. No free game for you though, you have to own the game to get access to the remake. Nice little touch of coding on the dev's part)
Time. THIS TAKES FOREVER!!! No really, you can be there for a good few hours figuring out one single mission. It can get really frustrating and at times I need to quit and relax my mind before I blow a brain tumor.

Final score:
I give this game a 4/5.
I'm giving it this score because considering everything that's great about this game, the crashes and amount of time it takes, as well as the sheer amount of difficulty some missions can have will result in rages and you not touching the game for a full week. However considering everything else about the game, it's really fun to play.

Notice: With the remake edition, multiplayer is available as well as a few other options, not to mention the crashes are at a minimum and you can increase time to X10 so waiting on your ass no longer becomes such a dull practice. Use the remake version if you want a better game in general. (again, you must own the game before you can use anything in the remake, and even then the remake isn't complete even today, so expect a few issues)

This is and was my favourite childhood game. I don't know how many hours, or months, I used to spent playing this game.
A very simplistic, yet fascinating and lovely designed strategy game from the year 1998.

This is how games should be.
10/10

If you want something that works well with some minor improvements and better graphics you should visit "kamremake dot com" and get the remade version from there. I can recommend to get an even better playing experience.

Finally The game is out on steam, Knights and Merchants is a typical Strategy game Based on the feudal system in the middle ages or what we call as Feudalism, What made Knights and Merchants Stand out back then that its even alive today is that game has a strange charm about it, It has no epic story or huge cinematics but its rather simple and great implementation of the feudal system , If you have played settlers this is no strange game then, its very similar to it .

What i like about Knights and merchants is that game is well paced and restricted unlike the other games like age of empires where you can build up very quickly and rush others, KAM lays down a Strong System where you need to have specifc Buildings to progress to the next one , so Unless you have a strong economy setup , there is no way to build up a army Fast and rush, It retains that cumbersome slow system Feudalism was. You can Focus on the city Builiding and then make units.
It even has a feeding system where you have to feed everyone in your base constantly so , planning is very important , without the right balance people will go hungry and die eventually.
Everything is simple and Influences your game in a way.
Its a very unique old game , unless you master that starting tutorial the game will be impossible to play easily.
There are a lot of fan based Re-makes and fixes but i recommend playing the game as it is, Its a great challenge that way, specially For those not interested in multiplayer.

Do Remember to save a lot , The game tends to crash after a long stretch of gaming or music changes