Why are knights so UTTERLY worthless?

[Arcane Azmadi]

Knights as implemented are simply abysmal, nothing more than a liability. They have exactly ONE use, and that's that you need to have them to be able to launch an attack on a portal (where most of the work is, as always, done by archers anyway). Other than that, they do more harm than good. They're HORRIBLY expensive to train, automatically convert a portion of any hunters near them into bowmen (basically hunters that refuse to hunt anything; apparently shooting animals is beneath them now or something) which does even MORE damage to your economy, and they refuse to fight! They CONSTANTLY fall back from a wall that's under attack before it even goes down, taking their bowmen with them and turning a defensible position into an indefensible one (and costing you even more money when the catapult tries and fails to defend the wall on its own) and you simply CANNOT make them turn and fight! Apparently you can pay them more money to increase their HP, but for the life of me I have NO idea why on earth you'd want to do that, as you'd simply be throwing bad money after good! I'm only on the second island already and I'm completely stuffed because my hunter AI has completely screwed itself with 90% of my hunters going to EAST border of my kingdom (AFTER I've destroyed the portal there) while the WEST side is constantly being overrun every night because I tried to rely on getting some knights only for them to make like Brave Sir Robin and run away every night, taking the 10% of archers I have who aren't sitting around on the East front picking their noses with them!

Seriously, what gives? Why would you implement an expensive elite melee combat unit in the game that runs away when faced with the prospect of battle?

[mruuh]

Knights are useful for two things, and two things only:
1. Portal attacks - even though the archers do all the portal damage, they wouldn't be able to do so without a protection from the spawned greeds which knight provides
2. Protection during a hasty fallback - when knight and his entourage are retreating from a crumbling wall, the knight usually runs last, and I've seen him block and kill a greed or two, as they tried to lunge at the fleeing archers. Sometimes the knight lost a coin doing that, often not.

I would say knights are far from useless, you just have to know how they behave, and prioritize spending money on them accordingly - only train one when you have enough free hunters on that side, so that your bunny-holocaust can continue after some hunters are recruited by the knight, give two or three coins before a portal attack.

Edited: typos

[Silvi the Bun]

I dont think knights are particularly great, rather they are necessary if you have any portal you haev to destroy.
The only way to make them useful is to pay for the knight shrine since then they attack through the wall and suddenly become the best thing since sliced bread.

[Elastic Art]

The knights are:

1) The means through which you destroy the portals (and thus push the game to completion)
2) The means to reserve some of your archers for defending a specific side of your base (if you know this is happening you can plan around it)

Be sure you feed them gold before they do anything -- 5 to 7 gold...I forget the exact number. It buffs their defenses so they can take more hits. They're a lot more useful then.

[Arcane Azmadi]

Originally posted by Bernie Sandking:

The knights are:

1) The means through which you destroy the portals (and thus push the game to completion)
2) The means to reserve some of your archers for defending a specific side of your base (if you know this is happening you can plan around it)

Be sure you feed them gold before they do anything -- 5 to 7 gold...I forget the exact number. It buffs their defenses so they can take more hits. They're a lot more useful then.

HOW can they be any use whatsoever for defending your base when they RUN AWAY at the first hint that your wall MIGHT fall?

[5 AM]

Because, the wall usually won’t fall regardless of where you’re knights are. Unless you’re majority of defenders are knights, in which case you either aren’t recruiting enough people, or you’re getting knights too early. Knights only count 8 archers on each side, 4 per knight, but by the time you get a knight, you should have way more than 8 archers on each side. Otherwise you need to take another look at your recruiting strategy.