Knights and Craftsmen

Knights and Craftsmen is a kingdom-building game in which you lead loyal knights as a lord in a chaotic kingdom. You claim resources, produce goods, attract immigrants and expand your territory and city-state facilities. Trade between city-states brings in funds, while completing tasks earns prestige. From ocean ports, you can explore overseas, establish colonies and gain territory and resources as you build a powerful city-state.

Build your city-state

The kingdom has five regions, each with different areas, environments and raw materials. You compete with other forces for limited resources. Each region contains 5–10 places or cities; as cities grow, they produce more goods and gain greater purchasing power, but also expand their territory and occupy more land. Strongholds can be used to exchange important items.

The game starts with more than 10 kinds of raw materials and nine production workshops. These support a production system with more than 60 goods needed by residents and city-states. There are 64 research and investment options for managing production, improving urban facilities and strengthening knights.

Population growth and your influence raise a city’s level. Its level determines how many knights can serve, how many territories you can control and which item levels become available; higher-level cities have a wider range of goods. Production buildings have five levels, and upgrading them increases their production capacity.

Lead your knights

The game has 42 soldier types across seven factions, with four soldier levels. Soldiers can be promoted at a training ground belonging to their faction, and each has two possible promotion paths. Soldiers also gain combat bonuses from Soldier Proficiency and Faction Proficiency. Knights have Faction Proficiency by default for soldiers of their own faction, and can learn Soldier Proficiency through experience; the two bonuses stack.

Knights earn skill points by working and commanding battles, and can improve their abilities using city training facilities. Each knight can master one combat skill, using skill value accumulated when attacking or taking damage to activate it. Knights can obtain equipment blueprints through missions and forge equipment, or acquire dropped equipment by defeating hostile forces. Good equipment further improves a knight’s abilities.

Trade and overseas expansion

Ocean ports in the kingdom’s royal city area let you explore the sea, discover resource-rich islands and find profitable trade routes. You can reclaim and colonize islands to expand the population and sources of raw materials.

Create and share stories

You can redesign products, equipment, mission items and their corresponding workshops to create a new production system, as well as change each city’s trade needs. Five task modes let you build missions and add character dialogue to develop main and side stories: item exchange, clue continuation, battle, riddle and password, and place opening.

You can also edit indicators, soldier models, attack methods, promotion paths and factions to create custom combat units. The editing tools cover items, production, buildings, cities, mission locations, trade, missions, factions, armies and soldiers. Finished stories can be packaged as MOD files and shared with other players.