Knights and Merchants
Moderate overall intensityWhat's in it
The player builds a winery that produces wine as an economy resource, and citizens consume it as food on screen; no other alcohol, tobacco or drugs appear.
The player commands soldiers who fight enemy troops with medieval weapons and die as small on-screen sprites; no blood, wounds or gore are depicted.
War and the deaths of soldiers and starving citizens sit in the setting of a medieval campaign, but are conveyed through unit sprites rather than shown in detail.
Pigs are raised on a swine farm and processed into sausages at a butcher's as ordinary food production; no graphic butchery is shown.
Who can reach your kid
What it is
Knights and Merchants is a medieval real-time strategy game in which you act as a captain of the palace guard, building and running a small settlement and raising an army in a fictional world modelled on Anglo-Saxon Europe around 1200 A.D. Most of the game is deep economic management: chaining resources such as wood, stone, wheat, flour, bread, wine and sausages through many interconnected buildings, feeding every worker and soldier so they do not starve. The other half is warfare — training soldiers and sending them to fight enemy troops in single-player campaign missions or multiplayer skirmishes. Combat and death are present but abstract, rendered in dated sprite graphics with no blood or gore, and the game deliberately avoids fantasy creatures and magic. There is no profanity, sexual content or purchasable items.
How it's framed
The game frames conflict as impersonal medieval statecraft and logistics — the challenge is keeping citizens fed and the economy flowing while your forces clash with an enemy army. Violence is a strategic act carried out by commanded units rather than something the player performs up close, and no reward is attached to harming non-combatants.
Details
- Developer
- Topware Interactive
- Publisher
- Topware Interactive
- Released
- Oct 14, 2013
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