Knights Of Honor

Green, Hall receive 2011 Knights' Blue Shield awards

The Ocean City Knights of Columbus Council No. 2560 recently presented its 33rd annual Blue Shield Award for 2011 to Captain Gary Green of the Ocean City Fire Department and Sergeant David Hall of the Ocean City Police Department for outstanding performance of duty and service to the community. Each year the Knights honor outstanding members of the departments, who are chosen by their respective chiefs. Pictured (left to right) are Fire Department Deputy Chief Charles Bowman, Green, Hall, and Chief of Police Chad Callahan. A reception followed the awards presentation with many family members and friends of both recipients, and members and guests of Council No. 2560.

Espionage, Knights of Honor Style

Espionage, Knights of Honor Style

Espionage. It’s one of the hardest concepts for any simulation or game to emulate. After all, how do you recreate something so subtle and ineffably “human”? It’s all about the art of manipulation, deception and suspicion. Countless games have incorporated espionage into their design and almost all of them have either seemed flaccid or trivial. It’s always an add-on, an optional tactic and an occasional annoyance.

Games like Civilization IV and the Total War series have always thought of spies as physical units that skulk around the overland map, until finally, you decide to employ them in harassing your enemy. From this perspective, they may as well be guided missiles, something that you fling at your enemy when you don’t have spare army around to simply crush them instead.

But that isn’t at all what spy craft is about. It’s really about working your way into your enemy’s trust, going native, gaining access, like an undercover cop on a sting operation. While real life espionage is almost entirely about information gathering, a game has to be a bit more exciting than that, assassinating leaders and causing “random accidents” to happen. Shockingly, through a random boredom-purchase of an older game called Knights of Honor, I found the best in-game espionage system I’ve ever seen.

Knights of Honor is played almost entirely on the overland map. It doesn’t have the graphical power to compete with Medieval 2: Total War, thus while there are real time battles that you can fight, that’s not where the main focus lies. Unlike Medieval 2, however, there is a fairly robust Civilization-style city building and resource acquiring system. And to make all the gears of your national machine work, there is the nobility.

Nobles can either be your royal family (king and princes) or just people you hire. Either way, you assign them tasks, such as merchant, general, priest, landlord…basically anything that your kingdom needs help with. The best part about this system, and the reason why it works so well with spies, is that every nation absolutely needs a full roster of working nobles to succeed. Your economy comes to depend on your merchants as a backbone, a good priest is required to convert unruly provinces to the “one true faith” and you can’t even recruit soldiers without a general stationed in town. Now, enter the spy.

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