The player takes the role of the captain of the palace guards and leads the soldiers and citizens to victory.

The economy is complex, stemming from the game's variety of resources, ranging from wood and stone, to sausages and wine.

This creates a challenging dynamic for the player - between managing combat, resource gathering, city building, as well as making sure there is a stable food supply for all the units.

Apart from the purely fictitious geography of the world, all game elements and scenes are based on the European, but more particularly, the Anglo-Saxon period, around 1200 A.D.[1] The economy is very complex in Knights and Merchants: The Shattered Kingdom, more so than most other RTS games, with a greater range of resources and a need to combine basic resources in a number of ways to create a functioning economy.

The many different resources in the game require a large amount of corresponding buildings and units in order to fully utilize them.

Every citizen and soldier must eat in the game meaning that the player needs to produce a great deal of food creating a more naturalistic limit on army size.