It came out for the PC a couple years back. My friend bought it on clearance and forgot about it for a while, until last night when we were sitting at his apartment bored out of our skulls trying to find a multiplayer PC game we haven’t gotten bored to death on already.
The game is a blast! Its like a mix between Caesar III, Lords of the Realm, and Simcity. Its fun because you get both the exciting aspect of castle seiges/medieval warfare, and also managing a ‘city’. It was also playing against each other, since we were both hopelessly clueless, we each had populations of starving, pissed-pissed off peasants.
I dont think there are revolts in the game, but there are ‘good’ buildings and ‘bad’ buildings. Good buildings are things like maypoles and gardens that are supposed to make people happy . But the ‘bad’ buildings were my favorite, stuff like gallows and heads on spikes, to scare your population into submission. There is also religion as an aspect in the game, but neither of us were really able to invest in any of those buildings (we had a hard enough time just keeping our populations fed).
The game was kind of frustrating at first, because as you build up your village, people come in and offer additional manpower to expand. However, this causes the population to explode, which gobbles up all your food. When the food runs out, people get pissed and leave :mad: Going from farm-dinner plate is a little more involved than other games we’ve played, where you JUST had to build a farm/granary/whatever. Everything in this game is rather involved and requires a chain of buildings, so getting stable supplies of resources/food can be challenging if there are any bottlenecks in the production.
I guess the funniest thing about this game is that since space is a premium INSIDE the castle, many of the bulkier structures (farms) are easier to have outside the walls. When we attacked each other, we often simply just raided each other’s resource gathering buildings rather than bother attacking the castle itself, since it is so easy to hole up in a relatively flimsy castle. I tried building seige engines, but they can’t outrange defensive seige engines (mangonels and ballistas on towers) which makes it really hard to damage an enemy castle without sending in hordes and hordes of guys. I look forward to playing the game with my friend again; hopefully we can make a map so that each other’s castle is far away creating an opportunity for each of us to build up enough forces to threaten the other guy’s castle.
I played it and loved all of the mechanics of play, with maybe the exception of really bad AI. Attacking soldiers automatically head for breaches in your walls, so if you intentionally leave a breach, and build a long, winding corridor leading into it, and then station archers along the tops of the walls of that corridor, you will cut down all attackers every time. If that corridor is a single square wide, you can also fill it with the stake/pitfall traps, ensuring mass slaughter. But beyond that, the construction and resource management elements were excellent.
The campaign, though, sucked, as there were too many scenarios that called for a specific solution. If you couldn’t conceive of the same solution that the scenario’s designers came up with, you were gonna have a hell of a time moving on. Playing with your friend, though, should eliminate that problem.
There was a sequel, but I never tried it, having gotten fed up with the campaign problem noted above.
I’m glad I got started on this game in vs mode with a human player- the AI issues may have turned me off.
Only complaint I have about multiplayer is the 2-player maps are too small! I wish there was a HUGE 2 player map, so each side has time to build up before the other guy attacks. The way the maps are, its easy to build a wall towards your opponent, then start making towers and Mangonels on em and harass the hell out of the other castle.
Oh, and also, I really wish the game had Fog of War. Its rather easy to see what my opponent is up to- if he made swordsmen/knights, then I would pump out crossbowmen, etc.
Its great using burning arrows to set off tar traps. One well placed burning arrow, and the whole enemy army gets barbecued . Also, the war dogs are fun- I loved shouting, “release the hounds!” then sending a bunch of dogs after my friend’s guys.
Huh. I played it one night for several hours and thought it bit. It was like a heavily-tweaked child of Sim City and Age of Empires - with the drawbacks of both.
I own both Stronghold and Stronghold: Crusader and think both are very good games. Crusader is more playable because it allows you to set up custom battles against a variety of computer opponents. Feeding your people is rather minor as all you need is one or two wheat farms, a mill and about 6 bakeries.
Crusader also has two different campaigns compared to the one campaign in Stronghold. The Stronghold campaign can be very frustrating, especially attacking the Pig’s castles but there are solutions to it, they just take a long time to work.
I didn’t have any trouble with the campaign. I haven’t played the game multi-player yet. I just played the campaign through and it’s been collecting dust ever since.
I also played most of the re-created famous castles that are available for vs computer play. They are rather silly. They are all heavily one sided battles one way or the other. In some of them you can easily win on defense without loosing a single man, even with the settings at maximum difficulty. When you try playing offense you get slaughtered even when playing on least difficulty.
I don’t remember multi-play even being an option. I’ll have to look back into it.
BTW, you need to build churches or your people will never be happy. It’s a lot of fun figuring out all of the things your people need. However, once you get it straight, it’s a simple matter to keep them fed and content. It’s just a matter of getting the ratios of all the stuff they need right.
I never build churches because I find them to be a waste of space and gold. The best combination I’ve found is one Hops farm, two breweries and an inn. That gives you +8 happiness. Add an additional inn each time the bonus drops below 8. This allows you to jack up the taxes with no negative effects.
Note that the downside to happiness and ale-related structures is that production suffers. With several Inns, many of your people are staggering around drunk instead of working :mad: Although at +8 happiness, you dont even have to feed them at all! O_o (the +8 happiness cancels out the -8 happiness for having no food)
What I found I enjoy doing is creating a castle full of paranoid religious nutballs. I build 9 Bad Things, then lots and lots of churches to offset the Fear Factor. I can thus get the people working 30% faster. Instead of taxing them, I use a market to sell off surplus resources/weapons. Religion is the only happiness boosting structure which doesn’t take away from productivity, and doesn’t need any alternate resource (like hops).
Using Good Things/ale is only really useful if you have problems with food supply, or want to tax the bejeesus out of your people.
I’ve never really thought about the drunks. Since I always maintain a minimum of 10 people standing around the fire in case I need to recruit troops, I’ve never looked into if I’m losing workers because they are drunk. The problem with fear factor is your troops are less effective in battle. If you max out fear factor or good things, it can swing battle effectiveness +/- 50%.
Most of my games come down to stone construction by building as many stone quarrys as possibly and selling the stone for profit. All profits are then plowed into engineers and mercenaries. My favorite tactic is to produce about 50 catapults and completely wipe out enemy castles.
. But the ‘bad’ buildings were my favorite, stuff like gallows and heads on spikes, to scare your population into submission. There is also religion as an aspect in the game, but neither of us were really able to invest in any of those buildings (we had a hard enough time just keeping our populations fed).
. Also, the war dogs are fun- I loved shouting, “release the hounds!” then sending a bunch of dogs after my friend’s guys.