For over 20 years now, the Stronghold series has consolidated itself in an interesting place somewhere between city builder and more traditional real-time strategy. Stronghold fighters continue this tradition with new flavors as it takes them to the battlefields of ancient and medieval East Asia, for the first time in the series. But as RTS, it seems like it is still living in the dust of the past. And city building, while it can be an interesting and almost Zen little puzzle, often conflicts with the goal of directly conquering your enemies.
The biggest, often refreshing difference between a stronghold game and, say, a craft craft or a starcraft is how it forces you to think about space. You’re turning an open plot of land into an impressive, rich-walled city … without letting anyone believe it comes to land first. And it’s not just the availability of natural resources that you need to worry about. Decisions such as keeping your main stockpile close to resource mobilization areas can have a big impact on the efficiency of your economy, and keeping your people happy later will depend in part on how many of your buildings are within the radius of the temples. To build your defenses to maximize the benefits of your home area, on top of that, you really have to portray how everything fits together. It does a good job of scratching that the Tetris-Y itching comes and pays off with long-term planning.
That’s true of the series as a whole, but Warlord has added a new wrinkle in which you can choose whether or not to keep your people in line by love or fear. A building chain will allow you to build torture racks and other inadvisable symbols of tyranny, which make your workers work faster, but disappoint your army and reduce your popularity. Gives comfort to other animals that inspire soldiers and will make you a favorite in the hearts of ordinary people, but reduces their resource production as they spend more time playing darts or anything they don’t resource. I enjoyed the stress I created because I could see how much productivity I could squeeze out of my people and prevent each new g hold from feeling like the last iteration.
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It is important to have at least some degree of positive happiness because that is the only way your population will grow, and raising taxes to afford high-end units is only possible if you can pay something more in return, such as more rice rations or fancy new silk. Duds. This will give your cities a traditional RTS. Like it seems a little more than a collection of farmers destroying gold in piles to fund your army. But once it reaches the military move, it boils down to all this.
Fighting is best in Stronghold Worlds during the siege, whether you are attacking or defending. All the modular pieces you can build your walls and towers, allowing some interesting and clever set-ups to maximize your advantage against large forces, especially if you have a couple of things about how real castles are built in this era If you know. And figuring out how to capture the enemy’s guts, exploring weak spots, and carefully choosing your opportunities can also be fascinating. The battles of the field are not so interesting, though.
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There is a large gap in the speed of movement between the lower-level Scurmishers and the Tank Imperial troops that you can get later in the Tech Tree, allowing the savvy commander to get rid of the more powerful army and win the day. But overall, these battles are very old-school age in their pacing and scale of the Empire. It’s not terrible, compared to recent RTS like the Northguard or Total War it seems to be a time behind time. And art doesn’t help. While the elegant keeps and shiny pagodas are detailed and sleek, the models of this low polygon, flat-looking unit can go beyond something like the Heroes of the original company that came out about 15 years ago. Six-hour-long single-player campaigns, taking you to a different time and place in history, just feel like separate groups because most missions limit what you can create. In multiplayer and skirmish vs, on the other hand, the difference is lost: the unit rosters are not the same for every army, your royal swordsman always speaks Chinese even if you play as a Vietnamese. Genghis Khan could easily hire ninja and samurai units to get his rivals, the shogun, the Mongol horse archers. There is little visual variation in the architecture, but overall, it is a strange homogeneous abstraction of a whole cent that extends over the whole continent and a thousand years of history.
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Some of the voice acting is definitely even very ifif. The main advisory character in the campaign, in particular, sounds like a really cartoonish, potentially offensive stereotype of a vocal Chinese bureaucrat. It is somewhat similar to the exaggerated and playful illustrations of historical figures, but the series, when applied to a non-European character, is not difficult to win at any time when it opens its mouth. Leaders don’t feel like the least consonant when exaggerating themselves.At least the mission objectives are well diversified and agree on some interesting historical battles. They certainly play fast and loose with history, but keep it interesting by alternating between more traditional base building, a few that you are trying to bring down the castle with a stationary army and not the ability to replenish the troops, and some that completely The focus is on boosting your economy while defending the castle. Those last ones are the most fun, especially when militarily or diplomatically connected to a system of arranging AI fighters on each map to give you various bonuses. It makes me wish there was some sort of lump or potential multiplayer mode, which could take the hard part of the fighters and make it playable indefinitely.
