When I first started playing this game, my first reaction was “Wow! It’s like Warcraft or Warcraft II on steroids!” If you’ve ever played one of the original Warcraft real time strategy (RTS) games, you would probably have the same opinion.
If you need more food for you peasants in Warcraft, you just build a farm. In Stronghold, you can build a Hunter’s Post to get meat like deer or pheasant, a Dairy Farm to get cheese, an Apple Orchard to get apples (of course) and a Wheat Farm. Of course, your peasants can’t just eat wheat, so you also need to build a Mill to grind the wheat into flour and then build some Bakeries to make bread out of the flour. In other words, you have a more complex economy in Stronghold and that’s just one little example.
I know it may be hard to believe, but I never play any of the SIMM City games. I do know enough about them to be able to make a comparison of one aspect of the games. In Stronghold, one of your jobs is to make sure you keep your people happy which, as I understand it, is one of your main goals in SIM City. You can adjust the taxes that your peasants have to pay, the amount of food you distribute to them, whether they have ale to drink and be merry with and how much concern you have over their spiritual lives by the placement of chchapels, churches or cathedrals.
Because you are in a setting of medieval times around 1100 AD or so, you also have to be concerned with your neighbors waging war against you. In addition to the economy of feeding your people and also the gaining of building supplies such as wood and stone, you also have another set of economic tools for supporting a military. You have Pole Turner Shops to take wood and make spears and halberds, Fletcher Shops to take wood and make bows and crossbows, Blacksmiths that use iron to make maces and swords, Tanners who take unsuspecting cows from a nearby Dairy Farm to make leather armor from their skins and Armorers to take iron to make metal armor.
Provided you have a nice pool of unemployed peasants waiting to be trained, weapons and armor in you armory and the gold to do the training, you can crank out various troop types in your barracks which include spearman, archers, mace men, pike men, crossbow men, swordsmen and knights. Oh, yes, you need to have stables with available horses in order to train knights—your only mounted troops.
Your troops can be used for defending you castle and also attacking your enemies. In addition to them, you can also train siege engineers who can build all kinds of very useful equipment—Ladders for scaling enemy walls, portable shields to aid in moving troops in closer to the enemies’ walls under fire from archers on the battlements, battering rams and catapults for crashing down gatehouses, walls and towers and trebuchet for launching rocks over the walls at strategic enemy buildings or launching diseased cow carcass to weaken the enemy’s resolve.
n addition to having an economic campaign and a military campaign to play through, you could also build your own missions with a very nice map editor and scenario builder. I was very impressed with the ability to create your own maps and scenarios. If you’re interested in the strategy castle building and how it will stand up to enemies, it was very nice to be able to experiment with castle designs where you can just build with no time constraints and without enemies attacking you and then let loose on your castle with a defined number of enemy troops for a scenario you can somewhat control. I really enjoyed this game! So much that I didn’t waste a lot of time waiting to buy a couple of its successor games whenever I realized they had been released.
The graphics do only allow four directions of view on your buildings with a fifth view option than collapses everything to a top view which is often handy for making sure you’ve actually got a solid wall with no gaps in it. Unlike Warcraft where your resources are wood, stone and gold, your resources are wood, stone and iron and the only way to get gold is by selling items in your market or taxing your people. You landscape is also a lot more rich and “less flat” as you can have relatively complex hills and slopes in the terrain which affect where you can build things and the movements of your people. The AI of the peasants and soldiers isn’t perfect by any means, but it really isn’t too bad. You don’t have to micromange your economy once you’ve got it going except for when your stockpile, grainery or armory becomes too full of items to place more into them. That was probably the only annoyance near the end of the game play when you’re focused on destroying an enemy castle on a different part of the map and you hear your squire begin telling you over and over that something is full.
Stronghold is an excellent game, surpassed only by its later successors!
