Created by Firefly And published by Gathering Developer and Take2 Interactive At first sight you could believe that this is just another real-time strategy game with a Middle Ages theme. You construct your castle by building walls and towers, collect resources, build your base then recruit troops and set forth to seek and destroy everything that moves. Indeed it is a Middle Ages real-time strategy simulation, but its focus is much more on defence and careful construction than the usual run of the mill combat-heavy action of other similar games. Stronghold has two single-player campaigns, which, incidentally, are both available from the beginning. One centres on combat, defending and attacking castles with a good old-fashioned punch-up; the other is much more peaceful, concentrating on economic scenarios and resource management. The combat campaign is definitely the heart of the game. The plot concerns a fictitious civil war in 13th century England, between you and an alliance of four dukes nicknamed, aptly perhaps the Rat, the Snake, the Pig and the Wolf. These four are characterised well, nice little video and sound clips depicting their increasingly emotional responses to your armies marching through their kingdoms. The missions involve you entering a new area, and having to establish a castle and then defend it against waves of attacking troops. You choose a defensible location for your keep, identify useful food sources (wild animals for meat or green valleys to farm), locate the resources necessary for expansion (wood, initially, then in later levels, stone, iron and pitch), grow your population, and raise an army. A key attribute in this process is your popularity represented by a number between 100 and 0. This determines how fast new people come to your castle. These new people are the most important resource – without them, nothing gets done. They are potential soldiers, farmers, miners, blacksmiths, archers; the list goes on. If there are no additional people waiting by the keep for employment, then the shiny new swords have nobody to wield them. Popularity is affected by a great number of different factors. For example: simple things like tax rate or level of rations, complex things such as religion or random events like bandits appearing or a traveling fair coming to town. There are, of course lots of interdependencies just to make your life more interesting. When your treasury is empty, but your granary is full, increasing the level of rations and raising taxes will, hopefully, have equal but opposite effects and cancel each other out. Now, lets look at some of the main game features.   Castle Design How good an architect are you? Walls are simple. You build from stone or wood and connect together to form ramparts. Add battlements next to the plain walls as this gives your archers a place to fire from cover. Choose from a variety of different-sized towers and platforms for your archers, and even large one for catapults to be placed on top. Gatehouses come in wood or stone, and a variety of different sizes and of course you have moats and drawbridges around your fortress.   Castle Attack Missions This is all about the decisions you make. Is it best to send in a large force of infantry, to fill in the moat and smash down the walls? Should you hang back and allow your crossbowmen to pick off the defenders? Can you get to the wall base and use ladders to scale the wall? Do you use machinery like battering rams, catapults and wheeled platforms to help crack a strong castle? Alternatively if none of that works, send in miners to burrow under the walls or towers, destroying their foundations and making them collapse. At the various levels the game provides a large force of varied soldiers then leaves all these decisions up to you. Economic Missions These are generally simpler but there is often some combat. They focus on environmental hazards such as bandits rather than taking on a powerful enemy. Even so, they are just as involved as the combat missions. Tight time limits are used to impose tension and provide the challenge. Stockpiling weapons when your crops keep failing, or your castle keeps catching fire, those bandits keep on attacking you, certainly makes the going a little tough. Men running around with armfuls of logs is reminiscent of micromanagement in games like Age of Empires and Settlers, but there's no need to get involved in the management of resources beyond making sure there's enough coming in. If there is not, then the only thing to do is build more farms, or woodcutter's huts, or whatever it takes. Your villagers will not be standing around waiting for you to tell them what to do so a quick glance around the map, a check on the contents of your granary, armoury and stockpile, is all that's required to get "the big picture". In terms of combat, a well-built castle will, more-or-less, defend itself. This is definitely a good thing, because attacks come thick and fast, with just enough time to rebuild and reinforce defences in between waves. So while your troops and walls are keeping the enemy at bay you have just enough time to check your farms and behind-the scenes production since you cannot build defences when under attack.   So will Stronghold keep you amused over the long term? I think the response has to be yes. Its defensive focus and thoughtful construction are its main strengths. Its historical accuracy is broadly good and the campaigns are engaging, if a little easy at the beginning. There's a good selection of representative historical castles to play with. This is the kind of game, where when you look at the clock you find to your horror just how long you have been sat in front of the screen, or worse, whole weekends just vanish! You have been warned. Back to Table of Contents -- Lone Warrior # 143 Back to Lone Warrior List of Issues Back to MagWeb Magazine List © Copyright 2003 by Solo Wargamers Association. This article appears in MagWeb.com (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com