Unfortunately, in Stronghold 3’s case, that means “sort of works like you’d hope but is nonetheless a massive disappointment.” Setting up traps like log drops and creating kill zones where enemy troops will get funneled into overlapping fields of archer fire is undeniably cool. Hand crafting your perfect castle should be the game’s highlight, and it is. This means every town looks more or less the same, as there is only one “right” way to build. Everything goes through the stockpile (of which you can only build one), so your miners have to deliver their iron to a central location where your smiths can pick it up instead of sending it directly.
STRONGHOLD GAME TRIAL
How many planks is a wood camp producing per day? Is something slowing down the progression of wheat to flour to bread? Who knows? Pursuing efficiency – the primary goal of most economic sims – is a matter of trial and error. Yet you can’t see how your production chains are getting along other than manually checking your stockpiles of various resources. Setting up your economy is simple to the point of absurdity buildings take no time to construct and peasants automatically work any open slots. Whether it’s the shallow, yet hard-to-manage economy or the fabulously broken pathfinding, the only difference between the systems is how poorly designed, infuriating, or merely boring they are. No matter which aspect of gameplay you look at, problems crop up in its implementation. Depending on the scenario, you might be dealing with anything from collecting a set number of resources to hungry wolves in the forest or invading armies. Once your economy is established, those resources can be turned into a variety of weapons to equip your armies and fortifications for them to defend in RTS combat. as they harvest and process resources like wheat, wood, stone, and iron. Then you keep them happy and fed by setting taxes, rations, etc. First you set down buildings for your peasants to work. Stronghold 3’s basic gameplay loop is intuitive and simple. An economic city-building simulation feeding into freeform castle design and real-time medieval combat? Yes, please! I like what developer Firefly tried to do with Stronghold 3, but the utterly incompetent execution is a disaster. The worst part of my job is writing a scathing review of a game I was looking forward to.