The Stronghold range has established itself for 20 years in an interesting place between an urban builder and a more traditional real-time strategy. Stronghold Warlords continues this tradition with a new flavor, as it takes us for the first time in the series to the battlefields of ancient and medieval East Asia. But as an RTS, it feels like it’s still living in the mists of the past. And while the city building can be an interesting and almost Zen small puzzle, it often feels contrary to the goal of conquering your enemies straight.
The biggest, often refreshing difference between a Stronghold game and, for example, Warcraft or StarCraft, is the way it encourages you to think about space. You’re going to turn an open piece of land into an impressive, prosperous walled city … assuming no one even flattens it. And it’s not just the availability of natural resources that you need to worry about. Decisions such as placing your main inventory near the collection of resources can have a huge 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 temples. You have to really try to imagine how everything will fit together, in addition to expanding your defense to maximize your home field advantage. It does a great job of scratching the Tetris-y itch and making long-term planning a success.
This was true of the series as a whole, but Warlords has added a new wrinkle by allowing you to choose whether to keep people in line through love or fear. With one building chain, you can build torture racks and other subtle symbols of oppression, which will make your workers work faster, but demoralize your armies and reduce your popularity. The others offer creature facilities that will inspire the troops and love you in the hearts of the common people, but also reduce their resource production because they spend too much time playing lawns or whatever. I enjoyed the tension it created because I could see how much productivity I could squeeze out of my people and also refrain from making each new fortress feel like a repeat of the last.
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Keeping happiness at least somewhat positive is important because it is the only way your population will grow, and raising taxes to afford higher units is only possible if you give something back, such as more rice rations or new new ones. sysoppies. It helps your cities feel more than just a collection of farmers throwing gold into a pile to fund your armies like in a traditional RTS. But once the armies are on the move, it comes down to everything.
Combat in Stronghold Warlords is at its best during siege, whether you attack or defend. All the modular pieces from which you can build your walls and towers offer interesting and clever setups to increase your benefits at a greater power, especially if you know a thing or two about how real castles were designed in these periods. And it can also be exciting to find out how to take on a hostile fortress, search for weak spots and choose your opportunities carefully. Field battles, however, are just not that interesting.
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There is a huge gap in speed of movement between skirmishes of lower levels and the stuffy imperial troops that you can find later in the technology boom, enabling a clever commander to execute a more powerful army and win the day. But overall, these battles are very old-school Age of Empires in their pace and scope. It’s not terrible, it just feels a lot behind the times compared to more recent RTSs like Northgard or Total War. And the art does not help. Although the large blows and shiny pagodas are detailed and attractive, these low polygonal, flat-looking unit models can be overshadowed by something like the original Company of Heroes, which came out almost 15 years ago. Each of the six single-player campaigns, which are about six to ten hours long, takes you to a different time and place in history. It just looks like different factions, because most missions limit what you can build. In multiplayer and skirmish vs AI, on the other hand, the distinction is lost: not only are the unit grids identical for each army, but your Imperial Swordsmen will always speak Chinese, even if you play as the Vietnamese. Genghis Khan can just as easily hire Ninja and Samurai units as his rival, the shogun, can get Mongolian archers. There is some visual variation in the architecture, but overall it is a strangely homogeneous abstraction of an environment that spans an entire continent and more than a thousand years of history.
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Some of the voice acting is definitely tough too. Especially the lead adviser character in the campaign sounds like a very cartoonish, potentially offensive stereotype of a picky Chinese bureaucrat. It looks similar to the somewhat over-the-top and playful depictions of historical figures that the series has struggled with in the past, but when applied to a non-European character, it’s hard to never wink when he opens his mouth. . Although the leaders themselves are exaggerated, at least they do not sound like caricatures.The mission objectives have at least a great variety and nod for some interesting historical battles. They certainly play fast and loose with history, but keep it interesting by alternating between more traditional base builds, some of which you try to take down a castle with a fixed army and have no ability to replenish troops not, and some that are purely focused. building your economy while defending a castle. The latter is the most enjoyable, especially when combined with the system of military or diplomatic vassalization of AI warlords on each card to give different bonuses. It made me wish there was some sort of horde mode for skirmish or multiplayer, that could take the strongest part of Warlords and play it endlessly.