It's gotten to the point that you don't know what you're going to get when you open the box of a new Stronghold game. The castle-building franchise from Hartford's Firefly Studios has gone through some significant changes over the past two years, but the latest version throws the whole formula out the window. Stronghold Legends moves the series out of the history books and into D&D-styled real-time strategy territory with mythical heroes, dragons, and dwarves. Yet while this is admittedly a nifty idea, the switch from reality to fantasy kills the historical authenticity that has long been a trademark of the Stronghold line. Even worse, everything seems to have been crowbarred into the aged Stronghold 2 engine, resulting in a generic RTS that has more than a few serious technical and design issues.
The actual gameplay in Stronghold has little to do with the earlier games in the franchise. Here, instead of building a castle and getting knee-deep into the nitty-gritty of what it was like to live during the Middle Ages, you sign up for three campaigns out of medieval mythology. In the opener, you take on the role of King Arthur, battling against the Saxons for control of Britain. In the others, you play as Siegfried, the German dragon slayer and star of a Wagnerian opera, and Vlad the Impaler, the Transylvanian Turk-killer best known today as the bloody inspiration for Dracula.
But nothing of interest has been done to develop these storylines or settings. Buildings follow the RTS template and feature barracks, armories, granaries, and so forth. Resource gathering goes beyond the usual food, wood, and stone, but it does so by adding an annoying level of micromanagement to what should be a straightforward grind of building armies and attacking the bad guys. A game this simplistic probably shouldn't demand the collection and processing of any resources, as mission objectives always involve straightforward building armies and killing enemies.
All of the soldiers featured in each faction are virtually identical. There is little difference here whether you're fighting on behalf of the evil forces of Dracula or the noble knights of King Arthur. Also, since the units themselves are generic, the gee-whiz factor of getting to play Count Blah and his evil minions in an RTS fades quickly. You get little aside from the same old pikemen, archers, crossbowmen, and swordsmen. There is only so much that a developer can do with a medieval setting, of course, but no effort was made to provide significantly different troops to represent the nationalities and time periods represented. A millennium passed between the King Arthur campaign of the mid-400s and the Vlad campaign of the mid-15th century. You would think that more than the color of the shirts would have changed during that time.
At least the three sides vary quite a bit when it comes to the menageries of mythological beasties that they can throw into battle. Heroes like Arthur, Merlin, Siegfried, and Vlad have special powers that give them the ability to pull off feats like casting spells, knocking down walls, and summoning magical creatures. In the Arthur scenarios, you have access to heroic knights and wizards straight out of Malory; in the Siegfried ones, you deal with figures out of Norse legend such as frost giants; and in the Dracula missions, you get to play with Halloween refugees like creepers and werewolves. All of the units fit perfectly into their settings and make the game feel like a collection of folktales come to life.
Yet while these beasties add color to Stronghold Legends, and some cool moments like giants stomping pesky soldiers with their feet and Merlin blasting archers with lightning bolts, they don't do much for gameplay. For starters, most are underpowered. Dragons, for instance, are second-rate compared to Tolkien's Smaug and can be taken out by well-placed archers. Giants can be ganged up on by regular infantry grunts like pikemen and felled quicker than you can say fee-fi-fo-fum. And just breathing on the frail Merlin seems to kill him. More play testing was also needed to root out some big problems with mission design and artificial intelligence. Most missions are laid out in an extremely linear fashion. You start at point A and kill everything until you reach point B, you defend a fortress until the clock runs out, and so on. But lack of imagination is the least of the game's issues. Enemy troops often continue patrolling mindlessly and actually ignore huge columns of your soldiers even after you've just smashed down or climbed a castle wall. They often don't react to crossbowmen or archers firing away at them, either, and sometimes choose to walk away from battles or abandon sieges. The narrator who provides tips on enemy attacks frequently comes out with lines like, "Woodsmen have seen a band of enemy troops heading this way!" right before they turn around and head back home. The game was obviously shipped without a fully functioning AI.
It also wasn't shipped with a modern graphics engine. Stronghold Legends looks like it was made with the same dated 3D technology that powered Stronghold 2, which unfortunately means that it looks like it was released around 2002. Visuals are drab and dingy overall, with blocky castles, dull building styles with little in the way of convincing detail, and terribly animated units that wobble back and forth when they run, like packs of chain-mail-clad Fat Alberts. Because there is no collision detection, battles between human armies immediately degenerate into undulating, colored blobs with no way to tell what's going on or who's winning.
Audio quality is a bit better, thanks to suitably cheesy voice acting during scenarios and soldiers' shouts during charges that really get the blood moving. Lines are repeated way too often, though, and frequently misstate what's actually going on. Once per mission, you'll usually hear something completely incongruous such as, "The enemy's ladders are on the walls!" even though you're not actually defending any walls at the time.
And even though Firefly should know its way around this engine by now, there are some serious bugs here. Crashes to the desktop are an infrequent occurrence, but the big problem is that units rarely respond properly to commands. They run by targeted enemies and often turn their backs on foes, giving them a free shot or two at you while you slowly rotate around to attack. Mass attacks directed at specific baddies always result in some units attacking and many others just standing around cooling their heels. It's best not to attack directly at all, as you're more likely to get everyone in on the action if you move close to the enemy and let the AI take over from there. Installing the version 1.10 patch didn't seem to rectify any of these issues, either.
There are some appealing alternatives to the campaigns, although considering all the gameplay problems and bugs, it's hard to contemplate why anyone would want to bother with them. Still, the three Legends Trails sets of linked skirmish maps is an intriguing idea that plays like a trio of solo ladders. Custom skirmishes with up to four players can also be played, both online and off. There does seem to be a fair number of people looking for matches online, too, so you can find games pretty easily. And a map editor is also included for players who want to roll their own skirmish scenarios.
The developers were obviously going for a you-got-your-chocolate-in-my-peanut-butter moment here by throwing D&D into their medieval simulation series, but Stronghold Legends is just another second-rate RTS. While incorporating giants and dragons into the mix may seem like a natural fit these days, as any game with castle walls in it seems to demand the addition of Tolkienesque beasties to knock them down, you've got to do more than just toss such creatures in with generic armies and buggy gameplay. This is an interesting concept that deserved more careful attention than the designers gave it.
Wednesday, 22 June 2011
Stronghold 2
Store your food and raise the drawbridge, for Stronghold 2 has been released and is ready to lay siege to your computer. For those of you unfamiliar with the Stronghold series, or castle sim games in general, Stronghold 2 puts you in command of a castle. You must feed your peasants and keep them happy, build walls and towers to protect your property, and raise an army to lay siege to your opponent's castles. While there have been plenty of additions made to Stronghold 2 over its predecessor (in addition to the implementation of some good ideas), a poor story, weak artificial intelligence, and plenty of bugs mar what otherwise could have been a simple yet fun castle-building game.
In Stronghold 2, you have a lord who presides over a keep. Peasants will flock to your keep as long as they're kept happy. Happiness is dependent on several factors, including how well they eat, the amount of rats in your castle, and whether you provide entertainment for them. You'll gather various resources to place in your storehouse, and industry workers can take these resources to create advanced items, like bread, ale, and weapons. However, there aren't any complicated manufacturing trees, so don't expect an intricate economic sim game. Stronghold 2 is designed so you can focus on building up your castle and raising an army.
There are a few issues with the gameplay that are worth noting. You can't shut off just one building. You have to either shut down the entire industry or sell the building. For example, if you build three lumber camps but only want two to operate at a given moment, you have to sell the third camp. Also, some of your workers will, on occasion, turn to crime, thus abandoning the industry in which they were working. And, unfortunately, you can't shift a worker from one industry to the abandoned one. This poses a problem when the abandoned post is critical, such as your gong pit. If your gong pit worker leaves his post, and you don't notice, gong will pile up, and your peasants will be unhappy. If you're already on the breaking point of happiness/unhappiness, people will start leaving the castle (and, thus, they'll start to leave other critical industries), putting you in a feedback loop you may never recover from. These are micromanagement issues you shouldn't have to face. More alerts for when critical posts get abandoned would have been a big help.
There are two campaigns in Stronghold 2: peace and war. They're what you'd expect. The peace campaign focuses on economic missions. The king is displeased with his vassals, so you must step up and fix the economy of his nation. You'll focus on collecting a set number of resources in a mission without worry of being sieged. The most fighting you'll see is against bandits or wolves. Since the economic portion of the game is pretty basic, this campaign can be boring if you expect heavy micromanagement. The war campaign, on the other hand, throws you into missions where you not only have to build up your castle, but also attack an enemy or defend your lands. The storyline of the war campaign is weak due to boring cutscenes and poor voice acting, but the missions are structured nicely. Some strategy games can be repetitive because you have to rebuild a base every time you start a new mission. In Stronghold 2, each mission is divided into several submissions played on the same map. As a result, you don't have to rebuild a castle every time you start a new objective.
The two campaigns aren't particularly challenging. The peace campaign can have some tricky situations, but you're not going to burst your brain trying to figure out how to win. The war campaign is a cakewalk, especially once you discover the limitations of the AI. You may have to restart a few missions, but you'll soon realize that the computer follows the same strategy every time. Whether you're defending or attacking, you won't find a worthy opponent in the AI.
When being sieged, it's very easy to adapt your defenses to thwart the attack. Some missions pit you against seemingly impossible odds. The easiest way to defend against these attacks is to build a bunch of wooden walls outside your main stone ones. Ladder men can't scale these walls, and enemy troops will happily hack at the wooden walls while under heavy fire from your archers. Even if the computer has siege equipment, it will be used against your wooden walls instead of your towers or your defenders. Rarely will the computer ever be able to get to your stone walls, much less your lord (if your lord dies, you lose, by the way). When you're on the offensive, the AI won't do much to lift your siege. You can methodically pick off defenders and towers one by one with your siege equipment, all without worry of retaliation. It makes the game really boring and simplistic, which is unfortunate, because there's high potential for great battles.
We wouldn't have had to resort to cheesy tactics if the other castle defenses weren't broken. You can mount logs and rocks on your walls that can be released to cause damage to soldiers underneath. The problem is that once ladder men get close to these walls, these defense mechanisms mysteriously disappear. It's extremely irritating to spend a bunch of gold on these defenses only to have them vanish. Of course, you can exploit this to your own advantage when you're the attacker.
Once you complete the campaigns, which can take around 15 to 20 hours, there's plenty to keep you occupied, if you so desire. You can play a free-build mode, where you just build up your economy and castle with no objectives. Kingmaker is the skirmish mode where you square off against computer or human opponents in multiplayer. Single-player skirmish suffers from the same faults as above, but multiplayer has a lot more to offer in terms of strategy and castle development. Human opponents can use the fairly large number of units and siege weapons to formulate counterstrategies that make gameplay much more rewarding. You can play multiplayer using a LAN or the in-game browser, which is rudimentary but gets the job done. Unfortunately, multiplayer is also buggy, though. In one game, we were suddenly dropped to the main menu. In another game, it appeared that all three of our opponents were dropped without warning. We didn't even notice until it became apparent that one of our siege victims wasn't responding to our attacks.
The biggest change between Stronghold 2 and its predecessor is the addition of a 3D engine. You can zoom in and spin the map around to accurately place walls and structures. However, the 3D engine isn't particularly flattering, because the graphics aren't very good. Aside from the lackluster combat animations, units tend to clump together in combat, making it difficult to control individual units or to even tell what's going on in a fight. Units clip through each other, so you'll see a wagon roll right through a peasant while on its way to the storehouse. Also, the game has a low frame rate during any action, even on high-end machines. And cutscenes are in-engine, so this issue rears its ugly head even during story sequences. Additionally, the audio to these cutscenes, and to the rest of the game, for that matter, is poor. Furthermore, the voice acting just isn't very good.
There's a patch out already that fixes some issues, but the low frame rate and other bugs mentioned above weren't fixed in it. The single-player experience isn't very rewarding, although the game does let you build your own missions with the editor. You can set victory and losing conditions, and you can even make a sequence of missions in a scenario. Players can also create more-challenging scenarios here, but being able to do so isn't going to make it worthwhile to pick up this game. Meanwhile, multiplayer would have been a more redeeming aspect if it wasn't so prone to dropping players. All things considered, Stronghold 2 has too many problems to be recommendable to even the most diehard strategy fan.
In Stronghold 2, you have a lord who presides over a keep. Peasants will flock to your keep as long as they're kept happy. Happiness is dependent on several factors, including how well they eat, the amount of rats in your castle, and whether you provide entertainment for them. You'll gather various resources to place in your storehouse, and industry workers can take these resources to create advanced items, like bread, ale, and weapons. However, there aren't any complicated manufacturing trees, so don't expect an intricate economic sim game. Stronghold 2 is designed so you can focus on building up your castle and raising an army.
There are a few issues with the gameplay that are worth noting. You can't shut off just one building. You have to either shut down the entire industry or sell the building. For example, if you build three lumber camps but only want two to operate at a given moment, you have to sell the third camp. Also, some of your workers will, on occasion, turn to crime, thus abandoning the industry in which they were working. And, unfortunately, you can't shift a worker from one industry to the abandoned one. This poses a problem when the abandoned post is critical, such as your gong pit. If your gong pit worker leaves his post, and you don't notice, gong will pile up, and your peasants will be unhappy. If you're already on the breaking point of happiness/unhappiness, people will start leaving the castle (and, thus, they'll start to leave other critical industries), putting you in a feedback loop you may never recover from. These are micromanagement issues you shouldn't have to face. More alerts for when critical posts get abandoned would have been a big help.
There are two campaigns in Stronghold 2: peace and war. They're what you'd expect. The peace campaign focuses on economic missions. The king is displeased with his vassals, so you must step up and fix the economy of his nation. You'll focus on collecting a set number of resources in a mission without worry of being sieged. The most fighting you'll see is against bandits or wolves. Since the economic portion of the game is pretty basic, this campaign can be boring if you expect heavy micromanagement. The war campaign, on the other hand, throws you into missions where you not only have to build up your castle, but also attack an enemy or defend your lands. The storyline of the war campaign is weak due to boring cutscenes and poor voice acting, but the missions are structured nicely. Some strategy games can be repetitive because you have to rebuild a base every time you start a new mission. In Stronghold 2, each mission is divided into several submissions played on the same map. As a result, you don't have to rebuild a castle every time you start a new objective.
The two campaigns aren't particularly challenging. The peace campaign can have some tricky situations, but you're not going to burst your brain trying to figure out how to win. The war campaign is a cakewalk, especially once you discover the limitations of the AI. You may have to restart a few missions, but you'll soon realize that the computer follows the same strategy every time. Whether you're defending or attacking, you won't find a worthy opponent in the AI.
When being sieged, it's very easy to adapt your defenses to thwart the attack. Some missions pit you against seemingly impossible odds. The easiest way to defend against these attacks is to build a bunch of wooden walls outside your main stone ones. Ladder men can't scale these walls, and enemy troops will happily hack at the wooden walls while under heavy fire from your archers. Even if the computer has siege equipment, it will be used against your wooden walls instead of your towers or your defenders. Rarely will the computer ever be able to get to your stone walls, much less your lord (if your lord dies, you lose, by the way). When you're on the offensive, the AI won't do much to lift your siege. You can methodically pick off defenders and towers one by one with your siege equipment, all without worry of retaliation. It makes the game really boring and simplistic, which is unfortunate, because there's high potential for great battles.
We wouldn't have had to resort to cheesy tactics if the other castle defenses weren't broken. You can mount logs and rocks on your walls that can be released to cause damage to soldiers underneath. The problem is that once ladder men get close to these walls, these defense mechanisms mysteriously disappear. It's extremely irritating to spend a bunch of gold on these defenses only to have them vanish. Of course, you can exploit this to your own advantage when you're the attacker.
Once you complete the campaigns, which can take around 15 to 20 hours, there's plenty to keep you occupied, if you so desire. You can play a free-build mode, where you just build up your economy and castle with no objectives. Kingmaker is the skirmish mode where you square off against computer or human opponents in multiplayer. Single-player skirmish suffers from the same faults as above, but multiplayer has a lot more to offer in terms of strategy and castle development. Human opponents can use the fairly large number of units and siege weapons to formulate counterstrategies that make gameplay much more rewarding. You can play multiplayer using a LAN or the in-game browser, which is rudimentary but gets the job done. Unfortunately, multiplayer is also buggy, though. In one game, we were suddenly dropped to the main menu. In another game, it appeared that all three of our opponents were dropped without warning. We didn't even notice until it became apparent that one of our siege victims wasn't responding to our attacks.
The biggest change between Stronghold 2 and its predecessor is the addition of a 3D engine. You can zoom in and spin the map around to accurately place walls and structures. However, the 3D engine isn't particularly flattering, because the graphics aren't very good. Aside from the lackluster combat animations, units tend to clump together in combat, making it difficult to control individual units or to even tell what's going on in a fight. Units clip through each other, so you'll see a wagon roll right through a peasant while on its way to the storehouse. Also, the game has a low frame rate during any action, even on high-end machines. And cutscenes are in-engine, so this issue rears its ugly head even during story sequences. Additionally, the audio to these cutscenes, and to the rest of the game, for that matter, is poor. Furthermore, the voice acting just isn't very good.
There's a patch out already that fixes some issues, but the low frame rate and other bugs mentioned above weren't fixed in it. The single-player experience isn't very rewarding, although the game does let you build your own missions with the editor. You can set victory and losing conditions, and you can even make a sequence of missions in a scenario. Players can also create more-challenging scenarios here, but being able to do so isn't going to make it worthwhile to pick up this game. Meanwhile, multiplayer would have been a more redeeming aspect if it wasn't so prone to dropping players. All things considered, Stronghold 2 has too many problems to be recommendable to even the most diehard strategy fan.
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