Other in-game hints and messages sometimes come a little later than would be useful. Prepare for frequent messages about your castle being attacked when no one is actually anywhere near it. From there, you get some basic cinematics and mediocre-to-cheesy voiceovers, and very linear quests. The main campaign missions are divided by difficulty, and once you select a campaign, you select yet another layer of difficulty. A little more direct allocation of manpower would have been nice. There's nothing worse than seeing 10 guys standing around outside the stockpile holding excess lumber while you've got an empty or understaffed dairy farm or granary and your people are starving. Production stops, buildings sit vacant, and while you're supposed to be focusing on conquering the universe, you have to keep hopping back to the homestead to see if anything's running as it should. If your peasants leave (food runs low, taxes are too high, etc.), you get a sound bite telling you such, but that's about it. You can only build the industry buildings they should inhabit for a job, and then wait around for them to go do the job. From there, you cannot select any of the workers or assign them specific tasks directly. You simply build housing, and eventually they'll just show up at your castle whenever it's convenient for them. You don't build or hire workers like you would in many RTSes. The worker/peasant interaction (or lack thereof) creates another issue. Peasants will work or not work at a whim, not depending on whether you put in any roads or placed their jobs anywhere near the stockpile, a la Sim City, but based more on their own personal laziness, I suppose. There's an architect's view (directly overhead looking down) available at a key press, but it's not like there's any real advantage to how you build and arrange your castle. It felt like my army was ferried to and from the battlefield on the short bus.īase building has been pared down. If enemies wander near your troops, they may or may not defend themselves, and certainly won't take priority of nearer troops over ones farther away. You have to keep telling them over and over and over to attack a target or move out of harm's way, and many of them will ignore you.
What's more, the combat units are largely ineffective in actual combat. I went up against a dragon with a dozen pike men, he breathed fire on them, and they just stood there for a while before any damage even registered. Five archers shouldn't have much trouble felling the mighty dragon you sent to demolish an entire enemy castle. The big base-buster units, like the ice giants and dragons, cost an awful lot to build and are taken out much more easily than you'd expect. Instead, the heroes move along at an utterly glacial pace, slowing down any unit group-selected with them. The big units should be terrifying to the enemy, and the heroes charging your walls should be intimidating. If combat is going to be a big part of your game, you'd expect it would be flashy and exciting. Who hasn't heard of Lancelot and the Knights of the Round Table or Count Dracula? The departure from the sim aspects will further alienate fans of the original, and the tedium of the actual combat and sameness of each faction's units should finish off everyone else's interest in the franchise.
#Stronghold legends series
Now that balance has been tipped entirely in the opposite direction as the series tries to find a narrative and something to put on the cover with which people will identify. This series started out years ago with an emphasis on building your home fort into a real working castle and an economic powerhouse, with occasional combat to keep things interesting. It's just so underwhelming and unpleasant to play (to the point of being nonfunctional in many cases) that uninstalling it will be my favorite part of the game. The idea of throwing Siegfried, King Arthur, Vlad the Impaler, and a few other medieval legends together in a RTS isn't a bad one, per se. My apologies to all those who picked up the game already, those I couldn't get to in time who are now trudging through the boring, broken gameplay at the nougat core of Stronghold: Legends.
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