Everything (is) wrong with Stronghold 3

[Hierophant Green]

"King of the Castle: Your castle walls are being smashed by siege engines, an enemy catapult surrounded by troops is rumbling ever closer, your villagers are starving, wolves have been spotted in a nearby cave and your barracks are desperately empty... just another typical day for a medieval lord in FireFly Studios' Stronghold 3."

No kidding, this is what it says on the jewel case box the game comes in. It's like having a sign outside of a bar saying "The barman will smash a bottle on your head and whip you with a pool cue". Or for a closer example, if the quote for Skyrim was about you getting roasted and eaten by a mountain giant.

So...I have seen a lot of mixed and mainly negative reviews, and thus was dubious about the game at best. So much that, despite the fact that any game I buy is through Steam, this time I opted to get it in physical CD from an online shopping site instead, since Steam price is thrice as much...anyway.

The first word that came to my mind to describe the game, as soon as I walked through the tutorial was: Clunky. The camera was either a pain to move or so slippery that it turned and moved every which way. Add to that the uneven and repetitive terrain (and the fact that with some exceptions most of the buildings look the same) and you can literally get lost in seconds.

The mini map is so useless it might as well not be there. Besides rotating along with the camera, it is so simplified it gives no useful information at all. Every "thing" yours is red, every "thing" enemy is blue (or other colors in certain maps). "Things" include walls, buildings and troops. I'd like to be able to tell whether those "things" are buildings or troops standing still, thank you. The only useful part is when grey dots appear, which lets you spot beasts or bandits when they spawn...unless, of course, they get covered up by even more red dots.

The only other Stronghold game I played was Crusader, and it was hard not to run the parallels. Crusader was colorful, and as you built your fortress it seemed to become more and more full of life, and that was quite a feat for a game set in a desert area. Here the graphics, 3D and detailed as they may be, look just...dull. Especially with the day/night cycle, and level which take place under the rain or in foggy areas, which make it a lot harder to see what's going on when you have soldiers and villagers running all over the place.

The construction turned into a nightmare. Besides not even having the satisfaction of basking in the glory of a job well done (most of the missions in the campaign have a time limit, whether it's a matter of holding out or succeeding before it runs out), every single building placed is a chore. Walls can't be built normally: they snap to the closest existing wall, tower or mountain, can't be connected at certain angles, can't be built over obstacles and so on. Once the wall is built, then, making towers and portals is even harder since they only seem to have valid positions when they feel like it. And good luck getting any troops up there: the pathfinding is very buggy and most of the time your troops will either scatter around, get distracted and stop halfway through, or go to a different place altogether. It's especially aggravating when trying to get them to man walls and towers: many times they will either miss the staircase or go BEHIND the wall, even if they merrily reply to your order as "Heading for the walls, sir"

Add to that that when the game is paused, it bugs out and doesn't let you build or give orders to your troops. Yay, just great. What would I have paused the game for? If I had to take a bathroom break I would have pressed Esc to open the menu. Also, it often bugs out and displays the "Game paused" message while the game is, in fact, still running.
Did I already mention that most missions barely let you read the flavor text before dumping enemies on your back? So you have a game where it takes forever to build efficiently, you are forced to do it all while the game is running, and have strict countdowns until you have to be ready for battle. What could ever go wrong with that formula.

Missions can be made unwinnable by simply forgetting your Lumberyard and/or Market, While lumberyards were pretty cheap and could be built without resetting the map by salvaging another wooden building, here you get no resources for salvaging, and lumber yard come at a hefty 20 Wood. It might seem like a minor thing, but when all buildings look alike it becomes an annoying and frequent occurrence to forget a single building which is necessary for the mission and watch your economy crumble like a sandcastle.

Also, building placements. Besides being able to rotate 360 degrees (which is definitely NOT a good thing when you are trying to be space-efficient), buildings have a huge and ugly "hitbox" that prevents any other building from being built around them. While this is just annoying for, say, farms and industries, it can ruin your day when it comes to things such as trap fields, when your traps have gaps between them that the enemy can waltz through without a scratch.

The enemies are just...WRONG, that's the only word I can describe them with. In Crusader, I remembered each enemy having their own playstyle and strategy both in their castle economy and their attack and defense formations, which you had to find a countermeasure to, and being able to hinder them by hitting them the right way.
In Stronghold 3 they just use cookie-cutter castle designs which are only meant to be a generic obstacle for you to take down. The enemies don't even "play": they don't build anything, they don't manage their castles, they don't even train troops: the enemy units simply SPAWN at their castles and make a beeline for yours, zero tactics involved. Oh, and of course they also cheat: the first time you reach the heart of their castle they will instantly spawn 20-40 extra troops out of nowhere.

You know how Stronghold used to have a nice, calm pace in their campaigns? In most missions you could go at your own pace. Wanted to build up your economy before setting off a siege? As long as your defenses held, you could go ahead and build whatever you wanted until you felt confident enough. Stronghold 3 campaign missions instead are...rushed. They just want you to finish them, most if not all of them have time limits after which you either win or lose, depending on the scenario. And I see the reason for that: in one particular mission where you have to conquer three castles, in the last 10-15 minutes no new enemies spawned. Yep, each mission has each enemy attack completely scripted, no IA or anything.

Controlling soldiers is as fruitful as controlling the movements of a cloud in the sky: when they actually do what you told them to, you'll still feel as if they would have done it anyway without your order. Melee units which are ordered to kill a target (say, take out those archers in the back instead of whaling on pikemen while you get shot to death) will turn back and keep attacking random targets after a split second. Ranged units react inconsistently to enemies coming in range: sometimes they will shoot them, sometimes they will take a second or two to notice them. Order them to attack something, and if it's not in range they will sometimes go toe to toe with them and get trounced. Not to mention, if you order to attack a target, EVERY soldier you selected will attack that target. Which sounds logical, but when you order your 50 archers to attack one of a group of 5 archers, and 50 arrows hit the first one where 5 would have sufficed, you have to realize it's either that or not giving them orders and HOPE they actually fight on their own.

Want to talk about the units? Most of them got a "nerf" compared to the first Stronghold: Catapults have a much shorter range,trebuchets are portable but are a lot less accurate, battering rams can't break walls or towers,melee units in general walk much slower...except archers. 90% of your army will be made of archers, and the other 10% of support units such as (figurative) tanks to shield them while they plink enemies to death through the sheer number of arrows. Maps always have the fort with a height advantage too, which means that towers built on top of them make the archers pretty much instant death with a huge range. Only very few times you have actual use for other units, mostly as fodder for traps.

Some levels take place at night. It looks interesting at first, but then you realize what a cheap gimmick it is. Not only it makes no sense (one mission has you "surviving the night" in a fort, but the in-game clock is measured in days: about 20 "days" pass before the sun rises), but the only thing it's good for is adding a broken stealth component to an already broken game. In attack, you are barely able to see anything while enemies only need your troops to step into a light for a second to spot you. In defense, you have to constantly light up the area with hay bale launchers, which you can't order to fire continuously or cover a wide area: you have to take wild guesses and target the generic area where enemies could be hiding each time. Or you know, play through the mission and memorize the pattern since everything is scripted.
You want stealth? Crusader had assassins. You could pave your way to victory by just knowing how to micromanage and deploy a squad of assassins to cripple your enemies.

The physics engine is another failure. Some hitboxes are way bigger than they look, especially those of traps: a flaming log could have come to a stop in the ground and still instantly kill any soldier in a spear's length radius around it, fire and plague clouds will deal damage even to units that don't seem to be touching it...and everyone's personal favourite, soldiers getting stuck in walls. If they're yours it's not a huge deal: you can either demolish the wall to free them or disband them which teleports them to the castle. But if they're enemies...first, it will prevent you from achieving victory from routing the enemy unless you find them and manage to kill them (i.e. with an area attack). Second, they will block the capture of a castle if they're close enough, meaning you'll have to restart the map if they're somewhere you can't reach. Also, way to go for realism when all projectiles which aren't rocks can go through walls, towers, buildings and cliff sides.

Missions difficulty is sporadic. While in most Stronghold games you had at least some leeway in how you could achieve your goal (if all you had was an iron mine, nothing prevented you from just selling iron and purchasing tons of mercenaries), here all missions want to coerce you into figuring out the only way to beat them and execute it flawlessly. They do so by adding time limits so that the slow-and-steady approach gets tossed out of the window, making resource management (especially food) a nightmare in its own right, adding random events which will mostly make your happiness plummet and costing you villagers, and generally giving you either a pre-made castle or a very limited area to build in each level.

Defending castles is pathetically easy (see the above point about archers and towers), and sieging castles is a pain. Normally (in missions which are castle vs castle), the tactic isn't too bad. Send in tanks to distract the archers, send your own archers to kill them, repeat for every layer of walls and capture. But those missions where you're given limited troops to fight your way through a castle which has death traps and ambushes at every turn are plain evil.

I'll cite as an example the mission at which I gave up on the military campaign entirely. You are given a decent amount of foot soldiers and one trebuchet, and have to lay siege and kill the lord of a "castle" (which is little more than a layer of walls full of troops. Some castle.). There are huge fire traps outside the walls, which burn your soldiers alive, so you need to send in some fodder. Except the fodder won't reach most tar traps because there are archers everywhere, so you need to first blast the wall with the trebuchet (which here is much more slow and inaccurate than in other Stronghold games) and then send in the fodder, let a surviving archer light all the tar pits, and then cross with your own archers and take the outer walls. Inside though is a horde of melee units, so you have to move the trebuchet and use infected cattle (again, a slow and even more inaccurate attack) to weaken them. And while you're at it, destroy the cauldrons, since there are engineers which will chase and pour boiling oil on your troops, which is an area of effect one-hit kill. Do all that and you find out that even the inside of the walls is full of tar pits, so you have once again to send in the fodder, wait for the fire to burn out, manage to survive the archers which are out of range and you can't shoot because you'd have to step in the fire, and finally you can reach the lord and kill him.
Slow and steady is the way? Well, read two paragraphs above and guess. Yep, time limit. Of FIVE MINUTES. Not only does this make no sense (sieges are supposed to be tactical and even slow paced, and without any explanation here it gives you an arbitrary deadline), but it also turns it into a purely luck-based mission, since if the trebuchet misses too many shots you'll have wasted too much time to reach the inside of the castle. Add to that the lack of auto-saves and quick-saves, and long loading times every time you have to restart a mission (there is NO restart mission button. You have to surrender, navigate back through the main menu, and select the mission again).
Not that it would help much, since it's way too easy to get to points where any action you take will lose the game, either by saving too close to the dreaded deadline or by saving with a broken fortress caught in the Catch 22 of not enough workers->not enough food->not enough happiness

You'd think that the economic campaign would have been for me, right? You like the slow and steady gameplay, a mode where all the objectives are just to gather certain resources or build certain structures would be good. But...time limits. Yet again, in addition to the insane amount of micromanagement needed to not go bankrupt, starve and/or reach a stall where you just can't get enough workers to produce the resources you'd need to get out of the stall, missions are timed as well. And you still have to spend a hefty sum on units, since you get sieged by bandits and beasts.

The multiplayer mode is the only saving grace. It's as broken as the single player mode, but the idea of actually interacting with an intelligent opponent who follows the same rules as you do is a sigh of fresh air from the mockpuppetry of the campaigns.

That's all I have to say.

[krehator]

No skirmish mode makes this game mediocre.

[Seaplace]

I hate Time limits, espicially in this sort of games... just why?... why woulf you ruin a game thats about planning and being therough, with ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ lame ass timers! worst is I cantr see any way to remove/extend or even mod it away

[Raimerz]

I have read the entire text. I understand your exposition perfectly, and I have not stopped thinking during these days, there must be a way that this video game can come back to life with all the errors it has corrected.

There are several sections that you have mentioned quite well, including that Stronghold does not have a skirmish mode and a pesimous IA. Is it so difficult to make a videogame with the quality of those from the past and the graphics adapted to the new times?

We can divide the Stronghold saga into two timelines. Something quite chaotic and that in my opinion did not help at the time. The main story takes place in 1066 between England and Wales. The secondary one tells the adventures of Matthew Steele and Lord Williams. Other than that Stronghold 2 and Legends (I don't like it at all) needs a graphical update like Age of Empires. And this could have been done with the assets used for Stronghold 3, and would have been a success.

On the historical issue I would have developed another argument. After the defeat of the Rat, the Snake, the Pig and the Wolf (I hate when characters are resurrected to commercially squeeze them), the events would have taken us a few years ago, taking the Wolf and the forge of his kingdom as the main plot. Starting when he takes the line of succession and begins his journey through the kingdom. Eventually leading to an ambush in which they kill the Boy's father.