Stronghold for Windows

Stronghold is an economic strategy game, a kind of city-building simulator in real time.

The entourage was chosen interesting – the times of feudal lords, fortresses and the Middle Ages. Battles were also brought here, but, unlike other real-time strategies, they do not take place in an open field. Most of the time, the player either besieges someone else’s castle, or actively defends his own.

Stronghold Game Review

The beginning of each game is the same: in the free battles mode. The Stronghold game offers to start with building a castle with a complex infrastructure. The game belongs to the genre of strategies with indirect economic control. What does it mean? First of all, production chains. In order, for example, to feed the citizens with bread, you will first have to build grain farms on which workers will grow wheat.

Then build a mill where the grain is threshed into flour. And finally, build bakeries where bakers will turn flour into a finished product. And there are a lot of examples of such production chains. To recruit soldiers for the army, they will first have to be armed. Sometimes it is more profitable to buy weapons on the market, and sometimes to produce it yourself. However, this process is not easy.

When the economy in the game Stronghold is built, brings stable income and is not going to collapse, it’s time to think about your castle. The castle can be built from wood or stone. It is clear that the stone is much stronger, but it is mined more slowly. Among the wooden buildings, one can distinguish a palisade, wooden gates and towers. The range of stone structures is somewhat larger.

For example, you can build several types of towers, barbicans, stone wall blocks, and more. Once the fortifications are built, you might want to consider deploying troops. If the towers are large enough, ballistae or mangonelli can be placed on them under the guidance of engineers. In addition, you can drive a crowd of archers there, and place a brazier next to them.

In front of the castle, you can place an oil ditch (set on fire by the above-named archers with a brazier), a water ditch (the enemy will have to fill it up in order to advance further). It is prudent to place kennels in front of the entrance, mad dogs will tear up the approaching troops. In addition, wolf pits with stakes can be scattered over the fields. Enemies cannot see them in any way, which dooms opponents to a painful death. From the defensive means of Stronghold, it is worth noting boiling resin boilers. Served by an engineer who fills special vats and engineers pouring resin over the heads of the invaders. In the event of a hit, only armor remains from them.

We sorted out the defense. Time to attack! And here the developers of Stronghold provided a huge number of means of effective destruction of the enemy and a great many effective tactics, the competent implementation of which will help to capture any fortress. Although, to seize a fortress is not a field to cross. We will have to look for weak points, divide the troops, and undertake deceptive maneuvers so that in the very first attack we do not lose the entire army. For example, you can destroy walls with trebuchets (they stand outside the firing zone), but you will have to cover them from enemy attacks. It’s time to bring up the stairs and capture the walls with swordsmen and infantrymen. An excellent move is to bring up the siege towers. You can break the barbican with battering rams, while capturing the walls and towers, and rush into the bulk of the breakthrough.

The graphic part of the Stronghold game looks very decent for that time. Even now, neat 2D looks better than the newfangled, but curved 3D in the second part. The sound design is decent, but the often repetitive tracks are annoying, especially during the fighting. After several missions, you have to go into the settings to turn off the intrusive music. The second part is not recommended to play, as the first is still much better.