Stronghold 3 game for pc ~ STUFF4FREE

Stronghold 3 Descricption

If the last few years have taught me anything, it's that the global economy is a delicate machine, and the boot heels of the greedy can all-to-easily trample it, and the lives of millions along with it, underfoot. A balance must be struck between the wants and needs of the consumers and the ability to provide and make a profit for the producers.

This is the same idea explored in many economic games, and Stronghold 3 is no exception. The third game in the castle-building and economic real-time strategy series has split its campaign into two major sections; the military campaign and the economic campaign. Both require mastery of raising and sustaining your population's wealth, food and industrial supplies, and fending off threats. Unfortunately, neither the combat so heavily emphasized in the military campaign or the careful micromanagement required to guide your budding society in the economic campaign is particularly engaging.

Stronghold 3 Gameplay

It's also not well explained. Stronghold 3 comes with a built-in tutorial that takes you through basic controls -- placing structures, messing with the camera, selecting things etc… -- and that's about it. It ends unceremoniously and the vast majority of game elements you'll need to master to progress aren't explained or even mentioned. When the campaign begins, it assumes you know that harvested wheat goes to the storehouse and not the granary. It assumes that you know that the wheat needs to be milled and taken back to the storehouse as flour, where it needs to be picked up by a baker to become delicious, edible bread.

None of those steps are ever explained to you, nor is the functionality of many of the structures. The apothecary, a structure that allows one of your citizens to cleanse diseased parts of the land, is available to use in the first economic mission, and is virtually required to clear the stage. But Stronghold 3 only tells you what the thing does about five missions later. Some structures go completely without explanation like the church, as do some of the resources. I still have no idea what "honor" is for, other than to fulfill some quest objectives. This makes many of the missions more puzzling and frustrating than they need to be. Discovering the relationships between wheat, mill, bakery, storehouse and granary can mean you need to completely restart a mission because you unwittingly built your base in the least efficient way possible.

Once you understand the mechanics, however, Stronghold 3 occasionally shows moments of glorious economic balance. Keeping your peasants happy (and therefore your population growing) means keeping a steady and varied supply of food, plenty of housing, and if you can supply it, offering services like ale and religion. Spinning all of those plates at the same time isn't a simple task, and adding building an army into the mix complicates things further. When Stronghold pushes your building-efficiency to its limits, it shines bright. But then nothing really changes, and you begin to get very similar objectives -- defend your castle from invaders, make a big stockpile of resources X, Y and Z before the time is up -- over and over again.

Stronghold attempts to throw you the curveballs by regularly hitting you with events. Sometimes it's wild bears that begin to eat your peasants, sometimes it's an outbreak of the plague or a fire, or sometimes it's just the weather. The events affect the mood of your little hamlet and can throw a wrench in your food supply or eat up your resources. These events aren't randomized, though, and if you've tried a mission previously (and due to how little is explained, you very well may have) it's not hard to know exactly what's around the corner. This severely hampers replay value.

But Stronghold's greatest flaw is the combat. It's a simple case of sending your units at other units and hoping for the best. Some units are stronger than others, but there isn't too much complexity to unit balance and function. Now, I've been playing Stronghold 3 for the past week or so, and the game was patched yesterday. Prior to the patch, combat was virtually unplayable. Units were unresponsive, trying to select and attack things was inaccurate, and AI was miserable, to the point that they would stand still and be eaten by wolves unless I specifically told them to fight. The patch has certainly addressed some of these issues but not all. I still find that my units are reluctant to attack nearby enemies after their target has died, and selecting a particular unit to attack or be attacked is still overly difficult.

Economy!

Multiplayer is barely functional right now. Most players can't enter games, and those that can are often met with out-of-sync errors. There are also regular stability issues. I've had Stronghold crash just seconds before I would win a long, tiresome mission, forcing me to start again. I've also had it crash while trying to save and while starting a new mission several times. The patch does tell me that Firefly Studios is aware of the issues and intends to address them. To what extent remains to be seen.

It's unfortunate that Stronghold suffers from so many issues, because subtle indicators tell me that a lot of passion was put into its development. The dozens of responses (which get really hilarious) the peasants give you if you try to build something with too little wood are probably the best example.