Stronghold 2 - 5/20 hours

I am staring at the computer, dead-eyed. There's nothing wrong with Stronghold 2, I tell myself. I repeat, more forcefully, there is nothing wrong with Stronghold 2. But time has lost all meaning. Meaning has lost all meaning. I am playing the sim campaign and the challenge is to clean up shit. Oh, the game calls it "gong" for some reason, but we all know it's shit. And they put you under a clock. Your workers, with their indifferent pathfinding, crawl their way towards these steaming turds and you have to fend off bandit attacks and all the while the clock is ticking. And it's not enough. It's never enough. The arbitrary deadline the game gives you for your shit cleaning task passes in a flash and I have to start all over.

So I get aggressive. I dedicate half my economy to cleaning up shit, except it's not fast enough. Even with the massive bribes I pay my population, my popularity ticks down and people start abandoning their jobs. Yet even with a shrinking population, the shit keeps piling up. I'm going to be buried in it, I think. Is there any hope left for me at all?

I thought this was what I wanted. A game where the logistics were important. Where you had to think about things like sanitation and infrastructure and the like, but I'm not up to the task. I'm too weak. My town keeps getting buried in shit and it's making me want to cry. Those poor little simulated peasants with their lack of a modern sewage system. They betray me with their untamable digestive tracts. I know it's just the game teaching me a lesson, like in a previous mission where everything caught on fire, or the lesson after that where I had to use the cargo shipping system to save a village from starvation. But it's demoralizing, having this kind of problem. It feels like such a basic failure.

I tried to get away from it for awhile, but playing as the defensive side in historical sieges felt pointless (is it just me or are the strongholds weaker in Stronghold 2) and my free build city was attacked by bandits, which seems to me to miss the point of "free build" entirely. I guess I'll just have to grit my teeth and crawl my way out from under this mountain of shit. After all, I'll only need to do it once, right?