Stronghold HD - 10/20 hours

Time has ceased to exist. I'll play a mission or two of Stronghold and, subjectively, it will feel like an hour has passed, but when I exit the program and check the time counter, I'll see that it was only 20 minutes. Normally, a game will begin to engross me the more I play it. But this one, it's like throwing my consciousness into an ocean - instead of coming together, it just diffuses outwards and I become aware of each second passing.

I think it's because a lot of this game is waiting for things to happen. You can't construct a new building until your workers gather wood. You can't recruit a new soldier until your forges churn out some new weapons. You can't achieve the mission objectives before a certain amount of time has passed.

Ordinarily, that wouldn't be a problem for me. It's just that I feel guilty about letting time go by passively. I feel like I should be playing the game instead of just watching it. But Stronghold is an rts, not a city-builder, and thus playing it is a major chore.

It's always been a mystery to me why I like the one genre, but not the other (aside from, you know, all the grudging exceptions I've admitted to over the years). They seem very similar in many respects. They both involve building and resource management in real time, and the controls are quit often identical. Then you have things like tech-trees and sometimes even units to control (more in the games that blur the line, but still).

Yet I think I've narrowed down the key difference. An RTS tests your creation against external threats and a city-builder tests your creation against internal threats. Something like Stronghold, you have to worry about enemy soldiers and artillery tearing down your walls and razing your economic buildings. In something like SimCity, you have to worry about the unintended consequences of growth - traffic, crime, public health, and whatnot. There is some overlap with things like fires or natural disasters, but generally, in an RTS, a larger base is always better and in a city builder, a larger base is only stable after you've solved the problems created by having a larger base.

Stronghold has elements of a city-builder, but now that I've gotten up to population 250 in Free-play mode, I can say definitively that there is no special challenge in having a larger base. Population morale is trivial to manage and is only really affected by natural disasters and tax levels. Income is useless for anything besides recruiting troops. And food surplus is purely a point of pride.

I guess that means that my time of dithering is over. I have to actually commit to playing the game right. On the upside, maybe constant warfare will make the time pass faster.