Monday, January 1, 2018

Stronghold HD - 2/20 hours

I had such high hopes when I saw that there was an economic campaign. I thought for sure that I could focus purely on building up my town's economy and leave all that tedious siege warfare stuff to the military campaign. And for the first mission,it seemed like that was exactly the case. But then I loaded up the second mission and wolves slaughtered all of my workers!

Apparently these are the fearless video game sort of wolves that will just attack a populated human settlement en masse. So I reloaded and tried again, and this time I was killed by bears. Then later bandits. I must have gotten to my fourth or fifth time through before I gave up in disgust.

And now, here I am. Frankly, if Stronghold is going to treat me this way, I may just have to do the military campaign after all.

I'm afraid the next 18 hours are going to be rough either way. This game really shows its age. The RTS controls are imprecise and the economy (such as I can tell between wolf attacks) is shallow. All I really want to do is build castles and their surrounding villages. I know that the whole purpose of a castle is to defend against attacks, but I don't want a real castle, I want a toy one.

Maybe there's some way I can fiddle with the settings to get a game I want to play, but I'm not optimistic. I don't think this is the sort of game that takes it easy on people.

1 comment: