For 20 years, the Stronghold series has strengthened in an interesting place, between a city builder and a more traditional strategy in real time. Stronghold Warlords continues this tradition with a new flavor by taking us, for the first time in the series, to the battlefields of ancient and medieval East Asia. But, as an RTS, it looks like it still lives in the mists of the past. And building the city, while it may be an interesting and almost Zen puzzle, often seems to be at odds with the goal of defeating your enemies directly.
The biggest and often invigorating difference between a Stronghold game and, say, Warcraft or StarCraft, is how it makes you think about space. You will transform open land into an impressive and thriving walled city … assuming no one completely destroys it. And it is not just the availability of natural resources that you need to be concerned about. Decisions like placing your main stock near the resource collection areas can have a big effect on the efficiency of your economy, and keeping your people happy later will depend in part on how many of your buildings are within the radius of the temples. You really have to try to imagine how it will all fit together, in addition to building your defenses to maximize your home advantage. He does a good job of scratching the Tetris itch and making long-term planning worthwhile.
This is true for the series as a whole, but Warlords has added a new wrinkle in which you can choose whether to keep your people in line through love or fear. A construction chain will allow you to build shelves of torture and other subtle symbols of oppression, which make your workers work faster, but demoralize your armies and reduce your popularity. The other offers creature comforts that will inspire troops and make you captivating in the hearts of commoners, but it also reduces resource production, as they are spending a lot of time throwing darts on the lawn or something. I liked the tension it created because I could see how much productivity I could extract from my people and also prevent each new fortress from looking like a repeat of the previous one.
“
Keeping happiness at least a little positive is important because it is the only way for your population to grow, and raising taxes to pay higher level units is only possible if you give something in return, like more rice rations or new fancy duds of silk. This helps their cities look like little more than just a collection of peasants throwing gold into a pile to finance their armies, as in a traditional RTS. But, once these armies get moving, that’s all it comes down to.
Combat in Stronghold Warlords is best during sieges, whether you are on the attack or defense side. All the modular pieces with which you can build your walls and towers allow for some interesting and intelligent configurations to maximize your advantages against a greater force, especially if you know a thing or two about how real castles were designed in those times. And figuring out how to tackle an enemy stronghold, probing for weaknesses and choosing opportunities carefully, can also be exciting. Field battles are just not that interesting.
“
There is a big gap in movement speed between lower level skirmishers and imperial tank troops that you can get later in the tech tree, which allows an experienced commander to maneuver a more powerful army and win the day. But, in general, these struggles are very old in Age of Empires in their rhythm and scale. It’s not terrible, it just seems too late compared to more recent RTSs like Northgard or Total War. And art doesn’t help. While the great forts and shiny pagodas are detailed and attractive, these models of flat-looking, low-poly units could be overshadowed by something like the original Company of Heroes, launched almost 15 years ago. Each of the six single-player campaigns, which take about six to 10 hours, takes you to a different time and place in history, they just look like different factions because most missions limit what you can build. In multiplayer and skirmish vs AI, on the other hand, that distinction has been lost: not only are the lists of units identical for each army, your imperial swordsmen will always speak Chinese, even if you are playing as a Vietnamese. Genghis Khan can hire Ninja and Samurai units just as easily as his rival, the shogun, can hire Mongolian archers on horseback. There is a bit of visual variation in architecture, but overall, it is all a strangely homogeneous abstraction from a scenario that spans an entire continent and over a thousand years of history.
“
Some of the voiceovers are definitely very dubious as well. The campaign’s top advisor, in particular, sounds like a really cartoonist and potentially offensive stereotype of a demanding Chinese bureaucrat. It is similar in tone to the somewhat exaggerated and amusing representations of historical figures with which the series has previously been involved, but when applied to a non-European character, it is difficult not to shudder whenever he opens his mouth. The leaders themselves, although exaggerated, at least do not look like caricatures.At least the mission’s objectives have a good variety and beckon for some interesting historical battles. They definitely play fast and loose with the story, but keep it interesting by switching between the more traditional base building, some that make you try to bring down a castle with a fixed army and unable to replenish troops, and some that are purely focused on building your economy while defending a castle. The latter are the most fun, especially when combined with the military or diplomatic system of AI commanders on each map to give you various bonuses. It made me wish there was some kind of horde mode for skirmish or multiplayer, which could have taken the strongest part of Warlords and made it infinitely reproducible.