I was worried that the Stronghold series was going to be a one-hit wonder. Stronghold 1 laid a pretty good foundation, Stronghold: Crusader and its Warchest had better scenarios and AI and some good additions to the unit roster, but they were also an expansion pack and a stone age DLC (respectively). Stronghold 2 and its many follow-ups (3, Legends, Warlords, Crusader 2) all had much worse review scores. I speculated it might just be a matter of when the games came out, Stronghold is one of those games that a lot of people played when they were eleven and maybe Stronghold 2’s big weakness is that it came out when its target audience were more discerning fifteen year olds, causing a large perceived drop in quality.
But although that was a possibility, I more suspected that actually the Stronghold devs didn’t really have any idea what they were doing and got Stronghold 1 working good by pure dumb luck. Stronghold 2 has borne this possibility out.
Stronghold 2 is now fully 3D and several key structures likes towers, gatehouses, and the central keep can now be entered. This is a cool gimmick but makes very little difference in gameplay. Units have been rebalanced a little, mainly in that swordsmen and knights are now way more powerful, and also there is exactly one new unit, a peasant militia which requires no weapon production, just 5 gold (even less than the 8 gold spearman or 12 gold longbowman, previously the cheapest, most basic units) that you can spam out in an emergency. This is a good addition, although since it’s the only addition it doesn’t really justify a sequel by itself.
Likewise, the religion overhaul is appreciated but not exactly worth making an entire sequel over. In the original Stronghold, when you built chapels, churches, or cathedrals, they would spawn priests who would wander around blessing any worker they bumped into. The blessing lasted a while, and longer if blessed by a priest from a more impressive religious building, and you got a happiness boost based on the percentage of your workers that were blessed. Happiness management is super important in Stronghold, so this is potentially a major effect. This sounds like it’s an interesting placement puzzle but in practice the priests wander in sufficiently unpredictable paths that there’s not really anything to do except stamp down religious buildings wherever they’ll fit and hope for the best. Crusader adds a flat happiness boost for the first church and the first cathedral you build, which at least encouraged you to build those two, but for the most part you’d get that, and then the +2 bonus for having 1-25% of your population blessed, and getting any more than that required such a ludicrous amount of religious buildings that you’d only do it as a gimmick.
In Stronghold 2, your church now works exactly like your tavern: You keep it supplied with a resource (candles for church, ale for tavern) and provides a happiness boost based on the rate at which you instruct them to consume that resource, from +0 if you shut it down (or run out of candles/ale) to +8 if you chew through your stockpile at maximum speed. Kind of lame that the church and the tavern are now basically the same thing, but I don’t have any better ideas and the old system just didn’t work, so whatever.
Then there’s honor and estates, a major gameplay change that I quite like. You can now do various poncy noble things like hosting feasts, making fancy dresses for a royal (or, technically, noble) ball, hosting tournaments, and so forth, which give you honor. Honor is a required resource to recruit certain units, so knights and swordsmen and such will only show up for you if you are a prestigious and well-regarded noble. You can also use honor to buy NPC villages called estates, who will send regular shipments of resources and/or gold to you in little wagons. You can, of course, also yoink villages that have already been claimed by a rival by military force. The NPC villages are completely self-governing so you don’t have to worry about micromanaging their food supply and happiness and so forth, allowing you to stay focused on your main castle, and they’re spread out through the map, so it’s actually worthwhile to have a field army that can run out to confront enemy skirmishers, so you get things like cheap, lightly armored, fast-moving longbows and macemen running around yoinking villages from each other.
It also means the game’s top-end unit, the knight, is now actually worth something because of how fast they are, which means they’re great for village patrol, whereas in the original game they were almost never worth the trouble of creating over the alternative option of demolishing all your stables to build more blacksmiths in order to pump out swordsmen faster. Sure, swordsmen are really slow, but in Stronghold 1, this rarely mattered. In Stronghold 2, your hammer blow on the enemy castle is still probably going to be either a glacial line of swordsmen marching inexorably through a breach in the wall while a giant mob of longbowmen/crossbowmen provide cover or else a giant mob of macemen and/or spearmen Zerging the enemy lord down using a combination of speed and sheer numbers to absorb enemy missiles in the meantime, but knights are much more likely to be involved as a harassing force rather than only being useful on specific maps that go out of their way to make economic harassment viable.
One major win and two minor but welcome improvements, so what’s the problem? Two things: First, Stronghold 2 has abysmal scenario design. They figured this out for Crusader, but I guess the lessons didn’t stick, because in Stronghold 2 they’re back to invasion missions where you have a finite number of troops and have to storm an enemy castle with them, rather than just giving you a castle and the enemy a castle and last castle standing wins, which is how the multiplayer works. Stronghold: Crusader had the Crusade Trail which was just 50 missions like that in a row in (mostly) escalating difficulty and it was great. Add a plot stringing them together (admittedly, you probably don’t want to voice act all 50 missions, but whatever, cut it to 20) and we’re golden.
Even worse, Stronghold 2 now strings multiple missions together on the same map, which is cool except that there’s no checkpoints between missions. If you quit mission 6-2, you have to start over from mission 6-1. If you lose the final invasion on mission 6-2, you either load a save or start over all the way from mission 6-1. There is no autosave system.
This is an unfortunate but manageable problem, except that also they got really excited about sending troops flying with siege weapons and it ruined the game. See, Stronghold 2’s 3D engine means that when a catapult or especially trebuchet stone hits, it blasts all troops in a five yard radius into the air, scattering your formation and killing most/all of the unlucky bastards, especially if they were on a wall, which, y’know, is generally where you want them to be. Scorpions/ballistae now fire a line straight through enemy units, wiping out entire advancing formations if they’re strung out to fit through a narrow path, which they often are just as a result of the shape of the game’s maps and the way the pathfinding works (there’s lots of bridges and mountain paths and even if there aren’t you will be adding some gates, and once your troops get into a column formation they don’t get out of it until they arrive at their destination). This places a much stronger emphasis on unit micro and the exact positioning of your troops and it makes siege engines a major threat to most troop types. And in a viscerally unrealistic way, too.
While the Stronghold series has never been good at historical accuracy, it did a good job of capturing the general vibe of medieval siege warfare. The exact units and resources were all over the place, but you had to bunker down behind walls to defend yourself from a besieging force, and weakening an enemy through starvation was a valid strategy, as is suppressing enemy archers with your own to make way for siege engines to open up the defenses so that your army could storm the place. A lot of the details are off, but the overall vibe is accurate.
Not in Stronghold 2. In Stronghold 2, trebuchets are WW1-style artillery that have a lethal radius measured in meters away from the stone’s actual impact, inaccurate but capable of completely cleaning out a bastion tower or wall of defenders if it’s lucky enough to score a direct hit. This places the emphasis on field battles – siege engines are so powerful against defenders atop walls and towers that you really want to go and confront them where you have room to maneuver. In fairness, real medieval militaries also really wanted to do field battles instead of sieges if they could help it, but the game is called Stronghold and it’s fallen down on historical accuracy in so many other places that it’s weird that it decides that one of the places it needs to stick to history is in making the title of the game less accurate.
Neither of these problems would’ve killed the game by themselves. I could follow a walkthrough beat for beat for the invasion missions to get to the good ones, and I could adapt to the new, far more devastating siege engines despite how much worse they make the game feel and look as a game about defending or attacking strongholds, but taken together it’s too much. This game goes in Regrets, and so does the rest of the series as, from the review scores, they have no chance of catching up.
On the bright side, that clears a lot of games out of the backlog.
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