The one new gameplay feature that I really enjoyed was the true 3D, non-gridded, placement of buildings. In Stronghold 3, each building piece can be rotated a full 360˚ as it is placed allowing you to twist, turn and wedge it pretty much anywhere it will fit. I say fit as when placing a building, each other building and or map object (such as a tree) is outlined and these borders cannot overlap, though some objects such as towers will snap to others like walls. The one negative side to this new feature is that some of the buildings have a lot of space around them, while this is not a huge issue for things like lumber mills and farms, it is a little odd around houses which one would expect, like many medieval cities, villages and castles to be packed nearly on top of each other. This new feature however, still allows for a more medieval looking town to be created as buildings are placed in an organic fit-them-where-you-can methodology, though for the symmetrically anal (a curse which I bear myself) one can still line them up edge to edge if wanted.
Stronghold 3 Crumbling Ruin
Now for the not so good parts of which I will only cover a few.
If you have been following the release of Stronghold 3 than you may already know about the numerous bugs that have been encountered since this games release. Those very bugs are one of the reasons that this review is as late as it is, as we decided to wait for the initial patches. While this in part was to write and provide a better review, rather than a rant, it was mostly necessary as the game was nearly unplayable without them. I won’t list all of the bugs that I encountered during the first week of play but some of the more annoying ones were random crashes, stuck units, unclickable units, and numerous problems with building and wall placement. To Firefly’s credit they have reacted quickly and many of those bugs have been addressed in the last three weeks, and they continue to address others, yet for those who had been looking forward to the game, such as myself, a bad taste has been left behind nonetheless.
However’, bugs are not the only problem with Stronghold 3.
The greatest issue I had with Stronghold 3 was in how difficult it is to defend a castle, especially for a game whose focus is on castle building and warfare. Sure some of this frustration could be related to me being new to the game, but there are some significant issues that rally against the very idea of a castle.
When I started, one of the first things I did was build a wall across a choke point with a tower behind it. I then placed some troops, with some difficulty, up on top of them thinking this would at least buy me some time to build additional troops and get my economy in order. Unfortunately, I watched in dismay as a small unit of enemy spearman came along and took out my freshly placed garrison, including the guy high in the tower, without losing a man of their own. Seems my guys were sleeping. They then proceeded to hack apart my wall, and once through, laid waste to my present population. As I proceeded to play that game I realized that ranged units, especially archers, are by far the most powerful units in the game. With a good amount of ranged units a player can depopulate castle walls in seconds and the computer often does this faster than you can order them to return fire or move them off the walls. I quickly became aware that being perched atop a crenellated wall or a high tower was a death sentence rather than a defensible position for my troops.
In fact, now at the beginning of any mission in which I start with troops atop a wall, I pull them down immediately. So how do you defend your walls then? I found that the best way to defend my walls was not by perching units on them, but rather behind them. This is because the game allows defending units, and once in awhile enemy units, to hurl or shoot projectiles through them. Yes, through them. It seems to take more than it should for your units to attack enemy units at all. Getting them to attack only seems to occur while directly clicking on the enemy unit making the defense of your walls a slow tedious feat of micromanagement, one the computer can do far better than you can.
