Game 430: Stronghold (1993)

 

        

Stronghold
United States
Stormfront Studios (developer); Strategic Simulations, Inc. (publisher)
Released 1993 for DOS, 1994 for FM Towns and PC-98
Date Started: 10 August 2021

       

Stronghold is a weird fusion between city simulators like SimCity, role-playing games, and strategy games. The basic setup is that you're a classic Dungeons & Dragons hero, retired from dungeon crawling, building your first castle. Accompanied by up to four named vassals with their own keeps, you slowly build your society--and come into conflict with monsters and other kingdoms in the area. While the leaders of your kingdom cannot level up (they're just names; you never seen them), the units who join your society can, either through training or combat. You win the game by either wiping out the other strongholds on the map, achieving the title of "emperor," or both, depending on your alignment.

         

There are definitely RPG elements to it. It technically meets all three of my criteria. The units you recruit can gain levels, and they have a full set of inventory, the quality of which is determined by the facilities you've built and upgraded. Attributes and statistics definitely make a difference in combat. Of course, when I said that an RPG must have "leveling," I meant more for individual, personal characters. When I said it must have inventories, I meant the type where you can find, equip, wield, use, and drop specific items. I could make the definition more explicit that way, but I think I'll wait and see if it becomes a problem (as in, there are a lot of games like this) first. In the meantime, I had fun with Stronghold regardless.

      

A successful stronghold has many types of buildings and land parcels.

      

When you fire up Stronghold, you have several options for a new game. "First City" starts you with a civilization in progress, your keeps already constructed and your heroes already selected. I tried it but I found it more confusing than starting from scratch. Beyond that, there are five pre-constructed world maps to choose and a "random" map. For each one, you get to set a "hostility level." In a "peaceful" game, you're the only stronghold. There are monsters on the map, but no other kingdoms, and the game is much more about building than fighting. "Aggressive" and "hostile" maps have other strongholds to defeat, including one ruled by an evil warlord named Mindark.

     

The main character has a history with Mindark.

     

As the game begins, you have to set the location of your stronghold. You have a large map to choose from. Choosing the right location is an art. I didn't play enough games to become an artist, but I think I understand the basic considerations. While the main stronghold is the center point of your kingdom, each of your heroes' keeps serves as the central point of its "neighborhood." You want to establish the stronghold in a place with enough room to space out your keeps and for each of them to grow, and yet also a place that offers some natural defense, including obvious places for walls and towers. You want as much flatland as possible for buildings, avoiding deserts and swamps. Rocks (which may have mines) and trees should be prized. More experienced fans might have other suggestions.

   

Once you've selected the location of your fortress, you create your main character. He has the standard set of D&D attributes (strength, intelligence, wisdom, dexterity, constitution, charisma), which you can re-roll as many times as you want. These attributes don't matter so much for the leader himself, but the people he attracts will have the same attributes, and they're the ones that do the building and fighting and such. You then select a "class" from fighter, mage, cleric, thief, dwarf, elf, and halfling options. Again, the class matters because the hero will attract followers of the same class. Not only do the options have the traditional strengths and weaknesses in combat, but the selection matters for kingdom-building, too. Dwarves get more out of mines, elves more out of trees. Thieves are excellent scouts, and halflings make great farmers.

       

A main "character" at the beginning of the game.

        

Name, sex, and alignment are the final selections. Characters can be lawful, neutral, or chaotic. I don't think alignment makes any difference for the four sub-heroes, but for the main character, it determines the game's victory conditions. A lawful character has to rise to the rank of emperor to win; a chaotic character needs to defeat all the other strongholds; and a neutral character has to do both.

   

After the main character, you can create and place your four other heroes in quick succession. The creation process is the same for each of them. I think for a game that's going to focus on city-building, you probably want more of the racial classes, while for a game that's going to have a lot of combat, you want the vocational classes. 

    

My leaders selected (lower right), the peasants get to work building things.

   

Once you "place" them, peons begin building their keeps, and the heroes simultaneously begin recruiting other units of the same class and training units already recruited. (You can adjust the proportion of time spent on each task.) From this point, the game becomes a never-ending process of clicking around the map until it's over. Fortunately, you can pause the game so that if you get lost or confused, things aren't happening in real time. It still doesn't take long to get a bit lost.

  

The map is organized into rectangles. At the beginning, you only control the rectangles on which the keeps are situated. But as new units get recruited and fan outward from the central keeps, those rectangles fall under your control. Each rectangle has four quadrants, and something can be built in each quadrant (some buildings take up more than one quadrant). If there are trees already there, you can clear them or "claim" them; in the latter case, they remain, but you get food and income from them. If there are rocks in a quadrant, again you can clear them or "excavate" them, which might establish a mine on-site. If there are swamps in the quadrants, you can fill them in.

       

A blank parcel. What shall I build?

     

There are lots of types of buildings, including housing, farmland, granaries, foresters' camps, marketplaces, bazaars, towers, vaults, toymakers, fletchers, gemcutters, inns, and arenas. You can build bridges across water, walls across land, and gates within the walls. Each building has a cost for initial building and upgrading, and an associated impact on population size, income, food, and inventories. It's tough to juggle all the variables, but your recruits often comment on what is needed at a particular time. My general impression is that you want to keep population, housing, food production, and income around the same numbers. This is hard because they change seasonally. 

      

Summary reports like this one give you a sense of your entire kingdom.

    

As new units get recruited, they are initially "unassigned," meaning you can move them wherever you need them to go and start building there. The problem is that if you don't notice they've been recruited, they'll wander off on their own, establish themselves in an unclaimed rectangle, and make it their "home," so they're no longer unassigned. I sometimes didn't notice this happening, and thus didn't realize until late in the game that I had failed to build on some claimed rectangles, sometimes right next to the initial keeps. Other times, I would manually move a unit to an unclaimed rectangle and start building, but for some reason the unit wouldn't recognize it as "home" and would go wandering off elsewhere, leaving the buildings half-finished. (You can set "home" manually, but I often forgot.) As far as I can tell, there's no way to get a quick map of places that have units but no production, which I see as a major weakness of the game. Maybe there's a color differentiation between "built" squares and empty ones that I'm not seeing.

   

My tendency was to leave units on their home rectangles permanently. If you don't, the buildings start to decay and require repairs. This strategy often slowed the growth of my civilization, as there were times that recruitment slowed to almost nothing for entire seasons. I wonder if some players hustle units around from rectangle to rectangle, increasing the speed at which they can grow the civilization but having to do a lot of micro-managing otherwise.

   

An NPC expresses an opinion.

      

I wasted a lot of time in my first games trying to create logical layouts for my civilization. I think I had SimCity on my mind. I haven't played a lot of it, but I remember that you have to balance economic resources across the city, minimize traffic problems, and centralize key resources like hospitals. I tried to lay out my Stronghold like a sensible city, with zoned areas for agriculture and commerce, saving space for a university later, and so forth. None of this is necessary. It's much easier in hindsight to just let the units establish themselves where they want, and then build there whatever the kingdom most needs at that time. You also don't need to waste a lot of time ensuring that each new block is next to a previous block. Even with all the enemy factions on the map, there's plenty of land. It may make sense to send units to distant locations and start new neighborhoods, setting up guard towers to watch for incursions of hostile forces.

       

In the mini-map in the upper right, every white dot represents a unit stationed in a particular rectangle.

      

Eventually, your income rises so much that you begin improving previously-built structures rather than building new ones. The costs escalate fast. A new farm plot costs 10 gold pieces. Upgrading it to a full farm costs 400 or 500; upgrading it to a plantation costs 2000-3000. But the returns are worth it, and there are times you're just looking for anything to spend money on, since the amount of cash you can hold at any given time is capped by the number of vaults you've built.

     

It will cost 500 gold to upgrade this plot to a farm, but it will start producing more food and income.

      

Combat occurs when one of your units meets another faction's unit on the same rectangle. This usually occurs when you're scouting at range or when your kingdom starts to expand into the territory of another. I found that enemies usually left me alone unless I attacked first or built so close to their territory that they couldn't avoid me. You have no options in combat except which units to bring to the battle and how many (and even that can be difficult, as below). The game fights for you automatically. Given that, it's impressive how many special attacks and spell effects they programmed into it. Mages get up to 12 spells, starting with "Charm Person," "Magic Missile," and "Sleep" on Level 1, and eventually acquiring such mainstays as "Fireball," "Flesh to Stone," and "Mass Charm." Clerics mostly have healing spells, which they use effectively to heal other characters, but they'll also turn undead and use "Hold Person."

   

The crazy combat screen. I'll recount this battle next time.

      

A unit's success in combat is determined by its level and equipment, which you can tweak by adjusting the amount of time spent on training; by building facilities that increase the rate of training, such as universities for mages and arenas for fighters; and by building locations that produce weapons, armor, and magic items. 

    

I survey my units after a few hours of gameplay. I don't know what you'd have to do to get them up to Level 36.

      

The difficulty is getting the right units, or any units, into combat. You can't "group" units into armies. You can't even assign them to move individually. All you can do is specify a destination rectangle and then use the "magnets" associated with each of your heroes to try to draw unassigned units to that location. There are a lot of difficulties associated with this, starting with the fact that you never have many unassigned units because units are in the habit of assigning themselves shortly after they spawn. Even when I was sending them to war, they would frequently decide to stop and plant stakes at some random square along the way

   

Your more experienced units will probably be the ones created early in the game, since they've been spending a certain amount of time training the entire time. But swapping them out for new units is not an easy process, since you can't direct a specific unit to a specific rectangle. I'm probably not explaining why very well, but it's one of those things that has to be experienced. It's a horrible control system no matter how you look at it.

      

All the red dots in the southeast represent enemy units. I have set all of my units to march to the yellow rectangle to the southeast of them so that they'll cleave a path through the bulk of the enemy's forces. You "draw" the units by adjusting the bar beneath the pyramid. I have it set all the way to the right, to draw all available units.

      

The best approach I could think of was to consciously decide to build an army, usually when I identified the first enemy kingdom. I chose a blank rectangle somewhere between my civilization and theirs, sat on it for a while, and adjusted all the "magnets" to maximum. Every time a new unit spawned, I was there to grab it and draw it to the chosen rectangle before it had a chance to put down its own roots somewhere. (Even then, I'd often have to go back to the kingdom and unassign units that I missed.) Once I had 20 or 30 units of different types in one place, I could start sending them against enemies.

  

Overall, though, the mechanics of combat are so annoying that I would understand if some players chose "lawful" and "peaceful" every time and just focused on city-building. 

      

My character is promoted for managing his city well. I love how D&D has a system of royalty, but it's apparently a meritocracy.

      

You get promoted at certain milestones from baron (your initial title) to viscount, count, marquis, duke, archduke, prince, king, and ultimately emperor. (There are female versions of these titles.) Promotions happen when you've reached certain milestones in terms of kingdom size and population satisfaction, and when you've reached certain martial milestones, such as defeating your first enemy of a particular class. It's entirely possible to win a "lawful" game without fighting a single foe, just by building yourself to emperor level.

      

After a brief attempt with the "New City" scenario, I started playing a "Peaceful" game with a fighter baron. I played for about an hour just to get a sense for how the game worked. At that point, I started a third game on a random map set to "Aggressive" (the medium difficulty level) with a "lawful" elf baron and fighter, thief, mage, and cleric vassals. Ironically, I won that one without fighting a single combat. I could see enemies on certain parts of the world map, but I never got anywhere near them. It probably didn't help that I set my kingdom on an isthmus in the south of the map.

     

Emperor Chester achieves his objective.

        

I then tried a "Hostile" game on World 3, setting my kingdom in the center of the map with a halfling hero and a "neutral" alignment. I gave him cleric, fighter, dwarf, and mage allies. That one took bloody forever. It turns out that clearing a map of enemies takes a long time, making a winning game much more difficult for non-lawful characters. I feel like the "chaotic" option is a joke. You only have to clear the map of other factions, but I suspect it's impossible not to become an emperor during this process anyway.

    

I get on the leaderboard having killed no one.

     

I'll recount my experiences with the second campaign next time, but I've already finished the game, so please let loose freely with spoilers. What are your tips for getting the most out of Stronghold? What enemies do you find most difficult to defeat?

   

Time so far: 9 hours