Old Games I Still Love: Stronghold

Still in it's box on a shelf for me!

Ah, Stronghold where to even begin with this little gem? As a consummate 'turtle' in most strategy games the idea of building a heavily fortified castle is inherently appealing to me. It hadn't really been done before either, sure other medieval games and such had their castles but they were usually just big defensive towers. Stronghold on the other hand focuses purely on those medieval bastions, letting you practically build them brick by brick, placing down towers, walls and more to craft your ideal fortress. Everything from a wooden palisade to a multi-layered citadel and everything in between could be built given enough time and resources on hand.

There's also a fairly in-depth economic aspect to the game as well more in line with games like Settlers than Age of Empires. It starts off fairly simple with woodcutters huts and hunters huts to feed your peasants and provide material for building more structures you soon find yourself actually having to produce the bows, spears and armour of various troops whilst trying to balance increasing your peasant population to work and fight for you whilst also taxing them to train soldiers. Honestly, the economic side of the game reminds me of the Settler's series (though this has shorter production chains thankfully.) You could also use the marketplace to your advantage, have an abundance of iron but no stone? Then sell the excess iron to buy in stone. 

A wooden fort, everyone starts somewhere..

The campaign has a fairly cliche story but it was compelling enough to move the action along (there was even a short non-combat economic campaign). You started off building castles from wooden palisades and fending off wolves as you tried to gather food and resources and each mission saw new units or new economic structures or challenges to take on. Some missions did away with the castle building and instead gave you an army, tasking you with attacking an enemy stronghold, I wasn't personally a fan of them but they could be fun and more than a little satisfying when you figured out how to pull them off.

The sieges themselves are fairly spectacular to watch with hundreds of arrows sailing through the sky, trebuchet shots tearing chunks out of walls and pitch ditches bursting into flames. In my case I much preferred defending to attacking, simply because I love building castles, fortifying my bases and generally watch all those archers and crossbowmen I paid for putting the hurt on my opponents. It was made all the more impressive to watch due to the sheer amount of units that could be on screen at once, often hundreds of units from the cannon fodder spear-men to heavily armoured knights, archers, mace men etc.

"My lord.. The farms are on fire.. Again.."

The free build mode is where I sunk many an hour once the campaign had been exhausted where you could build in peace on a number of maps and only be attacked when you chose to be. As I said at the start, I am quite a turtle when it comes to strategy games so getting to construct the perfect castle and then spawn in enemies to test it was innately appealing to me. Sometimes I built sprawling citadels encasing all my peasants and production buildings behind triple thick walls and multiple gates, others I'd simply take the Helm's Deep approach and build a massive wall bisecting the map. The fact I could make the titular strongholds however I felt best was a lot of fun when paired up with the compelling economic issues. Did you want to keep all your production buildings inside but run into space or travel time issues? Or did you keep some of them outside of the protection of your walls at the risk of invaders poking your farmers and woodcutters with pointy sticks?

I could genuinely spend hours tinkering with the layout of my castles either for the sake of min-maxing them or just making them look cool, even copying the layouts of fantasy and real medieval castles as best I could. I recall me and a couple of friends using both free build and the map editor to try to recreate the battle of Helm's Deep, fun times!

Such a cozy little fort, I think I'll take it!

All in all this is the game that started it all, it isn't my absolute favourite in the Stronghold series but I like it enough that even now I sometimes reinstall it and play it to this day. If you are into building castles then I can heartily recommend Stronghold Crusader HD as it has far more content than the original. Stronghold Crusader however is an entire other blog post waiting to happen!