RATING:
Pros: Lots of cool features with a definite emphasis on strategy and long-term gameplay.
Cons: Graphics are a little bit dated and the player population doesn't seem well spread.
Graphics: 6
Performance: 9
Gameplay: 8
Overall: 7
After having a first look at the game last week, ee took some time out to take a more advanced look at Firefly Studios' free to play Empire building MMO Stronghold Kingdoms, in it, players get the chance to found a village, train an army and look to expanding their own mediaeval empire facing off against players and AI factions. Throughout the course of our reporting career we have played an unfathomable amount of these Empire building strategy games and so it is often with caution and a hopeful optimism that we explore them simply hoping that this time we'll see something different.
The first thing that we did like was the World Selection choices. There are currently three different world designs that we could choose from; the initial European map and the United States map, as well as the welcomed addition of the new United Kingdom map! With the first two, as they are much larger areas, the maps are broken down into territories and city provinces, whereas the United Kingdom map is broken down into Counties and even individual towns can be found, which makes sense as the UK had a very broken up kingdom back in the middle ages (as opposed to the United States that didn't even have a middle ages... at least not one with European colonists and a mediaeval period).
So for our starting location we were able to choose our home county Lancashire, though we started a little bit further north of the town where we actually live, we had eyes set on it from the beginning to one day rule over it (absolutely no chance this was happening any time soon). The only problem we had was that whilst we wanted to start in Lancashire it was a low populated region, meaning not many (we actually didn't see any) players nearby and so the MMO element wasn't really there for us during our play test and was more like a single player strategy RPG, albeit a pretty interesting one.
The tutorial does a good job of guiding players through the key features, but where the tutorial glosses over the in-depth details the official wiki more than makes up for it providing an absolute wealth of information for players any time they get stuck. What we did notice with both the tutorial, our general perusal of the game and the wiki is that it is actually ram packed with features. So often these strategy MMOs follow a very simple and generic set of mechanics, using basic tech levelling up, villages/bases having lots/premade spaces that you construct buildings upon and relatively simplistic resource acquisition and spending. The same cannot be said for Stronghold Kingdoms, the organisation aspects is extremely detailed and it seems a lot of the features that individual games might use as their primary core feature Stronghold Kingdoms have taken them all and put them all into one game. There's so many aspects of the game to talk about we can only unfortunately really focus on some of the key things that we liked...
Strategy Cards. An interesting Trading Card Game element is implemented where players can acquire strategy cards that come in numerous flavours giving everything from single one-off production boosts, instant resources, troop bonuses and more or Timed cards where the player gets an ongoing benefit from the card for a set period of time. There are hundreds of these cards for players to acquire and use as they wish, even the choice of trading your cards in for points to purchase a specific card that you want. Cards can be gained through gameplay by completing quests but more commonly they are acquired through the Booster Packs in the game store, purchased with Crowns that can be earned occasionally in game or bought with real-world currency. We are suckers for Booster Packs and the game even incorporates a rarity system with different cards offering extremely powerful bonuses, but all cards have a level prerequisites that players must reach so new low-level players can't simply purchase awesome cards and make the game pay to win. How balanced this is at later levels and how much higher ranked players must rely on purchasing cards we can’t really comment on.
Second up was the Research Tree, which whilst looking like most technology trees in other games with a long list of branching technologies that players must spend points in to unlock, with advancement through the tree opening prerequisites to unlock more advanced technologies, the truth is there was an extra added level of detail that makes this one of the best tech trees we’ve ever seen. Each technology has a number of research points that players can put into it, unlocking it with simply one point, but the more points they put into a technology the more direct benefits they get by increasing their boosts. For example, early on we had to place a Dairy Farm for our quest which required the Dairy Farming technology, not knowing that we would unlock the Dairy Farm building with one point (due to different views in which you can examine the research tree) we believed you had to put the maximum number of points in a technology to gain access to it, similar to many other games. The result was that we had access to a dairy farm after one point and then maxed out its production so that we were the best cheese farmers in Lancashire! Similarly going into the "Justice" technology for each point a player puts into "Justice" they will unlock a new building: Stocks, Burning Post, Stretching Rack and Gibbet, that can be placed into their village, each with their own boost effects.
However, some technologies such as the "Command" technology act as a pre-requisite to other technologies, unlike Sid Meier's Civilisation style pre-req where once you know a technology it instantly links to the other linking techs, instead the needed pre-req was unlocked for different advanced technologies depending on how many points were put into the initial "Command" technology e.g. with a single point in "Command" we unlock the "Conscription" tech, two points unlocked the "Long Bow" tech, three points the "Pikeman" tech and so on. Each of these new techs were their own branch, similar to Dairy Farming, which improved the quality of that specific unit the more points you put into them. The great thing is that it offers up such an open customisation for each player, far greater than any other system we've seen, due to the sheer number of available technologies it really does add a unique element to each player’s Empire to focus on their own personal priorities instead of being forced down a set route.
Building a village was extremely customisable, players can move around their buildings and pretty much place anywhere on their available land creating a real hustle and bustle village/town/city, something that is repeated each time they gain access to a new fledgling village as they expand their territory. Each village also comes with its own Castle, here players have a more Castle Defence style strategy by manually placing down walls, towers, traps and housing various defensive units. We didn't get to play that much combat due to the time it takes to build up a decent sized standing army, however you do get a number of options when attacking enemy villages/towns such as being able to raze, pillage, capture and more, depending on what your strategy is and purpose for attacking. Players get to place down their troops around a targets borders, able to send out scouts to survey the defences beforehand, and then send whichever and however many troops into the battle as they like, which can take a number of hours depending on how far they have to travel. Afterwards players get a full battle report and are able to watch the battle as it developed.
Like we said, the game is extremely feature packed and some stuff we weren't even close to being able to test such as the vassal system where players can become vassals of their chosen Liege Lord providing extra PVP antics and a little extra protection from potential enemies. There are so many options in the game players will have to take their time planning their strategy out, the biggest downfall from many is the amount of time you really have to commit to this game, it's not one that you can sit down playing for a few hours as most actions take a long time to complete, but if you're looking for a game to jump in and out of every so often then we definitely recommend it.
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