War, war never changes. But boy, can taking down castles be a hell of a time. Stronghold: Warlords is the next entry of Firefly Studios’ long running castle-building RTS franchise, and the first one to leave the desert lands of the Middle East and enter the jungles of Southeast Asia. During a tumultuous period in Asian history, you will be fighting grand armies, toppling giant man-made fortresses guarded to the teeth, and managing peasants, who are a very finicky bunch.

Mechanics

The Stronghold games are relatively simple to grasp. You construct economic buildings, wall them in, then build your army for defensive and offensive purposes. You start with your storage house and granary, as these buildings hold all the resources gathered by your workers will be stored for construction projects. Since Stronghold uses a logistics system where workers need to transport the resources to these buildings so they can be used, coupled with the limited building space you have available, it is of utmost importance to thoughtfully plan your city layout to ensure maximum efficiency. I really enjoyed this aspect of the game as unlike most RTS games, where the whole world is your building landscape, stronghold wants you to be more organized and less sloppy with city layout.

The castle is the most fun aspect of the Stronghold games and defending it is a thrill. At first it starts as merely constructing some walls, but before you know it, you are placing towers, where your archers will have an even larger range of fire to rain hell upon any foolish armies that approach your fort, to ballista towers, mangonel platforms, and even a caged tiger to unleash upon the unfortunate men that have chosen your castle to raid. Seeing these defenses take down incoming hordes of units is never a dull moment, reminding me of a scene from Lord of the Rings (but with humans instead of Orcs).

But before any enemy can be taken on, peasants must be appeased as they are the backbone of your war machine. In Stronghold: Warlords the popularity mechanic is back, and this is where you can gauge the overall happiness of your peasants. Build a beautiful kingdom with low taxes, good quality housing and abundant food and they will flock to it, allowing you to put them to work or recruit them as soldiers. But raise the taxes too high or run out of food and they will abandon your kingdom, which will lead to a downward spiral and eventually, your doom.

To keep your popularity high whilst maintaining a healthy income, you will need to balance how many rations of food you give your citizens, produce enough to meet their demands and tax them just the right amount to fill your war coffers at a steady rate.

For example, your peasants love rice (like a lot) and providing them a full ration of rice will boost popularity by a substantial amount; give them double or triple rations and they will revere you, but rice stocks will of course deplete much faster if you do not construct enough rice fields. There are other food sources that can complement rice such as meat, vegetables, and tea, and though they do not give such a high popularity boost, they can help alleviate the pressure on rice stocks to keep popularity in the green.

The higher their happiness, the higher you can tax them. Of course, this will prompt a sharp decline of popularity but as long as it stays in the green there will be new arrivals of peasants until the population limit is reached. Building quality houses is another way to improve popularity while increasing your population limit. I mean, would you not be happy if someone made you a luxurious house to live in instead of a rundown shack that could collapse at any moment? But of course, the trade-off is that building higher quality housing costs more resources; resources that could be put elsewhere, which requires forward planning and is a balancing act for the player.

Economy

Managing the economy is addictive, especially since many things need to go through a production chain before you get a final product. For example, to produce clothes to make happier civilians, you need to build a silkworm farm for silkworm cocoons, which then must be transported to a silk workshop where silk is produced, and finally to a clothes workshop where the end product finds its way to your storage facilities. When it all comes together, it gives me the same tingly feeling of satisfaction I got from creating efficient production-lines in factory games.”

All this economy and popularity management leads to your army developing, which will gradually grow into more diverse units as you gather resources and produce the armaments needed. You will need to build workshops that can turn iron or wood into weapons and then build an armory to store these weapons. Of course, building placement is all important as weapons need to be transported, so the further the workshops are from the storage center and the armory, the longer it is going to take your workers to transport the goods you need to build your elite troops. As mentioned, building placement is vital for success but is also very satisfying when it all comes together. There is a special military building where powerful mercenaries can be hired for gold, and these units range from the powerful samurai, able to take on many units, even when outnumbered, to the sneaky ninja who can climb walls and harass enemy peasants.

Warlords

On to the titular warlords. Scattered around the map are neutral factions representing a different house (such as Ox, Rabbit, Mouse, and so on). They function as map objectives for the players to capture. Defeating a warlord and his minor army will bring him under your banner and act as a sort of vassal state, once under your command you will be able to use diplomacy points, which generate slowly over time (or faster with a consulate) to enact edicts. Edicts are a type of deal that can range from demanding a tribute of resources, different for each house, send a force to attack the enemy, or to kindly tell the warlord to build an actual castle around him with an army capable of defending him, making him much harder to conquer for other empires. I really enjoyed this mechanic because this adds an extra point of contention in different parts of the map, instead of just facing them when they come knocking on your door, plus the benefits of having a powerful warlord act as a sort of buffer zone.

But warfare is not the only way to get a warlord under your influence: diplomacy points can be exercised to pressure a lord to join your side. However, other empires do the same and can steal a warlord from right under your nose, and that powerful warlord you spent lots of points upgrading can suddenly betray you if you’re not paying attention to his influence meter. This adds another tactical layer to Stronghold: Warlords where words are your weapon in a tug of war of political pressure.

Content-wise Stronghold warlords is about average compared to the original titles. It has a small but increasingly challenging economic campaign, where the general goal is to either amass a certain number of resources while weathering the storm from incoming attacks or invading an enemy castle. It functions as a good tutorial to understand the mechanics while providing increasing challenges the further you progress. I found it quite enjoyable, especially in the later stages which can really push you to manage your economy and military well.

Besides that, there is a skirmish mode that can be played against a decent AI, with a handful of maps ranging from one on one versus challenges to maps that support eight players. I wish there were a bit more variety, but I have faith more content will be on the way and the current maps are well designed. In addition, there are multiplayer skirmish, community maps, and a free mode which allows you to build your empire without any threat of combat.

Performance

But not everything about Stronghold Warlords is “peacherino”. Unfortunately, on the technical side the game leaves a lot to be desired. From a visual standpoint, the game looks dated and flat, unit models look a bit blurry, and it’s all unfocused from the normal view distance. However, when zoomed in they do look better, but you will probably not be in the range while playing. It is a shame because the civilians have so much charm to them, from their animations as they collect their resources, to the children play-fighting, the pigs wandering off looking for truffles… the developers really put a lot of effort into making your city and people feel alive. It is unfortunate that the game visually detracts from that sensation and will probably age even worse than the older Stronghold games. Voice acting is also a bit hit or miss; some are alright, others have questionable accents, and the flamethrower unit’s voice burns my ears (you have been warned).

Performance also suffers in Stronghold: Warlords. Considering the visual fidelity of the game, and even though I do not have the strongest rig, an RTX 2070 Super and a i7-7770 should not be experiencing sharp framerate drops down to mid-30s to 40s the moment a few castle walls and buildings go up. Changing the limited graphics settings did not do much to alleviate the problem and I am not sure how weaker computers will hold up.

Conclusion

All in all, my hours of game time has been pleasant, Stronghold: Warlords retains its enjoyable gameplay loop of building a fort and defending it that the fanbase has grown to love about the series, and this new entry should be up to their expectations. The game is light on content and it really needs more if players are to keep interested in the long term. The gameplay loop is satisfying, the soundtrack is whimsical and when everything runs well it is great, but I sincerely hope the developers at least fix the performance issues.