Stronghold 2 Impressions

On the surface, Stronghold 2 looks to be a simple 3D version of 2001's Stronghold, an enjoyable real-time strategy game that let you construct a medieval castle, establish an economy, and battle armies of invaders. But upon closer inspection, it's clear that Stronghold 2 looks to improve and evolve the gameplay of the original Stronghold in many different ways. The end goal is no less than to bring the highs and lows of the medieval world to life. Developer Firefly Studios recently visited GameSpot to give us a first peek at this real-time strategy game.

While popular culture likes to portray medieval life as idyllic and in harmony with nature, the truth of the matter is that life consisted of a grim and arduous existence, though not one without its high points. To capture this, Firefly has expanded the economic system from the first game by adding new economic "chains" that you must deal with.

For example, the original Stronghold games didn't address the delicate problem of waste disposal, a huge problem during the Middle Ages, especially considering that most townsfolk simply dumped their bodily wastes into the streets. In Stronghold 2, piles of "rubbish" will accumulate in the streets, eventually creating a noxious cloud that can cause disease. Even worse, rubbish will cause a population explosion of rats that will transmit disease even further. To address these problems, you'll have a couple of new options, including the ability to create a gong farmer, whose job is to literally cart off waste and dump it into a pit. And to deal with the rats, you can build a falconer's post, and a falconer will unleash his bird of prey to gorge on the rats. Another new economic chain involves bees. Beekeepers harvest bee's wax, which is turned into candles by candle makers. The candles are then used by priests to illuminate churches for services, which make your people happy.

It's not simply enough for Firefly to add more economic chains, though. The developer felt that in the first game, peasants acted too much like automatons by going back and forth to perform the same job over and over again. To infuse more of a sense of medieval life in Stronghold 2, your peasants will now actually do more, like attend worship services at the church or drink at the local tavern (if there are a bunch of peasants drinking, one can even get up and dance on a table). This will address another issue the developer had with the original Stronghold: that churches and inns were a bit too abstract. Now, instead of having to rely on a report to gauge the effectiveness of your inns and churches, you can simply observe their effects on your peasants.

The peasants illustrate low, gritty medieval life. However, at the opposite end of the spectrum are the nobility, a group that plays a larger role in Stronghold 2 as well. At the top of the order is the lord of the castle, who is essentially your character. A new concept in Stronghold 2 is the idea that your lord can accumulate honor, which will play an important role in the strategic parts of the game, though Firefly isn't revealing details on this system quite yet. To earn honor, a lord simply needs to live the good life, as well as be a good steward. For example, faithfully attending church and being a role model for peasants can earn you honor. To use another example, throwing a feast will also accumulate honor for you. Of course, the bigger the feast, the better. (While peasants are still stuck with bread, cheese, apples, and beer, Stronghold 2 will introduce royal foods that must be harvested, including geese, pigs, eels, wine, and vegetables). Yet another way to earn honor is to build a monastery, a place where monks spend their lives "illuminating" (copying by hand) books. The more books in your library, the greater the honor earned, though this represents a long-term investment

Tearing Down Castles

Overall, there's a much greater emphasis on economics in Stronghold 2, with approximately 60 percent more buildings to construct than in the original Stronghold. That said, the game will also feature improved combat, though Firefly director Simon Bradbury noted that the developer is trying to keep a balance between economics and warfare in the game. This time around, you'll face a variety of foes, including rivals and Vikings, the famed seagoing raiders of the era. Your job will be twofold. So when you're not defending your castle against assault, you'll be trying to figure out how to bring someone else's castle crashing down around him or her. Once again, you'll have to construct elaborate castle defenses, as well as build a variety of craftsmen shops to fashion armor and weapons for your men. Another new detail in Stronghold 2 is that the number of knights you can enlist depends on the amount of honor you've accrued.

There's also a greater emphasis on siege warfare. One of the gameplay concessions made for the first two Strongholds involved the fact that your troops could use their weapons to chip away at enemy walls, eventually knocking them down. While fun, it was highly unrealistic. Now when faced with a castle wall, you'll either have to scale it using siege ladders and towers, or you'll have to knock it down using siege weapons. On the flip side, castle design will also play a much more critical role in the game, because a well-designed castle can withstand a huge assault. You can create inner and outer walls, as well as designate rally points. So if the enemy penetrates one defensive line, you can order your troops to fall back to the next one. The artificial intelligence is designed so that your pikemen will hold off attackers and pin them to walls while the rest of your troops fall back.

The new 3D engine allows the developer to model the interiors of all buildings, and this plays a key role in combat. Mouse over a tower, and the walls disappear, allowing you to see the multiple levels and, more importantly, the tight, winding staircase contained therein. Invaders will now have to battle their ways up these narrow stairwells, meaning a handful of defenders above can hold off superior numbers moving up from below. (In keeping with historical accuracy, all stairwells wind their ways clockwise, with the idea being that right-handed swordsmen will have difficulty swinging their swords in such enclosed areas.)

Speaking of which, the most obvious improvement in Stronghold 2 is the upgrade to a fully 3D graphics engine, as opposed to the 2D, isometric graphics of Stronghold and Stronghold: Crusader. According to Bradbury, the 3D engine not only provides the game with a much more modern look, but also allows for improvements to the gameplay in a number of ways. Castles make excellent 3D objects, given their relatively blocky shapes and huge sizes. As a result of the new 3D engine, castles now have an appropriate heft and weight to them, and they appear as much more formidable structures. More importantly, the 3D engine makes it a lot easier to build castles. In fact, one of the problems that plagued the first Stronghold games was that it was far too easy to not see a critical gap in your walls until it was too late...and the enemy came pouring through. In Stronghold 2, you can toggle to a simple top-down view that lets you instantly see any holes in your defenses.

The new 3D engine, which was created in-house at Firefly, is certainly beautiful. While Bradbury said it won't feature a day/night cycle or different seasons, it will render a wide range of good-looking locales, including estuaries, uplands, and plateaus. The world of Stronghold 2 feels alive thanks to the swaying trees, the glittering water, and the fauna, which ranges from hawks that soar in the sky to rats that scurry about on the ground. Another advantage of the 3D engine is that the game designers can use motion-capture data to create a huge library of movements, so characters will no longer be limited to just a handful of animations.

Firefly has been working on the game quietly for a while and Stronghold 2 is currently nearing alpha, which means that almost all the pieces are in place. Still, Bradbury says that he expects four to five months worth of play balancing, bug squashing, testing, and polishing before the game is totally finished. Still, at this point, Stronghold 2 is shaping up to be a very promising successor to Stronghold, and it appears to be one of the real-time strategy offerings to keep an eye on in 2005.