Worth buying or just rehash?
Lorini
Disclosure: I'm handling some community relations stuff for 2K on this game.
The game's available in some parts of the world already. Folks on various message boards (Stronghold Knights and Stronghold Heaven) seem to be pretty happy with it. Consensus seems to be that it's a step up from Stronghold 2 and that the fantasy elements are a solid addition.
I am quite interested in this game, but with NWN2 comming out and BC a month later it might have to be one I come back to much later.
There's a demo out for it.
I played it for about an hour, and couldn't take it anymore. The game is just horrible. The artstyle is horrendous, mixed with the graphics engine which seemed to be about 2 generations old.
The gameplay was very derivative and boring... the game overall just wasn't compelling in the least.
And this is coming from a guy who really liked the Stronghold series.
...please tell us what you really think. ouch! :pOriginally Posted by flyinj
Stronghold had great promise... and somewhere along the line they messed up all the castle building and war stuff and never got on track. I think most of us wanted "Lords of the Realm 2" with updated 3d and current gen technology. But it never quite happened in Stronghold, and of course Lords of the Realm 3 was horrible...
I loved stronghold 1 and crusaders, but after the disapointment with Stronghold 2 ,I'm done with the series. The preview I read about legends doesn't interest me at all.
I imagine my CGW/GFW review will be online at 1up soon, so I don't mind saying: steer clear of this one. Ugh. Just ugh.
Man, Firefly really had me with Space Colony. I loved that game. Then they go and do CivCity and Stronghold Legends. :(
-Tom
Oh man, I didn't want to hear that. Stronghold 1 & Crusader & Space Colony are among my favorite games. What happened over there?
Of course, I'm sure I'll still buy it to see for myself, but still....
Well, I've only had time to do the tutorial so far, but that at least seems pretty solid... I mean, not a lot new yet but without the horrible problems that SH2 had, which is honestly mostly what I was looking for...
I played the demo, which decided to sell the "capture the point" gameplay, rather than the castle building which is surely what you come to this series looking for?
Utterly uninteresting.
What were the horrable problems with SH2? I do not remember any.
So what is the feeling here on to buy or not? I was thinking about picking this up.
For me personality, it felt like everything I liked about the first one was gone. The game became a dumb down rts, instead of a castle sim.
I remember reading the guide and one of the tips they gave for a level was to build at least 30 archers. In the first game that would have been the perfect defense early on. Here it was necessary for mission 3 or 4. One time I actually saw enemies run thru the mountain next to my wall and got into my castle that way.
Last edited by Jab; 10-27-2006 at 06:35 AM.
What about the retail game, its now now, isn't it?
My only gripe about SH/SH2 that it was hard, if not impossible, to get a multi-player game. I think the big issue was that it took forever to build a big castle and army before you could go at it.
I think if they had some kind of starting stockpile of like 1000 weapons / armor and 10,000 of all other resources it would have made the multi-player mode a lot more desirable.
The issues with these kinds of games (not just the SH series) for single player is that all the "next scenario" ends up being is starting all over gain in a poorer position (less resources, room, etc..) with an enemy in a stronger position.
All you end up doing is surviving the initial attacks of the enemies to get your economy going. Once you cross that line, the games all play out the same way. The challenge is always in the first part and never in the second part and that is why I never finish these games.
Designers need to stop doing the same thing over and over and try and throw a new challenge at us instead of a slightly ramped up old challenge.
Firefly hasn't made a new game since Stronghold.
Although I liked Space Colony, it really played like Stronghold + The Sims...OF THE FUTURE!!
Space Colony was fun although short. The only thing I didn't like, well, down-right hated, was their personality thing. It seemed that everyone gravitated to hating each other.
I know some fire-fly people read this board, Ill take this opportunity to post a request for Space Colony 2, and what I want from it.
1. Drop the personality thing. Stats are fine, such as laziness vs activeness, but the Betty-sue hates Tammy thing has got to go.
2. Allow character education thing to persist between scenarios. If I spend a bunch of time to train Tammy into a top-notch cyber engineer, I do not want to lose that every single scenario.
3. It would be nice if we could even make our own characters / crew that will grow with us throughout the campaign.
4. Make the maps / levels, MUCH MUCH bigger. I would prefer to be on fewer worlds longer then more worlds shorter.
5. Go beyond the "more resources in less time" mechanic to increase difficulty. Try and make a lot of special challenges. Having the same challenges scaled up over and over gets old fast.
6. Scale up the 'scope' of the game play. The original game wasn't really a colony. It was more like "space outpost" or "space mining camp". It is cool to start that way, but at some point you should start to grow and become something bigger. After the initial outpost phase, go to a small 'base' size. From there you become a facility with 100 people in it and maybe take on a the challenge of terraforming the planet. After that you do not need pressure domes and go to making houses, factories etc... Then you become a real colony that has special challenges based upon the planet you are on. Maybe one world has heavy gravity which changes how things works, or light gravity, or a hostile native species, etc...
7. Lots and lots of R&D and cool gadgets you can get. Lots of improvements too. The tech tree should be very wide and somewhat deep. Most tech should carry with you from scenario to scenario. New tech trees can be added to give you more to research, and some things may need to be researched every scenario. For example, making crops that grow on each world is something you would expect to have to research on each planet you go to.
8. Multi-player. Yes, I want to fight other players. Lots of options here. Large worlds that take a while to get to the other players, unique or rare resources to fight over, maybe a trade war over certain products and such. A wide tech tree can give players a lot of options here.
9. A level / scenario editor.
There is a game I would buy and look forward to with eager anticipation. Maybe you can make that instead of Stronghold IV?
As an after thought, it would be really cool if you played a cooperation that 'leveraged' planets. You start off with only a minor amount of tech, personal, and money. The galaxy is wide open to you, but you can't go everywhere because you can't handle it. You purchase contracts to develop a world. How effectively you do it, determines your profit (and continuing profit). As a company you can then spend the money on bigger planets, R&D, personal, and what-not. Of course there are other companies doing the same thing. You want to get all the plumbs and leave them with the lemons.
You could even then 'revisit' a world you already 'won' when you have much better tech. Maybe your new tech will allow you to leverage something else about the world and make it much more profitable. IE: Maybe there was some world with no atmosphere you could not terraform. Now you can terraform it and that will allow the population to dramatically increase while the cost of operations dramatically decrease. Or maybe there were some alien artifacts that you could do nothing with before, but now you are advanced enough to 'understand' them.
Last edited by DeepT; 10-27-2006 at 01:35 PM.
Ok, after about 20 tries on the 5th scenario of the freaking EASY campaign, I'm ready to give up on this. I guess I'm no expert, but I'm hardly a newbie at the series. This is just ridiculous. I'm sure the playtesters may have thought it was easy, but there's no way on earth this qualifies...
This sounds like stronghold 2 again. Before the game was patched the third mission was just about impossible to do . The enemy sent an army so big unless you got lucky with log defenses you would never be able to win it.
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