Now in beta!
I was playing the Alpha and it's pretty good. The beta is open to everyone, it seems. It's sort of stronghold, sort of one of those "do something and then quit for awhile because it takes X amount of time for it to complete" kind of games.
http://www.strongholdkingdoms.com/
I'm in Oxfordshire, with the name JasonC. You don't get to pick the exact location of your starting village, just from a narrow list of starting regions.
Sure, I'll bite. Staffordshire (no choice in the matter), as the ever popular Itsatrap.
Certainly hearkens back to the original Stronghold, which I thought had a cleaner art style. Not excited about having a separate client, although it certainly allows for more functionality than a browser does.
- Alan
Looks like good old Stronghold! I'm KZarr village, Bosbury, Herefordshire.
I must say that the game moves at a VERY slow pace. Almost everything has a timer.
Also, as part of the tutorial, you need to defend yourself against an AI attack. But how? I have no troops and I'm already short on peasants let alone weapons and armor.
Downloading. I'll try out anything that has a bullet point of efficiently placing buildings.
tutorial attack is a bit meh, but basically you just shoot them all with your default castle attack.
Also this is Civony with some graphics.
Got an error. Won't let me log back in. Oh well. I don't like P2P models anyways.
For a nanosecond I thought this had something to do with Seven Kingdoms and got excited. Sigh.
Pogo Village east of Hazlemere in Buckinghamshire
Looks like you're rather far from me. Pogo is closest, but still not that near. As the game progresses, he and I might end up in the same faction or something.Originally Posted by Cobra
It's definitely got a slow pace. It's one of those games where, after the first day or two, you just fire it up to "check in" a couple times a day. You repair some walls, build a new thing, trade something, then log off.
It certainly gets a lot more interesting as the game progresses. In the early days like this, you're just trying to gain some ranks and get a basic economy going and stuff. Eventually you get a second village, you're trying to maximize honor because it's harder to rank up, building up a good defense becomes critical (there are rather large NPC attacks, and players get feisty).
Being part of a faction becomes a core piece of the game later. It's you and your fellow players against other factions, and you work together to send monks and coordinate attacks and so on. I think it's a pretty good MMO representation of Stronghold, actually.
My biggest gripe is with the "premium" pricing stuff. You buy firefly tokens and use those to buy a 7-day or 30-day "premium token" that lets you have a building queue and longer research queue, plus auto-scouting and auto-trading and stuff when you log off. You can also use these crowns to buy cards, which can provide some pretty important boosts and stuff (and you can trade in cards you don't want to get points back to buy cards you do want).
All of that is fine...I don't begrudge them wanting to make some money. I just think the prices are off. Even with the 50% "beta bonus", they should give you more crowns for your dollar. It's not outrageous, mind you. I wouldn't have posted if I didn't think it was worth checking out and some fellow Qt3ers would be into it.
I know how much people got into We Rule and only wished it had some real gameplay to go along with it. This sort of scratches that itch, I think.
So far this seems to have a stronger PvE component, which will hopefully give this some longer legs than the other f2p city-builders which rely on PvP.
This did get me to dig out my old copy of Stronghold, and I was reminded that I miss having goals. However, I do *not* miss having my buildings catch fire.
- Alan
This starts off quick but at this point I can't really do anything without waiting for an hour or two.
I jacked up my taxes while also increasing food production. I finally got an iron mine but hell if I can figure out how to actually make soldiers. I'm guessing I have to research up to armor and weapons first, though I swore I already did so.
I shouldn't have bought so many research points as now I'm strapped for gold, hence the jacking up of taxes.
So let me get this strait, you can use real world dollars to gain an advantage in game? If this is true, unless it is isolated to special servers, my interest in this game has dropped to zero.
My interest dropped to zero when I saw that it uses the "do something and then quit for a while, come back later to see results" mechanic. Paying money for in-game advantages would drop my interest into negative numbers.
Oh awesome. I sent a scout to a wolf lair and lost the fucking scout, which cost 100g.
it usually comes down to who the better organized alliance is
i'm in the bottom of wiltshire btw
Alright so 60 crowns is $5. At the moment with the beta bonus (50% more crowns), for $5 you get Premium access which allows you to queue things, something that is already offered in the beta. Or you can get a random pack of cards for 10 crowns, and other specific gameplay (industry, farming, whatever) cards for 12 or 8 crowns.
Seems like if you were to keep this game minimized so that you could stay on top of doing things instead of queuing them, the cards are the way to go considering they seem to offer substantial bonuses.
I think I may have made a mistake pumping so many research points into Orchard production. A simple Dairy farm gives substantially more food.
if you get your popularity to 100 you get 3x immigration looks like.
Karnisov do you know how to get houses that aren't tiny ass huts?
lol orchard production. lol.
its probably tied to the player rank, but been playing less than an hour so don't know yet.
pogo have you tried selling resources to the parish capital for gold, instead of raising taxes?
What resources? I need all of my wood and stone.
Though I can't figure out how to use the market anyways. Probably because I don't have a market and/or merchants.
Man I wish I could start over.
Er, not quite. Orchards are cheap to build (in terms of wood and stone), while dairy farms are more expensive. Still, I wouldn't dump too many points into any one thing, well, except maybe Arts research because that serves as an always-on multiplier.
Selling goods at the market is complex--you have to research markets, build a market, and then recruit a merchant (same screen as scout recruitment). I've been selling surplus goods, using the money to buy research points to increase production, which increases my surplus goods, etc. It'll work for a while until the point-buy prices get too high and the market prices get too low, but at the end I walk away with a bunch of "free" production techs.
The "do things now, come back later" thing is sort of okay, and it fits with my schedule. Mostly. What I don't appreciate is that the ability to queue things is a for-pay feature. It offends my design sensibilities and is a deal-breaker once the promo period wears off. It's supposedly a time/money tradeoff, except that they neglect the third option of "play something else."
- Alan
Err, I'm seeing 909w/684s for an orchard compared to 497w/166s for a dairy farm.
There's something fishy going on here. The brewery that I just placed (which requires a wheat farm that I don't have) has gone up in resource requirements after I placed it.
What the hell? How many systems in this game are going to be tailored toward screwing you hard the more built up you get?
What I'm seeing right now would be totally enjoyable for 5 bucks a month or for $50 a year or something.
This seems exploitable. I just upped bribes and food rations and in 1 minute I get 3 peasants! Then I can go back to taking a ton of their money but keeping rations at x3.
And it like at 123, I'm gonna get x4 peasants. And another x3 in 10 minutes, while I only have 18 gold in my coffers but I'm promising bribes of -660 gold.
I should probably stop this though since I'll just have more people eating food where I don't have the resources to build more food production.
What about the abandon current village option in the Settings menu? My village isn't fucked up enough yet that I'd be willing to abandon it but it seems like an restart option, only you get to keep your resources.
I doubt that will allow me to redo all of my research. I'm assuming research applies to the player, not to each village. Abandoning a village wouldn't make sense, since you can delete buildings and all that.
Also, my village is now named Pogohamwiltenshireton.
This was almost my kind of game. I won't do micro-transactions though.
Without buying the cards the game comes to a stop. For instance I really need to build a Market at this point. 2000 wood, 3000 stone. After 12+ hours I don't have enough stone to do it. The only other thing I can do is pillage with my scouts. That is the ONLY thing I can do with my time, other than play internet chat on their forums (its bad). I am lucky too. Building scouts is something you can easily lock yourself out of while pursuing a different strategy.
Pillaging could be productive. I could find stone to pillage if I was lucky but while I see stone out there I can't get to it before is gone. (I have managed to nab about 400) Everyone is short of the same resource it seems and I am in a corner plot where, with my village centered, more than a third of my screen is blank territory. There may be 40,000 stone just over the border in Clwyd or Cheshire. I wouldn't know.
I don't think there will be a critical mass of players for this game to be successful.
The point is that I do not want to be playing against someone's wallet. If I lose a battle I want it to be because the other player is a better player, not because he dropped 50 real world dollars on resources in game.
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