Stronghold Kingdoms

by Aethyna Aug 17, 2015 | 1 Votes | 2 Played | 0 Reviews

8 rate

Genres:

Strategy , MMO

Graphics:

Labels:

Empire Building , Building , Historical Setting , Medieval Age

Platforms:

Publishers:

Bigpoint Games , Perfect World Entertainment Take up the role of a ruler in this game and grow your village from a handful of buildings into an empire that can be reckoned with! Fortify your keep to deter even the most relentless invaders from your village. Conquer and capture other players’ villages and be strong enough to claim the parish as your own! Play now! Play Now Similar Games

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Summary Gameplay Community Graphics/ Sound Conclusion

Summary

Develop your village from a tiny settlement into a stronghold in this exciting and challenging MMO strategy game, Stronghold Kingdoms! Set up your resource production and trade routes to ensure that you’ll have enough resources to support your village’s and army’s growth. Build fortifications around your keep in the castle edit mode and place defensive archers and other units to protect your walls and keep from attacks. Spread out and increase your domain by capturing other player’s villages and perhaps one day, you’ll be strong enough to claim an entire parish as your own. Work with other players in the same faction to increase your faction’s influence by taking control of as many parishes as you can. It’s a ruthless player-vs-player world in Stronghold Kingdoms... do you have what it takes to rise up to the top?

Gameplay

After setting up everything, you can launch the game that will bring you to the interface. The interface for Stronghold Kingdoms may seem a bit unimpressive, but well, the game focuses more on the gameplay rather than the visuals.

Anyway, to start, you’ll first need to choose a world/ server you want to play in. Of course, the game will provide you with a recommended server but it’s still up to you to choose which server you want. Different server may drastically alter your gaming experience as the servers in Stronghold Kingdoms are separated by “age”. Servers that are in First Age are new servers and well, there will be less higher level players around to attack your small beginner’s village, making these servers perfect for new players. However, if you’re a vet and are looking for a challenge, you might want to search for a higher “age” server to play on just to get that experience you want!

Once you’re in the game, you’ll be prompted to place your village either manually or randomly. It’s really up to you which option you want, but for manually, you have to chance to spend some time trying to find a place with less high level villages while for randomly, you can start the game faster. After this is done, you’ll be introduced to the game mechanics and gameplay via your trusted advisor.

To begin though, it’s always wise to start by building up your resources or in other words, the economy of your village. The most important of all resources in Stronghold Kingdoms is definitely food. You’ll need to place apple orchards or other food-producing buildings near to your granary Food is vital in Stronghold Kingdoms as it allows you to increase your rations to your citizens and in turn, increasing their happiness and your village’s popularity. Do note that you can only build 1 structure at a time and if you fancy getting a building queue, you’ll then need to spend some real cash. Also, the process starts off with rather fast building time (within seconds), but as your village grows, your building time increases.

Popularity will increase your honor that will help your village to rise in rank and gain status in the kingdom. Take note that you’ll need to manually increase the rank of your village. Rank increases will give you research points that you can later invest into your research tree as well as opening up new options an researches to you. Popularity is also needed to attract new peasants to your village. You can also increase your popularity by building churches, decorative structures, and many other service-based buildings, or by lowering your tax rate.

The next resources, which you will want to focus on, in line are your wood and stone. These are important for construction. You’ll need to build woodcutters near to the trees and quarries on the stone deposits to start gathering the resources you’ll need. The game will show you the amount of wood or stone that you can produce prior to placing your buildings as well as their distances to the stockpile where all your wood and stone are stored. You don’t need to collect your resources like in some other MMO strategy games – the resources will transferred from its respective producing “factories” to the storage area by your people.

One of the interesting aspects of Stronghold Kingdoms is the castle building part. You can use different resources – wood or stone, to build your castle and of course, wood may not be a very strong choice to use for building but it is fast. To build a castle, you’ll need to make sure that your keep is enclosed. If not, your popularity will suffer and your defenses will have huge holes in them.

In terms of research, Stronghold Kingdoms have a very expansive research tree with plenty of advancements in various fields, namely industry, military, farming and education. Each type of research consumes research points and can be performed multiple times (up to 8 times) to increase its efficiency, bringing your village more benefits. More research points can be obtained by increasing the rank of your village.

Like other MMO strategy games, Stronghold Kingdoms also provide boosters that you can sometimes get for free and these boosters come in the form of strategy cards. These cards give your village a rather powerful boost to, for example, increase production rate or provide you with a lump sum of resources. There are also cards to shorten building time and many more. There are plenty of types of cards and you’ll get free cards as you go through the game and well, you can also buy more at any time using card points. These cards are important as they can be very advantageous to you when played at the right time, so be sure to only use them when needed!

In terms of PvP, Stronghold Kingdoms allows you to build up an army to attack other villages. These troops will be attacking not the village itself but the castles that the players have built. If your keep is captured or razed, your village will be lost and you’ll have to start over with a new village somewhere else in the game. Although you’ll still need to rebuild your village... from the scratch, which may suck for some people as they have probably spent ages, making their village look fabulous and everything, at least you won’t lose all of your research or resources!

Of course, if you’re the conqueror instead, well, you should be glad to know that you can take control of any many previously-player owned villages as you want in your parish. You can also invade villages in other parishes. The player or faction with the most parishes will own that area. The other players under your rule will then need to pay “donations” to the parish capital, so you can fortify the parish against outside attacks (i.e. attacks from other parishes). Interestingly, the map in Stronghold Kingdom is based on the real live map of United Kingdom (For those who are not from the UK, this includes Ireland, Wales, Scotland and England), so you might recognize most of the names of the locations in the game. It’s kind of fun to be able to conquer actual locations in a game, allowing you to feel like a true conqueror of old!

Community

Stronghold Kingdoms has a pretty vibrant community. Its Facebook fan page has over 135 thousand likes and as the game is about to be released to iOS and Android platforms, you can definitely expect a surge in player numbers within a couple of months after the release. After all, more players will mean more villages for you to conquer! Unlike Plarium’s MMO strategy games, Stronghold Kingdoms doesn’t have too much political feuds it seems in the game, but the game can be pretty brutal to new players as higher level players can just sweep in and capture the village you’ve spent hours building, forcing you to start all over again (well, almost anyway).

Graphics/ Sound

The graphics in Stronghold Kingdoms may not be as crisp as what you’ll be used to, if you are a major fan of Stronghold standalone games, but well, it’s free-to-play and it’s from the Stronghold franchise – it’s good enough for most people! In terms of music, the game features a couple of Celtic music along with Stronghold’s signature church choir music that are able to teleport you to the past! The church choir music contains that haunting echo effect that is pretty sobering in some way. There are also ambient sounds like birds chirping in the background.

Conclusion

In a nutshell, Stronghold Kingdoms is a great free-to-play medieval-themed and browser-based MMORTS that contains a pretty sophisticated gameplay and in-game mechanics which are the hallmarks of the Stronghold franchise. Take up the role of a ruler in this game and grow your village from a handful of buildings into an empire that can be reckoned with! Fortify your keep with layers of walls, moats and even traps to deter even the most relentless invaders from your village. Conquer and capture other players’ villages and be strong enough to claim the parish as your own! Will you be able to grow your village into a formidable empire in Stronghold Kingdoms? Well, play now and find out!

New Game Added: Stronghold Kingdoms

by Aethyna Aug 17, 2015

Take up the role of a ruler in this game and grow your village from a handful of buildings into an empire that can be reckoned with! Fortify your keep to deter even the most relentless invaders from your village. Conquer and capture other players’ villages and be strong enough to claim the parish as your own! Play now!