Stronghold Review
Stronghold is a real-time strategy game set in Medieval England. You'll need to build a village and provide for your peasants needs while collecting the resources necessary to build and maintain a castle to defend your holdings.
Stronghold is part castle defense and siege, part medieval economic simulator. In fact, the game comes with two campaigns, one military, one economic. The military campaign requires the player to build enough of an economy to fund the war effort and the economic campaign requires just enough of a defense to handle roaming bandits and wild animals. For those who just want to build, the game can be played in a free build mode without specific goals.
In the military campaign, you are moved through a series of missions as you try to regain the country from four usurper lords. Each of the missions are primarily of the build a castle, withstand an assault variety, with the available fortifications and defenders increasing in strength and sophistication as the campaign progresses.
The economic campaign does not follow a storyline, and is more of a series of scenarios with one or more economic goals (produce 100 cheese, 10 swords, etc.). The game's economic model is primarily concerned with keeping peasants fed and providing resources for castle defense and construction. Most structures are of the primary resource gathering variety, but there are some secondary processing structures such as those that take wood and iron to make weapons.
