![]() Walls collapse slowly and convincingly, rather than as sudden removals of pre-determined chunks. ![]() Now, 'procedural wall generation' might just be the most boring phrase in the English language, but in practice it means smacking the side of a castle with a bloody great rock, and watching it collapse into a shower of stony fragments. Getting to unleash the heavy weapons - for instance catapults - shows off Stronghold 3's procedural wall generation. Of course, you'll get to storm castles yourself, either at night or in broad daylight. A few peasants roaming around with torches will open up a few extra bright spots too.īarracks are useful for defending your kingdom. If you don't want to be caught unawares by an invading force stealing over in the dead of night, you'll need to build watchtowers around your castle's perimeter, then have your archers set them alight with flaming arrows - casting back the otherwise total darkness. Here, the dark cloud that's proven such a staple of strategy games is, quite, literally, darkness. It's potentially the night sieges that really show the game at its best, as well as introducing a neat new take on fog of war. A new weather system and day/night cycle means the likes of flickering torchlights adding atmosphere to a gloomy evening, while the reasonably large infantry battles feature each soldier up to his own distinct, tangibly combative thing rather than eerily raising and lowering his sword in perfect synchronicity with his mates. Reap what you sow, and if what you sowed was an enormous teddy bear shape with a vulnerable gap in its left ear - well, expect trouble. Placing buildings and walls is no longer limited to a fixed grid with fixed angles, but allows freeform construction, regardless of how insane or defensively useless the results may be. The move to a modern-day engine - in fact, the same one used in Ubisoft's great-looking if over-fiddly last Settlers game - makes all the difference. Stronghold 3 gets back to the singular joy of diligently constructing a big bloody castle, replete with its own economy and populace, with the better bits of the second game brought back to the fold in theory without the excessive micro-management. ![]() The reality was that you spent so much time fighting minor fires within your own walls - such as curbing petty crime - that it was maddeningly tricky to focus on bringing iron justice to opposing castle-lords. The offered fantasy was constructing a whacking great medieval castle then raising an army to tear down an opponent's stone fortress. Play Stronghold 2 was, by Firefly's own admission, a sequel more about feature creep than actual improvement to the formula.
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