Stronghold Kingdoms - No Evil Rabbits Here

Stronghold Kingdoms is an online RTS where you can uhh...rule peasants or some such.

http://www.strongholdkingdoms.com/

There's a guide on how to play the game here:
http://help.strongholdkingdoms.com/i...

Anyways it's pretty much the world's slowest online RTS, but the redeeming feature seems to be that there are politics involved. You rule a tiny realm and rise in the ranks and eventually you can join a faction which is a portion of a house and try to conquer the realm. Even from the beginning you can rule a county by gaining the votes of the villages in the local area.

My not so strong hold looks like this:
IMAGE(http://img214.imageshack.us/img214/9422/stronghold.png)

I think the most entertaining part for me so far is that I took control of my county that was unattended and run both my village and the local parish. I invaded a neighbor's parish today for resources necessary to future success of my county and in return received a few angry words by messenger. I like that there are actions that require an element of risk or diplomacy. It just seems the only diplomacy I know is setting fire to someone's castle and taking their stuff.

I'm in World 3 in the county of Droitwich if anyone feels like joining. I'm too low level at the moment but soon maybe I can make a GWJ faction if there's enough interest.

I will crush you.

You forgot to mention it's on Steam. Well, it is. Now everyone will jump in, right?

Mildly interested? I'll check it out when I have some time on my hands, and then we'll see I guess.

A few years back I hoped that Dungeon Hero might help revitalize Firefly, so much for that. It looks like they are stuck in a not very pleasant place for game development.

They can't be doing too poorly because they had news of 500,000 registered members. The game is really pretty slow, but it's almost more interesting in that respect. You run a village, maybe a parish, maybe a county, and eventually someone can be the king. You can run multiple villages, but villages can also be destroyed or captured. The game really is a sort of medieval EVE Online. I stepped up to run a parish and I'm able to donate my own resources to benefit it, make builds, design the castle. I've got a county tax rate (what my parish pays the guy above me) that doubles the current parish income because the members of the county are of low rank and broke. I have county members still complaining the taxes are too high sending me mail that I have to try to deal with. Also, there is a war going on between houses in the next county over with each side trying to sway parish leaders (like me) to join for their side. In some respects the game is less than Stronghold (you don't directly control attacks) and in some ways it is more (the politics).

You can link your Stronghold Kingdoms account to your Amazon account and get a 7 day premium token and some cards. Check it out.

I tried this for a while back in beta and was sorely disappointed. Basically, it's Travian all over again, where military trumps all. Expect to be attacked mercilessly as soon as your protected period wears off.

Pfft. It's not that bad. I never get attacked, have 5 villages and run a parish ... and my faction is at war and I'm on a border.

But, yes, this is all about the military. The end game stuff is insane and I'm not particularly interested in it.

So, I checked this out while browsing free games on Steam. Right now, it almost feels like a Zynga FB game, which isn't very appealing.

Does the gameplay pick up once you get your economy going? Seems like now that I have units like Merchants and Scouts, I actually have something to do rather than log in twice a day and queue activity.

I played this back when it first launched and briefly ruled half of Wales before quitting due to the game become way to intensive.

It's a very fun game in some ways but it's typical of this type of game in that you gradually realize that you have to be at the game screen 24/7 and invest tons of real cash in buying cards in order to even stay alive.

It's one of those guys game where eventually a bigger fish will target you and you will NOT be able to defend from their timed attacks landing a ton of attacks 2 seconds apart so you lose all your cities even if you have the cards to defend them from spending real cash and then get forced to start over on a new area of the map.

I quit before it happened to me but i'd played enough to realize it was gonna eventually since i wasn't willing to spend the cash others were and was already spending far more time in front of the game than i could afford.

So unfortunately, while the concept is awesome and the game is really cool initially, i have to HEAVILY caution you folks to not get sucked into this...it's a life killer, a wallet killer, and a total bloodsucking vampire that will suck the life out of you then leave you a dried out husk with nothing for it.

STAY AWAY in spite of it's cool parts.

GioClark wrote:

Does the gameplay pick up once you get your economy going? Seems like now that I have units like Merchants and Scouts, I actually have something to do rather than log in twice a day and queue activity.

It will pick up and pick up and pick up and pick up and pick up till you can't possible keep up and then it will crush you while you try to grab an hours nap and you'll lose everything.

Eventually, if you live long enough and progress far enough it will consume every waking moment and make you forget about sleeping.

I speak from experience here as the formerly second most powerful person in Wales.

One of the features in castle mode is the ability to flatten your castle so you can see the full layout.. You could also view it in full 3d. This is one of the only screenshots i can still find of my experience and empire in that game. It's of one of my fully built castles in flat view mode:

IMAGE(http://imageshack.us/a/img138/3100/capturexe.png)

Castles like this are maxed out and pretty much best build possible, at least when i was playing, and required incredibly amounts of time and resources or lots of real cash spent on cards.

Such a castle was able to be completely demolished in 4 attacks timed 1 to 2 seconds apart with no chance to rebuild even with cards at which point you lost your entire city to the enemy invaders with zero chance of survival.

I had 10 of those, and i destroyed dozens....

And here's my prophecy if you become committed to playing this game....you will quit someday and it will look something like this (you being the defender) when this happens to all your cities within a couple hrs and you get completely reset.

And then you'll feel like sh*t for all the time you spent. and probably USD too.

Thanks Fuzzballx,

I was getting the feeling this was the case considering it asked me if I wanted to pay $$ every time I logged off in order to let the AI pick up some of the slack. I don't generally spend money on F2P anyway so this will probably be a one off.

My immunity expires in ~8 hours.