Stronghold Kingdoms MMO

[Edhel-dur]

Features

View game trailer

• View the brand new Stronghold Kingdoms trailer in dazzling HD.
• See what castle life was like in a living, breathing medieval world.

Build and expand

• Construct great castles to last the test of time.
• Layout your castle carefully to withstand even the greatest of armies.

Run the village

• Site your buildings carefully for maximum efficiency.
• Watch the village come to life and grow over days and weeks.

Join 1000's of Lords

• In a unique medieval world
• An interactive map helps you trade, scout, explore...

Arise Sir Knight!

• Sweep majestically through the ranks on your way to power
• Become the Steward, or sheriff, or King!

Hatch a plan

• Choose how and when to play vital strategy cards.
• Research new technologies to gain a vital edge.

Details----------------------------------------

Stronghold Kingdom is a new MMO RTS from Firefly Studios. It has been in development for quite a while, it is still in the beta however the data from beta to live will not be reset, meaning everyone will keep their villages.

The Goal of the game is to win Glory rounds. It's a little complicated. Basicly, you gain small ammounts of Glory Points for controling a parish, to bug ammounts of Glory Points for controling a province or even a country. However you cannot earn Glory Points if you are not in a House. Houses made of Factions, and Factions are made of players. So basicly you must first join/create a faction, in order to join in one of the many Houses the game has. To be clear, you personally do not gain the Glory Points, the House you are part of will. The more players you have in your House, the more territory you are likely to control. The more territory you control, the more Glory Points you get per day.

How do you gain territory? Simply enough either by waging war and barbaricly eliminating the opposition, sending monks to influence the election, or just strait up diplomacy and making other people your allies.

SHK is a really long macro oriented game. World1 is ending the 3rd round of Glory soon, after 245 days of play time.

The playable maps are: Great Britain(World 1 & World 2) and Germany (Welt 1), and soon to be added France (Monde 1).

Reading this, you might have gotten the idea that this game is similar to Travian or Tribe Wars. Well, you are correct, partially. Although SHK is of the same genre, the gameplay is much more different.

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I could talk all day about this game, but than the wall of text will just get bigger.

You can download and try the game yourself here. Oh ! it's Free To Play.

 

[Dr Super Good]

Oh ! it's Free To Play.

I am sure there is some catch which gives paying players an advantage.

 

[L2love]

That's what makes all these type of games annoying is that advantage doesn't make anything feel fair.

 

[Gilles]

That's what makes all these type of games annoying is that advantage doesn't make anything feel fair.

I don't complain when I'm receiving something for free.

 

[Edhel-dur]

I am sure there is some catch which gives paying players an advantage.

Of course there is. The catch with this game is that you can buy Strategic cards and Premium Tokens. The Strategic Cards give you some benefits such as increase apple production by x3 for the next 12 hours. The Premium Token allows you to re-arrange the buildings in your village and some automatic AI options when you are offline. (like auto-trade, will trade every 1 or 2hours while offline).

As a player who won't pay for this game at all, you can receive up to 1 one random card ever 3 days. Once you have 5 cards of any type, you can than transform them into card points, and get the cards you want to have.

If you buy the Premium Token (which is hmm 5 euro ?) you will receive 1 one random card per day. If you buy a second Premium Token later on, alongside reaching the ingame rank of squire, you will receive 2 cards per day.

The cards and card points have an account range, so if you play on both world 1 and world 2, what card you've obtained in world 1, you can see it and use it in world 2. Ofc if you than use it in world2, you can't use it anymore in world1.

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Of course there are some ppl who are just massive card users. But really in this game, at the end of the day. strategy is what's important. How you've build your castle, how you've planned your attacks, how you've coordinated your armies, how you've thought out your campaign.

On the german server my friend and I wanted to take out a rank 7th player, massive card user. We were in top 300, receiving 2 cards per day. He had 7 villages because he was higher rank, my friend had 4 and I had 3. We've spent like 1-2 weeks of doing nothing but gathering armies. Than in one night, we sent everything we had on him, we wanted kind of the Blitzkrieg attack.

We failed

Being a massive card user certainly helped him defend, but that's not why we failed. His castles were moderatly desinged. Each attack left a huge whole into his defenses on all his castles. We failed because the attacks had to be arranged quickly (you can arrange how you want your army to attack) to allow us a perfect timing. We screwed on the timing. If I would have made better calculations, and have each wave of units in the order I wanted to, I would have razed 3 of his villages. Also we chose a bad arrangement of our archers which were our first wave.

 

[Dr Super Good]

The major advantage of premium content in this game is the reduction in time. You might be of an equal city number to him but if he is playing premium and using cards he will just out produce you unless you do the same. He is stil beatable via massive multi attack stratergies (obviously 14-20 cities from many people against his 7 will win just through superiour production) but on equal city numbers even with perfect attacks you are not likly to win.

 

[Edhel-dur]

I agree.

But it rarely falls to any 1v1. Here is the thing, ussually people do not attack each othre because it costs honor. Honor is basicly the experience bar you have in order to be able to unlock and complete researches.

If you want to attack a player who is a lower rank than you are, the lower he is, the more honor it will cost you. In order for you to get rid of a lower rank player, it's more profitable to have someone else do it for you. If you yourself are a lower rank player, it might even cost you next to nothing to attack a higher ranked player.

Honor also can go into negative values. You don't lose your level or researches, but being in the negative means two things. Firstly that you will take more time to level-up. Second that while your honor is in the negative, you cannot launch attacks untill you are back at 0.

This said, that's the reason why players do not attack other players without a certain goal to justify the honor loss. Furthermore the card users most likely will outrank you, so them attacking you might not be worth it.

Even so, okay you get into a 1v1, he is card buyer and he captures you and you are left with 0 villages.

Than yes, you have to respawn, but given that you already have researches completed, crawling back up will take less time.

Personally I feel that the game is not about having the highest rank for yourself, it's about being able to wage a war when needed. Most likely, in a war, you will not be pitted all by yourself against a card user, you will either join an attack formed by other players, or you will be told to raze 1-2 villages of a player who is near your caliber of play.

That's just how SHK rolls.