The matter is further complicated in the dumb AI that your units have. Take spearmen for instance. In many scenarios where you are given spearmen a hint is generally included telling you to keep them at the back and after they have thrown their spears, pull them back until they have ‘reloaded’ before sending them forward again. However, if Spearmen are supposed to be used this way, why then are they programmed to run into melee after throwing their spears? This generally results in the computer, which does not have to worry about scrolling screens, highlighting units, and other such human worries, demolishing your unit because its Spearmen seem programmed to fall back, away from your now jogging melee fodder, reload, and decimate them before they get there. Worse, if you put spearmen atop walls or in towers, and they manage to get a spear thrown before dying, they then proceed to head to the closet exit/stair case, casually strolling along, in an effort to pursue their target on foot. The lack of intelligence does not stop with spearmen either. Archers, by far the most important unit in the game, are not immune to bad decision making. On several occasions, after selecting a group of archers and clicking on an enemy target I have seen them loose a few arrows and then do nothing as the target moves out of range. Is it too much to expect that a unit would stay in range and continue to attack until it is dead?
This lack of intelligence by your units, and the seemingly inability to defend walls and towers with units on top of them makes controlling any combat an overly complex task of micromanaging in a game that already demands a plethora of micromanaging outside of combat. For a game that was trying to return to its roots as a castle building siege game, they seem to have put very little thought or controls around combat. This might be okay if troops were easy to come by and there was an expectation that any given combat would be high in casualties, but peasants (which are needed for every unit in the game) are very precious and aren’t available by the hundreds. This would seem to hint to me that battles aren’t supposed to be meat grinders, but if that is the case where are the detailed controls and intelligence that allows the units to be smarter, or at the very least survive long enough for a player, that is half way across the screen busily adjusting his food levels so his peasants stop leaving, to respond to the attack.
As a game whose focus and niche is castles warfare, way more thought should have been put into its execution. Units should not have issues getting on walls, off of them, and defending from them. There should be controls that allow me to tell a unit it is now defending a wall, or better yet it should be smart enough to realize that. There should be better controls for ground troops such as patrol (attack an enemy if he gets near), defend (attack an enemy only in a certain area), or aggressively attack (track the enemy until he is defeated). Instead the game feels as if combat was an afterthought.
So if combat is not as good, what about the village building and economic side? For the economic side they did stick true to their word and simplify this, which is another reason as to why I am disappointed with the lack of improvements on the combat side. As a fan of Stronghold 2 I was disappointed especially when I saw that they removed a few of my favorite things like the solar and castle kitchens, which I felt added to the idea of building a castle. Also gone are things like the gong collector, falconer, and torture chamber which I again felt really simulated what a castle might need to deal with. Some of these concepts are still included in a way, like gallows and other execution devices can be put around the village to increase the ‘morale’ of the peasants, but crime is no longer a growing infestation that needs to be dealt with directly, though some semblance of disease is still included. While this side of the game is okay I found that half of the buildings that can be used to manage happiness are not necessary or feasible in a scenario as you are generally too busy making sure your peasants have food, a definite sign of balance issues, and a church takes care of the rest. For me this turns it into a negative as the combat side, or lack their of, does not fill in the gaps that they removed.
As to the castle building I am again left wondering what exactly the developer focused on in developing this game. Without getting into too much detail I feel that Stronghold 2 had a much better system of building walls, attaching towers, and adding defenses. In Stronghold 3 inserting a tower, adding a gate house, or attaching a wall trap can often become a feat of precision mouse movements as things seem not to snap together as well as they did. So while you are trying to figure out how to get the brazier on the wall so your archers can fire flame arrows into the dark and see the enemy they are getting decimated with arrows. Again very frustrating in a game where you are rapidly trying to manage a village, build a castle, and attack or defend against an enemy army.
Finally, I absolutely hate the night cycle that they added. While in theory it seems cool, and visually it provides some eye candy, in execution and gameplay again seems to break down. While much of this may be due to the already frustrating or limited combat control, the level of complexity it adds pushes it way past enjoyable. Now those enemy archers decimating your wall units are invisible, until you can afford some type of light system (like a hay bale launcher), purchase it, place it (see previous paragraph), and light up the area they are in. Again like many other unit quirks, it still takes several seconds before your units recognize there are now visible enemies in range, and start attacking them. By the time all this is done you are usually left with a pile of bodies and enemies marching through your wall, which you can’t repair because the enemy is too close. Furthermore, mix in an enemy that disappears and reappears every time they walk through a shadowy area and the already sub-intelligent targeting of enemies by your units and night warfare becomes a nightmare. While the day night cycle does add a cool visual to purely economic scenarios I would have rather had more attention been put into combat controls and game polishing before they added night warfare.
In short Stronghold 3 is a game that has lost its identity and its castle building competitive advantage. For a game that was supposed to return to its origins of castle building and warfare it has fallen drastically short providing a rudimentary combat system that is frustrating to play and castle building that is finicky and at times downright annoying. By reducing the economic side of the game and not providing any type of improved building or combat experience Stronghold 3 now offers little to any type of RTS player be them combat and economic oriented.
