Stronghold Legends Game
Shutdown pc software free. Many tools don’t give you that option though and the computer has to be left on until you come back to it.In Windows you can use the built in tool shutdown.exe from command prompt or a batch script to log off, shutdown, restart, abort system shutdown, set a timeout for shutdown to xx seconds etc, but many users are not comfortable using the command prompt.
Stronghold Legends: Steam Edition takes the beloved castle building series and plunges it into myth and legend with three unique factions and new Steam-exclusive content. Play as King Arthur and command his Knights of the Round Table, ally with the demonic Vlad Dracula or relive the heroic saga of Siegfried of Xanten in 24 story missions. Stronghold Legends is a real-time strategy game developed by Firefly Studios and published by 2K Games in 2006. It follows in the series of Stronghold and Stronghold 2.
Stronghold Legends Review Say good-bye to the historical authenticity of Strongholds past and hello to one generic, seriously flawed fantasy RTS. Stronghold Legends is a real-time strategy game developed by Firefly Studios and published by 2K Games in 2006. It follows in the series of Stronghold and Stronghold 2. Stronghold Legends is Strategy video game developed by Firefly Studios and published by 2K Games.It was released for windows on October 13. Oct 27, 2009 Stronghold Legends: Steam Edition takes the beloved castle building series and plunges it into myth and legend with three unique factions and new Steam-exclusive content. Play as King Arthur and command his Knights of the Round Table, ally with the demonic Vlad Dracula or relive the heroic saga of Siegfried of Xanten in 24 story missions.
Say good-bye to the historical authenticity of Strongholds past and hello to one generic, seriously flawed fantasy RTS.
By Brett Todd on
It's gotten to the point that you don't know what you're going to get when you open the box of a new Stronghold game. The castle-building franchise from Hartford's Firefly Studios has gone through some significant changes over the past two years, but the latest version throws the whole formula out the window. Stronghold Legends moves the series out of the history books and into D&D-styled real-time strategy territory with mythical heroes, dragons, and dwarves. Yet while this is admittedly a nifty idea, the switch from reality to fantasy kills the historical authenticity that has long been a trademark of the Stronghold line. Even worse, everything seems to have been crowbarred into the aged Stronghold 2 engine, resulting in a generic RTS that has more than a few serious technical and design issues.
The actual gameplay in Stronghold has little to do with the earlier games in the franchise. Here, instead of building a castle and getting knee-deep into the nitty-gritty of what it was like to live during the Middle Ages, you sign up for three campaigns out of medieval mythology. In the opener, you take on the role of King Arthur, battling against the Saxons for control of Britain. In the others, you play as Siegfried, the German dragon slayer and star of a Wagnerian opera, and Vlad the Impaler, the Transylvanian Turk-killer best known today as the bloody inspiration for Dracula.
But nothing of interest has been done to develop these storylines or settings. Buildings follow the RTS template and feature barracks, armories, granaries, and so forth. Resource gathering goes beyond the usual food, wood, and stone, but it does so by adding an annoying level of micromanagement to what should be a straightforward grind of building armies and attacking the bad guys. A game this simplistic probably shouldn't demand the collection and processing of any resources, as mission objectives always involve straightforward building armies and killing enemies.
All of the soldiers featured in each faction are virtually identical. There is little difference here whether you're fighting on behalf of the evil forces of Dracula or the noble knights of King Arthur. Also, since the units themselves are generic, the gee-whiz factor of getting to play Count Blah and his evil minions in an RTS fades quickly. You get little aside from the same old pikemen, archers, crossbowmen, and swordsmen. There is only so much that a developer can do with a medieval setting, of course, but no effort was made to provide significantly different troops to represent the nationalities and time periods represented. A millennium passed between the King Arthur campaign of the mid-400s and the Vlad campaign of the mid-15th century. You would think that more than the color of the shirts would have changed during that time.
At least the three sides vary quite a bit when it comes to the menageries of mythological beasties that they can throw into battle. Heroes like Arthur, Merlin, Siegfried, and Vlad have special powers that give them the ability to pull off feats like casting spells, knocking down walls, and summoning magical creatures. In the Arthur scenarios, you have access to heroic knights and wizards straight out of Malory; in the Siegfried ones, you deal with figures out of Norse legend such as frost giants; and in the Dracula missions, you get to play with Halloween refugees like creepers and werewolves. All of the units fit perfectly into their settings and make the game feel like a collection of folktales come to life.
Yet while these beasties add color to Stronghold Legends, and some cool moments like giants stomping pesky soldiers with their feet and Merlin blasting archers with lightning bolts, they don't do much for gameplay. For starters, most are underpowered. Dragons, for instance, are second-rate compared to Tolkien's Smaug and can be taken out by well-placed archers. Giants can be ganged up on by regular infantry grunts like pikemen and felled quicker than you can say fee-fi-fo-fum. And just breathing on the frail Merlin seems to kill him. More play testing was also needed to root out some big problems with mission design and artificial intelligence. Most missions are laid out in an extremely linear fashion. You start at point A and kill everything until you reach point B, you defend a fortress until the clock runs out, and so on. But lack of imagination is the least of the game's issues. Enemy troops often continue patrolling mindlessly and actually ignore huge columns of your soldiers even after you've just smashed down or climbed a castle wall. They often don't react to crossbowmen or archers firing away at them, either, and sometimes choose to walk away from battles or abandon sieges. The narrator who provides tips on enemy attacks frequently comes out with lines like, 'Woodsmen have seen a band of enemy troops heading this way!' right before they turn around and head back home. The game was obviously shipped without a fully functioning AI.
Stronghold Legends Game Engine
It also wasn't shipped with a modern graphics engine. Stronghold Legends looks like it was made with the same dated 3D technology that powered Stronghold 2, which unfortunately means that it looks like it was released around 2002. Visuals are drab and dingy overall, with blocky castles, dull building styles with little in the way of convincing detail, and terribly animated units that wobble back and forth when they run, like packs of chain-mail-clad Fat Alberts. Because there is no collision detection, battles between human armies immediately degenerate into undulating, colored blobs with no way to tell what's going on or who's winning.
Audio quality is a bit better, thanks to suitably cheesy voice acting during scenarios and soldiers' shouts during charges that really get the blood moving. Lines are repeated way too often, though, and frequently misstate what's actually going on. Once per mission, you'll usually hear something completely incongruous such as, 'The enemy's ladders are on the walls!' even though you're not actually defending any walls at the time.
And even though Firefly should know its way around this engine by now, there are some serious bugs here. Crashes to the desktop are an infrequent occurrence, but the big problem is that units rarely respond properly to commands. They run by targeted enemies and often turn their backs on foes, giving them a free shot or two at you while you slowly rotate around to attack. Mass attacks directed at specific baddies always result in some units attacking and many others just standing around cooling their heels. It's best not to attack directly at all, as you're more likely to get everyone in on the action if you move close to the enemy and let the AI take over from there. Installing the version 1.10 patch didn't seem to rectify any of these issues, either.
There are some appealing alternatives to the campaigns, although considering all the gameplay problems and bugs, it's hard to contemplate why anyone would want to bother with them. Still, the three Legends Trails sets of linked skirmish maps is an intriguing idea that plays like a trio of solo ladders. Custom skirmishes with up to four players can also be played, both online and off. There does seem to be a fair number of people looking for matches online, too, so you can find games pretty easily. And a map editor is also included for players who want to roll their own skirmish scenarios.
The developers were obviously going for a you-got-your-chocolate-in-my-peanut-butter moment here by throwing D&D into their medieval simulation series, but Stronghold Legends is just another second-rate RTS. While incorporating giants and dragons into the mix may seem like a natural fit these days, as any game with castle walls in it seems to demand the addition of Tolkienesque beasties to knock them down, you've got to do more than just toss such creatures in with generic armies and buggy gameplay. This is an interesting concept that deserved more careful attention than the designers gave it.
More play testing was also needed to root out some big problems with mission design and artificial intelligence. Most missions are laid out in an extremely linear fashion. You start at point A and kill everything until you reach point B, you defend a fortress until the clock runs out, and so on. But lack of imagination is the least of the game's issues. Enemy troops often continue patrolling mindlessly and actually ignore huge columns of your soldiers even after you've just smashed down or climbed a castle wall. They often don't react to crossbowmen or archers firing away at them, either, and sometimes choose to walk away from battles or abandon sieges. The narrator who provides tips on enemy attacks frequently comes out with lines like, 'Woodsmen have seen a band of enemy troops heading this way!' right before they turn around and head back home. The game was obviously shipped without a fully functioning AI.
It also wasn't shipped with a modern graphics engine. Stronghold Legends looks like it was made with the same dated 3D technology that powered Stronghold 2, which unfortunately means that it looks like it was released around 2002. Visuals are drab and dingy overall, with blocky castles, dull building styles with little in the way of convincing detail, and terribly animated units that wobble back and forth when they run, like packs of chain-mail-clad Fat Alberts. Because there is no collision detection, battles between human armies immediately degenerate into undulating, colored blobs with no way to tell what's going on or who's winning.
Audio quality is a bit better, thanks to suitably cheesy voice acting during scenarios and soldiers' shouts during charges that really get the blood moving. Lines are repeated way too often, though, and frequently misstate what's actually going on. Once per mission, you'll usually hear something completely incongruous such as, 'The enemy's ladders are on the walls!' even though you're not actually defending any walls at the time.
And even though Firefly should know its way around this engine by now, there are some serious bugs here. Crashes to the desktop are an infrequent occurrence, but the big problem is that units rarely respond properly to commands. They run by targeted enemies and often turn their backs on foes, giving them a free shot or two at you while you slowly rotate around to attack. Mass attacks directed at specific baddies always result in some units attacking and many others just standing around cooling their heels. It's best not to attack directly at all, as you're more likely to get everyone in on the action if you move close to the enemy and let the AI take over from there. Installing the version 1.10 patch didn't seem to rectify any of these issues, either.
There are some appealing alternatives to the campaigns, although considering all the gameplay problems and bugs, it's hard to contemplate why anyone would want to bother with them. Still, the three Legends Trails sets of linked skirmish maps is an intriguing idea that plays like a trio of solo ladders. Custom skirmishes with up to four players can also be played, both online and off. There does seem to be a fair number of people looking for matches online, too, so you can find games pretty easily. And a map editor is also included for players who want to roll their own skirmish scenarios.
The developers were obviously going for a you-got-your-chocolate-in-my-peanut-butter moment here by throwing D&D into their medieval simulation series, but Stronghold Legends is just another second-rate RTS. While incorporating giants and dragons into the mix may seem like a natural fit these days, as any game with castle walls in it seems to demand the addition of Tolkienesque beasties to knock them down, you've got to do more than just toss such creatures in with generic armies and buggy gameplay. This is an interesting concept that deserved more careful attention than the designers gave it.
| Platforms: | PC |
| Publisher: | 2K Games |
| Developer: | FireFly Studios |
| Genres: | Strategy / City Builder |
| Release Date: | October 13, 2006 |
| Game Modes: | Singleplayer / Multiplayer |
Legend has it this was supposed to be fun.
Stronghold Legends follows the mythological exploits of King Arthur, Nibelungen buddies Dietrich and Siegfried, and alleged vampire Vlad Dracul. Most of the Stronghold series had some footing in medieval history. It was all fictional, of course, but the warring kings, dukes and barons at least left open the possibility that it was based on some medieval power scuffle. Stronghold Legends goes full high fantasy with the plot, but that could give way to some interesting new gameplay. If only.
As in previous Stronghold games, you build defenses and defeat your enemies while keeping taxes low and food stocks high so that your peasants will keep the war machine grinding. Legends’ twist is that your archers and pikemen now fight alongside fantasy creatures like ice dragons and werewolves. It’s a departure from Legends’ historical predecessors, and the single-player campaigns take advantage of the opportunity to tell these three intriguing tales.
While campaigns in most strategy games are designed to teach you the basics gradually, Stronghold Legends campaigns are about furthering the narrative; there is little gameplay instruction beyond a few tips from the royal advisor and a description of newly available units and buildings on the mission briefing screen. What’s more, the introduction of these new items is often arbitrary. For example, you first acquire the iron mine in a mission where you must repel invaders, but the mine is so far outside your castle’s walls that it is effectively useless in achieving that objective. The scenarios are more puzzle-oriented than ever.
Legends proves unfriendly in other areas, too. The tutorial teaches you only a fraction of the game’s concepts and, at one point, forces you to sit and watch your peasants collect wood. The interface is in desperate need of tool tips to make the myriad windows easier to understand and navigate. The lack of troop-level hotkeys makes it harder to command armies, as do several bugs: Double-clicking on one type of unit often selects all the members of another type; you can define groups, but some of your forces occasionally lose their binding and ignore your orders.
Legends’ main problem, though, is that it’s bland, with neither of its constituent parts rising to the task. The simulation aspects, once the heart of the series, are confined to the sidelines. Constructing defenses is still crucial (and unwieldy when you’re dealing with trees and other environmental obstacles, despite a 3D camera and an optional top-down view). But popularity and peasant management take such a backseat to combat that they feel superfluous.
You’d expect, then, that the RTS elements would be stronger, but the strategic possibilities implied by the large amount of exotic units—heroes with special powers, faction-specific creatures, and colossal siege equipment—are belied by poor control, deficient pathfinding, and weak AI. Soldiers will often stand idly next to breached walls or slowly stroll by their countrymen being slaughtered. Formations are undercut by the strange way in which troops move to their positions, resulting in archers’ being momentarily vulnerable on the front line.
There is no way to keep archers from firing on enemies that are in range, which can lead to a mauling for which you weren’t yet prepared. And, while you can identify individual units for your troops to assault, battles devolve into such a visual mishmash of friendly and enemy soldiers that it’s nigh on impossible to target anything smaller than a frost giant. With neither satisfying combat nor decent city building, Legends offers little redemption for an already tired series.
Stronghold Legends Download For Pc
System Requirements: Pentium III 700 MHz, 256 MB RAM, WinXP
- Buy Game
N/A