This is one of the best online strategy games with a great combination of strategy, tactics and politics, but (and this is where I agree with so many of the other reviews) the balance of the game is so extraordinarily in favor of the buying-system it is basically unplayable without spending a lot of money.

The problem is that there is no limit on the usage of the cards in the game. The more cards you have, the more troops you have, the faster they move and the stronger they are. You win by spending money -period-

Don't bother playing it. After many hours, I can tell you that the game consist of angry people fighting for some make believe position and will destroy even the smallest of villages to harrass those who do not want to join their make believe group.

Also, it is a pay to win.

Whilst this game is entertaining for a while, it soon becomes obvious that you will soon be crushed by rediculously overbearing armies from more advanced players. Add to that the pestering for ingame pay-to-win currency, and it's worse than, say, facebook's Sparta game.

FYI: I have played this game way much more than 290+ hours in total. 290+ hours is my gameplay time in Steam only. My total gameplay time must be over 1k+ hours, I played in 3 ingame-worlds and I was level 22 (Prince).

This game had awesome mechanics, probably the best mechanics you could see in a MMO game. I played it for months without getting bored, it was really fun-- killing, upgrading, capturing, scouting, expanding, producing, destroying, gathering, researching... Multiple the fun if you are playing with your friends! Organizing, Raidcalls, supporting gets more meaning with coop-like multiplayer. You may spent your time in joy.

This went very well until I witnessed something, I discovered later something in game...
There is "cards system" (yeah, it is obvious) and the cards are making this game PVP-unplayable if you don't buy them.*

Rating: Free to Play 8/10
Rating: Pay to Play 4/10*

*Paying is not balanced also. If you pay more, you should keep paying more so that you will get more power. So, this is a very big problem. If you never buy or stop buying, gameplay suddenly drops speed, and in this game, time is everything!

Even EA would make this a more-playable game.

Love the concept of this game. FF just doesn't get it! Need to balance the advantage cards give the uber-spenders and those that can only afford to spend a few bucks a week.

An absolute blast, until it becomes absolutely pay-to-win (like a similar browser-based game of yesteryear - Travian). It's a real shame, because it is otherwise a game with nice complexity and detail and speed. An ideal game for the kind of person who likes a little diplomacy and to do a lot of city-building.

Pointless grind just to get captured by a big player once you grow your town big enough so it is worth taking. Alternatively you can throw piles of money at the game and hope to grow a bit before getting captured anyway.

Would be a great game, if it would not be PAY4WIN!
You build your castle(s) for weeks until WHOOPS, a paying player does raze or capture it in no time.

I do not recommend it.

This game, this game is so much fun to play if you've got time to waste. It's like farmville on crack.
The thing is, it's ridicously unbalanced. Cards that can be bought give you significant advantages.
Probably one of the biggest being able to manage your villages while youre not online.

The thing is, if you don't pay, you really dont get to play.

The boosts (cards) in this game that people buy give people an unbalanced benefit.

XP boosts (so you can expand faster and have more power)
Build time reduction (no joke, castles can take weeks of real time to build)
A que, (yeup you can only build one thing at time if you dont pay)
peasant management while youre not in game. (basically peasants come in at set intervals depending on happiness, they're either assigned to your army or a vacant building to do a job, however you have to do this manually if you're not paying thus peasants tend to build up while you're not playing)

there's probably more that i'm missing but these ones are probably the most noteable.
I've seen people who have bought cards who grow 3-4 times faster than i can.

You can get cards for free...at times, but those cards will run out fast, and if you're not acquiring new ones you will fall behind.

I have over 700 hours in this game, and yet i cant recommend it.

"Pay To Win" all I can say to you. If you are spoiled you will have fun otherwise not worth the time you spend! Keep out. don't get addicted and quite knowing there is a spoiled 10 yearold that is constantly beating your A.S.S with his parents money! If only this world wasn't all about greed.......

With over 930.3 Hours on record. The more you play the game as a non payer, the more you start to find it frustrating and boring. Yes you can play hours on end without paying a single dime, But if you want to be anything but a inactive farmer, YOU MUST INVEST. For a start, If you do not buy crowns the max amount of cards you get a week will be three and three only,compared to the 12 you get if you've got the level for it and have invested atlest $10.00 USD. Also the game has a flaw in its system, In every world there will be that one group of people who will overrule everyone, You cannot dare to fight back, or you will loose ( Such as the H14 Alliance in World USA 1 Atm.). This is a game where soulless hours of grinding on a bland game can be wiped on in one afternoon,So to the freeplayers, Its pretty much Buy,Die, Or be stranded.

I've been part of stronghold kingdoms since it's early alpha stages, back when there were only a few of us and we all knew each other like neighbors. Therefore I can say that this game is a massive waste of your time.

I see innovation here - a lot of it. I see opportunities to play stronghold like never before, with an MMO idea all taking place on a large map where cooperation and diplomacy are key to victory in the world of thousands of players all with their own individual strongholds they too are building. The game still has all the customization that stronghold offered you as well, placing the walls, towers, gatehouses, moats, spikes, and more all wherever you want to. It also gives you the freedom to train and manually deploy your own troops both defensively in your castle and/or offensively to siege another. In fact, at the time I began testing this game and for some time afterwards, it was unbelievably fun. But since then it's been squashed into a payment-heavy hunk of crap.

"Cards" in the game are used to boost what you can do with no limit to how many you can use, as long as you can afford to spend real world money to get them. On top of that, you require to buy premium subscriptions just to play the game properly, or you'll be logging in every hour to do something when nothing queues up properly. Cards can be earned for free, yes, but they take a long time and are fully randomized. You can earn more for free per week, but that is locked behind not one, but TWO paywalls of buying subscriptions to the game. You must buy TWO subscription tokens in order to unlock the full range of cards. On top of that, cards can still be bought with REAL WORLD MONEY after you ALREADY had to spend REAL WORLD MONEY on buying a PREMIUM SUBSCRIPTION just to play the game properly. This is massively unbalanced and, as is common among MOBILE COW CLICKERS, can take you from the bottom of the pack to #1 on the leaderboard in a matter of minutes should you pay enough money. Nobody will, but the fact that it is a possibility means the game is massively unbalanced. Any game that makes it possible to advance from bottom to top within minutes cannot be considered free to play.

Outside of that, the game itself is barebones. Your castle management becomes minimal, as the tiny map areas and massively limited resources for each "village" means you will not be able to customize the village to look as you please, it's going to have to run for maximum efficiency, followed by waiting through timers and resource walls as you wait for enough resources or an open queue slot to continue. This game also has an issue of expansion, due to the extreme number of players - castles/villages can only be built on predetermined slots, and the number of people in the game makes it very difficult to expand peacefully without spending an absolute fortune of gold and leaving your new towns well outside your support range. Production lines are also removed now, with the only actual production being from wood/iron -> weapons. That's it. All other production chains, no matter how simple, have been ditched. To help slow you down, each time you build something, it raises its own construction cost and also increases the time required to build the next structure. So, don't go too fast - buy our ♥♥♥♥ instead!

This game offers so much room for innovation in the stronghold series. It makes me want to see a stronghold game taking place on a large meta-map managing multiple castles against various AI opponents or players doing similar things, but not in this fashion. I want to see it in a microtransaction-free, upfront paid game with no multi-day timers or subsctipitions or ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ like that. This franchise NEEDS innovation, and the ideas behind stronghold kingdoms if applied to a paid game could provide it. But this just isn't it. All it does is makes you want to go play another stronghold game instead.

Avoid this.

I have played Stronghold Crusader as a kid , now I am an MLG pro at the game. This is nothing like it , it's a f-ing timed game , that's what it is , and lemme tell ya. The graphics look choppy and the overlay is a mess , don't download this game , its a P2W game. On day one it's fun but then comes the p2w part. The balance so extraordinarily in the favor of the buying-system it's basically unplayable without spending a lot of money . What are you spending lots of money on? Cards that make your troops fast and buff like a afro-american , but now in all seriousness , it goes like this : The more cards you have, the more troops you have, the faster they move and the stronger they are. And what is the mess here ?? You can buy unlimited f-ing cards.
(SECOND ACCOUNT 500hrs +)



(TL;DR)
Cons
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-Very time consuming

- Pay to win

- Bugs

-Non-friendly overlay
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Pros
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+ Over 150 quests

+ 4 Big research trees lots of variety.

+ It's Stronghold
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I just can't reccomend it now , maybe in the future.

Run a kingdom in the grand deserts of Florida, waiting endlessly for food, all from the comfort of your own toilet. Only recommended if you are rolling in the dollar bills. Will change my recommendation when my free Space Dollars run out.

Edit: FUNS OVER

If you, like me, are into medieval history, knights, castles, and kings, you love a medieval castle game. But you get tired of fighting the Ai, and want a challenge against another human. And, if it was free, and had alot of PvP to it, you'd have your dream computer game. But you doubt it'd be free. Then, Stronghold Kingdoms is shown on your Steam search. Bullyseye. Money on the nose. Congrats on finding your dream game, complete with PvP, castle, knights, real world maps, strategy, and excitement.

Wrong. Your a "bully" for wanting to battle different players and get involved in House wars, and any war for that matter, House or no House. And if you do attack a player, unknowing about the "bully" rules or not, you end up reset unless of course you have dozens of vassal armies, and tons of cards. Whats the point of having a PvP world, 24/7 at that, if you can never use the PvP? Mind you, the players, the ones who DESPISE you attacking another player, will gladly attack you cause they were bored, or just simply needed the supplies or wanted a new town and captured yours. But your not allowed to attack back, or else you'll be the bully, and will need to be reset! This is pathetic and an injustice to the defender. But thats not all the community has decided:

The soldier recruiting. Its very limited. Your given six options to choose from: peasant, archer, pikemen, swordsmen, catapaults, and captains. Peasants are near useless, but cheap to make and handy for quick battles. Archers are vital to the game, and it would be near impossible to play the game without them. Pikemen are somewhat cheap to recruit, and are effective in battle. Swordsmen are, by far, the coolest soldier on the battlefield. Its probably the most medieval looking thing on the entire game! The catapaults are useless unless attacking. Captains look like dismounted knights, but with a cape, like a king, and wields an axe. Expensive, and best for attacking. So, with these options in mind, you can customize your army! Wrong! The community has decided archers and pikemen are the only soldiers you really need. Swordsmen are "to aggressive" so you hardly see them and they highly discourage you even recruiting them. And they'll expect 375+ archers on your castle walls for defense to keep out invaders. Oh and unit space. After some research, your able to have 500 units. Units include scouts, merchants, monks, and soldiers. However, 1 monk=25 spots out of your 500! Safe to say, by the time you get 8 scouts(max allowed) 10 merchants(carries enough supplies worth the time) and save enough room for even 2 monks(50 spots taken with those alone) you'll get somewhere 319-342 soldiers. How are you able to get 375 archers out of that!? Its rather a nusiance and it would be much handier if every unit cost 1 spot. Next, the castles. To save time, basically put, they'll force you to build your castle THE same way everytime in every town, in every House, on every server. They will raze your town if you dont. To prevent invaders, is there wimpy excuse. Or make fun of you, if you dont build by there own standards. And still this one style the community has picked, gets razed in every war. So shouldn't you get creative instead of this grind of castle building the same thing over and over? I mean its not like it proves indestructible. They'll launch 5+ parish armies at it, timed attacks to take out your archers, and other defenses.

Cards is, pretty much, the legal way to "cheat" on here. Basically, within 2 hours you could have a near fully built town, high rank, lots of researchs done. And your neighbor has a tiny, barely built town, low rank and little to no research done, because he is not carding. In wars, the winning side is NOT who was the best fighter, or had better tactics. Its whoever was online the most to buy cards to use. Say I was in a battle, one-on-one, and my enemy used cards and I didn't. It'll take me four hours to recruit a full army. And then, it'll take two hours for them to reach his town. My enemy uses cards and voila! He has full army in 30 minutes, and another card and his army is reaching my town in 45 minutes, which was really 2 hours away. Cards also limit castle damage so, basically, use cards or just wait, slowly, to do ANYTHING!

Finally, the players. First off, Ive met some really nice fellows on here. The rest, are so mean, its enough to make you quit this game altogether. I have been called names, as if I was being bullied on a schoolyard playground. And these were mostly in battles, and one was from another player who, thinks Im a "bully" for wanting to try out the battles, so he bullies me, name calls me, makes fun of me, tells others Im trouble. But he isn't a bully, according to him. Ive been threatenend to be r*ped over scouting someone. Murder threats also happen in wars. Thankfully, Ive never seen any, my allies are the ones who told me. It caused multiple players to actually quit one server, out of fear, because they AND there familes were threatened with murder. And, so far, it seems FireFly aint the least bit concerned over any of this. Oh and the Ai is a problem. The Wolf castles spawn WAY to fast and then, literally, destroy your castle, makes it harder to bring in peasants to build an army to destroy it, forces you to lower your taxs, and usually, no one destroys it, due to needing supplies for wars, that they discourage you from being in, until your town is in complete shambles. Cutting Wolf castle spawn rates would make this game even slightly more fun.

Overall, not a good game. If they could give you an option to avoid human player attacks or not, then maybe we could have a little more of the PvP, without the innocent getting destroyed in the process. Towns defense upgrades would also be a welcome boost. Catapaults(cats, in-game) shoot so fast, that even if you manage to defend, your castle is destroyed big-time. Makes your victory feel bittersweet. But you gotta defend off 200 some archers, 150+ pikemen, and 100 or so cats, along with the captain(s) with, at max 400 possible soldiers. 500 possible attackers versus 400 possible defenders. Perhaps thats why the discourage the PvP, is because its way to unbalanced, and the defenders odd's of winning is slightly better than winning the Lottery.

At the end of the day, with PvP dubbed as "bullying" all you have left is a building game, and watching numbers go up game. It sounds more like a math game, and who wants to spend there free time doing math related stuff, such as watching numbers go up, numbers go down(addition and subtraction) and waiting for the one building to finish so you can place another?

I'd highly recommend Age of Empires 2 HD or Medieval Kingdoms 2: Total War over this game. I know you cant beat free, but the money spent on those games are worth there money. Plus, they deliver, great medieval experiences, along with highly intense battles, single player or multi player.

Plus, you can avoid getting a lesson in, Bullying 101, which this game is, pretty much.

The game starts out fun and then just becomes a timesink. Once the world gets to a certain age its all about the "Pay To Win" and if you want to not die, then you better be playing (and buying) 10+ cards a day.
Would totaly recomend you bash your head on your desk for just as much enjoyment.

Hello everyone this is my reviewe on Stronghold Kingdoms a played a fair bit of it in general the Consept is really good But I personally get a lot of crashes. I have Windows8 so that might be only a windos8 isue Further more there is microbuy actions which is to be expected. So i don't recomend the game But you can try it out and is free so...

Extremely ♥♥♥♥♥♥. Will freeze, display program errors, and crash repeatedly. Avoid at all costs. I am really puzzled at what this abismal web game is doing on Steam.

wasted a lot of my time but maybe kinda worth it probably yes, idk anymore..

Along side the pay to win comments, and the broken mechanics and all that, I will give you my experience first hand.

I figured out a great way to make use of the economy through trade early in the game to help get some extra resources to boost my production in various areas. I was accellerating quite well in the game for the first week. Then you get to a point where things start to take time and a little more strategy of what to build and upgrade based on a focus you want to persue. This I was happy with because it makes sense, you can't just major in everything and expect to go far sooner. So I went into military while prepping for religeous expansion. Once again, I was progressing along very nicely.

Probably a couple of months went by of dedicated play time (logging every day). I was making smart attacks, gaining honor, rebuilding my troops to always maintain 200 defending troops in my castle, and another 200-300 attacking AI for honor. My castle had a moat around the whole area, traps set, and maxed balista towers as well as turret towers, along side my 200 archers. I had two sets of walls that circled my village for enemies to get through, the walls were 3 layers thick, and I had large/grand towers all around as well. Also started to build into religion as I was able to max out my military.

2 months of work that built me up to this, and one day I get on to find out I was attacked for the first time. What was I attacked with? 2 captains who were obviously maxed out, and I think 20 pikes. None of them died because the captains apparently can heal them as well as make them go incredibly fast, as well as boost their dmg so they basically ran through the moat (which usually takes about 3-5 seconds for an enemy to fill), took down both sets of walls in a matter of 3 seconds, ran over my few pikes in my village and won the fight and looted my village. The entire attack took about 5-6 seconds after I spent about a month building my bloody castle.

So what's the point of spending all of that time building when all someone has to do is max their captains upgrades (only a few upgrades to do), go in and take down a fully constructed castle in a matter of seconds? The only thing that protected me from being attacked again was an ally sending a monk to my castle and giving me protection for 24 hours or something. All that work put into protecting my village, and someone sends in 22 guys that just destroys me. That doesn't make any sense. Thus, I deleted the game.

That's my rant/review of this game. Choose to support it if you will, or force them to smarten up their mechanics and balancing system. Because in reality, this is a GREAT strategy game. But I will not play it again with crap like that happening.