Playing Strong Hold with a 3 year old

Some time ago, I remembered I bought Strong Hold on the Good Old Games store, and that I could try to run it on my new PC. As I was installing it, Elenka showed up, asking what am I doing. So I decided to show her :-)

Strong Hold is a real-time strategy game, with most of what you’d expect from the genre. You build your base, meaning a castle, gather resources, build an army, and try to defeat an opponent. But the fact you are building a castle gies this a nice spin. For me, the castle-mechnics were realistic enough. You don’t build workers, you need to be popular enough so that people come live in your castle. You don’t just gather food, you can have someone hunt wild game, or tend to an orchard, or farm a field, but your people wouldn’t just eat wheat, you need to have a mill and a baker to produce bread. You don’t just have a mine to have money, you can have taxes, but that might not be popular with your subjects and people could start leaving you. Maybe you could improve the morale by building a pub. You’d need to have a brewery and hops farm as well, of course. But if you are too popular, your subjects could start slacking off, so you build a henge, so everybody sees who here is boss.

As you can see, I never really got to fighting, instead trying to build my perfect little castle. Fortunately, the game has a free-form mode that supports just that. Showing Elenka these little supply chains was interesting and educational, and she liked the way we were able do design our little castle together. We build few orchards, a bakery was producing bread, people were going to the inn for a beer. That took as around fifteen minutes, then we messed around with the castle walls, and then Elenka exclaimed that looking at little people carrying bread around was fun five minutes ago, but not anymore. So we called that a day and closed the game.

To be honest, I could see even more complicated production chains in the game, but this was no Settlers, were you need three buildings just to build a single bow. On the other hand, this is the only strategy game where I have seen happiness of your people simulated. I think that seeing the little people happy was one of the things Elenka liked as well, but it might have flown past her, despite my explanation. All things considered, twenty minutes well spent.