In this Stronghold: Warlords Beginner’s Guide we will guide you on how you can start playing Stronghold: Warlords for the first time. Firefly Studios has released the title for PC and it brings plenty of new mechanics and some classic mechanics back to the franchise. If you are just starting with the game, chances are that you might not be familiar with how the game works so we have curated this guide that will help you in doing exactly just that.
Beginner’s Guide – Stronghold: Warlords
Our Stronghold: Warlords Beginner’s Guide details everything that you need to build your castle and manage it effectively in Stronghold: Warlords.
Always Begin by Rice Fields or Other Food Buildings
Food is essential for your people and if you cannot offer food to your people, they will leave your side. Rice is the most common and easy to obtain food item in Stronghold: Warlords so make sure that you place at least 6 Rice Fields right at the start of the game. This will ensure that you have plenty of food for your people at the start. You start with only a small number of rice in your Granary and if you do not have plenty of food production structures, you will run out of food soon and your people will start leaving you.
Having 6 Rice Fields will provide sufficient food for a long time even if you have to increase your taxes, you can offer your people increased rations of rice to balance it out. More details on this is detailed below. Apart from Rice Fields, based on your progress in the missions, you will have access to other food items as well. Make sure that you work towards growing your own vegetables, tea and later produce your own meat as well as multiple food sources will ensure that you always have plenty of food for your people and they will remain happy.
Balance your Taxes with Food
Taxing your people in any Stronghold title is always a bargain and one that you cannot just lose all the time. Increasing the taxes means more gold for you but angrier people and angrier people tend to lose your castle. If you do not have people in your castle, you cannot train new army for your fights or cannot even get people for your different resource collection structures. If you decrease the taxes too much, your people will become happier, but you will never have enough gold to build structures or build your armies.
However, you can always balance out higher taxes with different other things that will keep your people happy. You can increase the rations that you give out to your people and even offer multiple food types to the people to keep them happy. You have multiple sliders on the lower-right side of your screen where you can adjust your taxes and how you distribute different food items between your people. Always make sure that you have multiple food types in stock and you are always giving out extra rations every time you increase your taxes. This will balance out the discomfort caused by higher taxes.
Train Your Army Alongside Your Castle Expansion
Stronghold: Warlords is not just a simple castle building title because you will engage in combat as well and even if you do not attack first, your enemies will not stop at anything from laying siege to your castle. For this very reason, you must focus on both castle-expansion and building your forces as well at the same time. As you build and expand your castle and look after your villagers, make sure that you are spending some resources on building armies and their necessary support structures too.
Building armies is not as simple as clicking on their icons in your Barracks or other structures. Some of the advanced units require weapons and armors in stock as well so make sure that you place an Armory and other weapon and armor production facilities as well that create weapons and armor for your units. Only then, you will be able to make sure that you can repel all of the attacks on your castle easily. Your people working on weapon and armor building facilities will automatically collect resources and make weapons and armor so once everything is in place, you can easily create more units without having to worry about any backend resource management.
Secure Your Castle with Traps, Defenses, and Walls
Your castle or keep is the most important structure in your settlement so make sure that you are always taking good care of it. Your lord stays in the castle or keep so you must ensure that it is fortified from all sides as well. Building a decent and secure castle is an art and one that you can only learn with practice. Instead of expanding your castle across the whole map, you must manage all of your buildings and structures in an organized and a small place and then fortify it will thick walls and other defenses that will keep your castle safe from enemy attacks.
You need to make sure that your castle is right in the middle of your walls and other buildings because your enemies will be throwing everything at you including siege weapons that can chew through your walls pretty easily so make sure you have some defenses in place on your walls as well that will fire automatically at approaching enemies and some traps can be triggered manually on your enemies as well. After expanding your castle a bit, you must always look for ways to secure it from enemy attacks.
Always Aim for the Desired Fear Factor
Fear Factor is yet another important in-game mechanic that you can tweak in your favor to yield desired results. By tweaking the Fear Factor of your people, you can either make your soldiers more effective in combat and make your people happy or you can make your citizens work harder which will result in increased resources but your people will be less happy. Both have their own pros and cons and you can adjust the Fear Factor by placing down certain buildings in your castle such as Zen Gardens, Torture Pits and more. Make sure that you are not always going for the negative ones as your people may eventually leave your side.
Take Control of Warlords to Increase Your Control on Each Map
Stronghold: Warlords introduces a brand-new mechanic of having warlords on each map where you can capture and control different warlords. These warlords have their own castles and keeps scattered around the map which are usually well-defended as well. To get a warlord to your side, you can either attack them or use the method of diplomacy. You will need diplomacy points for this. Once the warlord is under your control, you can use them for various bonuses such as more gold, ask for resources and even request armies and make them attack your enemies with special attacks such as pincer attacks. It is vital that you control as many warlords as possible because it will increase your control over the map but your enemy can take control of these warlords as well so you must always protect the warlords that are under your control.
For more guides, check out more Stronghold: Warlords guides below:
This concludes our Stronghold: Warlords Beginner’s Guide. If you want to add anything to this guide, feel free to use the comments section below.
