Going medieval with Stronghold Kingdoms

Premium Game Features

• Building Queue - This allows up to five buildings to be queued for construction in a village
• Research Queue - This allows up to five research tasks to be queued in the research screen
• Move Village Building - This allows players to move buildings in their villages
• Villages Overview - This allows access to the Villages Overview page, which shows players essential information about all of their owned villages from 4 simple screens

Building and research queues are extremely handy and, in a way, are almost offline features as well. The farther you progress in Stronghold Kingdoms, the longer build and research lead-times get. These premium features allow you to set up a queue, and then move on to other more important tasks in managing your holdings or, if you're like me, log-out and walk away, knowing that things will roll along as planned without you babysitting them.

Moving village buildings is just plain, handy, especially when you want to maximize production of various resources, as they are based on proximity to certain buildings, like your village hall, stockpile or granary.

The last item I'll admit I know very little about, as it didn't exist back when I played Stronghold Kingdoms with Premium Tokens. This go around, I refused the temptation so the best I can offer is a screenshot (Courtesy of Stronghold Kingdoms Wiki user CaptScuba)

Premium Offline Features

• Auto Trade - Every 2-4 hours while offline, this will automatically trade one type of goods to the parish capital markets
• Auto Scouting - Every 2-4 hours while offline, this will automatically send out all available scouts to resource stashes within the parish(es) in which the player's village(s) is located
• Auto Attacking - Every 2-4 hours while offline, this will automatically send out attacks to chosen AI targets within the player's parish(es)
• Auto Recruiting - Every 2-4 hours while offline, this will automatically conscript idle peasants to your army, providing you have the available weapons, gold, peasants and unit space
• Vacation Mode - a mode for premium players that prevents them from being attacked by AI or other players should they go on vacation/holiday and will be without access to their account; during this time they are locked out of their account to prevent exploitation of the invulnerability

These allow you a degree of automation. Early on these tasks, key to properly managing your holdings, are enjoyable to manage hands on. But the time it takes to manage them directly becomes less enjoyable as the number of villages you own increases. As you become more influential in your parish, county, province and even kingdom, there are much more important things to spend your time on. As such, these automated tasks are a godsend.

Vacation mode is pure brilliance really. Even gamers need vacations (though some of you might disagree with me on that). If you're right smack in the middle of a war, or even a time of heightened hostilities between neighboring factions or houses, you could come back to find your castles in ruins and your villages plundered.

Sounds great, how much?

Premium Tokens don't cost real money, technically. They are available in three varieties. This first is a onetime gift to new players, offering a 2 day premium token. How nice and warm and fuzzy, and so much like a crack dealer offering the first hit for free. After that you must use Firefly Crowns to purchase either a seven day or 30 day premium token.

That's where the real money comes in. At a base rate of $4.99 (USD) for 60 Firefly Crowns you are looking at $0.36 a day for a 7 day stint of premium play or around $0.27 a day if going premium for 30 days. If you wanted to continuously renew your premium features you could basically equate that to a monthly subscription fee of around $8.30/month.

Beyond that, Firefly crowns can also be used to purchase strategy cards, some of which are extremely powerful. This doesn't innately represent a pay-to-win scheme as you do accrue additional cards over time for free, just for playing.

The card system is likely to be loved by some and despised by others, but I found that it added an interesting extra level of strategy to the gameplay without too much extra complexity. It is a reasonably in-depth system, and as such I've simply embedded a YouTube clip to explain it rather than write it up here. 

But who cares about Premium? I want to play for free!

You’re right. All of those features sound great, but if you wanted to you could play everything there is to play in this game without spending real money. In theory, that is, not in practice.

As much as I enjoyed playing Stronghold Kingdoms, I found it became necessary to make it a part of my daily routine to come home from work, log in and take care things. Not a problem if you have a fairly predictable schedule, or aren't planning to go away somewhere. It was fairly manageable at first, but that daily routine, which began as 10 minutes every day after work day, quickly bloating into an hour or more every day after work. And then once I started getting more involved in the local politics of my parish and county, I found myself logging in more and more, outside of just my "routine times".

Eventually it hit a point where I ran out of hours in the day, and I was only scratching the surface of what Stronghold Kingdoms has to offer. It quickly became apparent to me that the premium features, particularly those related to offline features, was a non-negotiable, and those cost money.

The only way around this is to recruit a steady stream of friends to play the game and purchase crowns. You can earn up to $80 worth of free crowns on your friends first purchase. Just make sure you recruit those high rollers. Sadly if you don't have a steady stream of friends that regularly drop $80 on a free-to-play game, you're out of luck.

And that's a wrap!

While it was fun to revisit a free-to-play game from before my Free Agent days, the discerning skills I have learned on the job lead me to believe that it is simply not feasible to play Stronghold Kingdoms without spending any real money.

That said, you could certainly do a lot worse. $8.30/month (or less if you buy in larger increments) is a small price to pay for a really good MMORTS. It's certainly worth trying out for free, but sooner or later I guarantee you will throw down some dollars on this one. And well, that's just not how the Free Agent rolls anymore.

So on to the next free-to-play title. This week we covered an older game and it's going to be the same deal for our next episode, but there's a twist. Though this game is already more than two years old, it just recently went free-to-play. Can you guess what it is? Stay tuned to my Twitter page (@Caergan) to find out.

See you next time on the Free Agent.

Robert "Caergan" Gray