Whilst these can be safely ignored for the most part, it’s a decent system for experienced players that need a quick fix for their chosen base-building plan, and they represent a good boost for newcomers wanting to try out new things quicker than they otherwise could. The other essential component in the monetisation of Kingdoms comes in the form of a card system that grants players temporary boosts to any number of areas of gameplay, such as speeding up traders or adding a quick stash of fish or weaponry to your reserves. Crucially, the pricing doesn’t feel oppressive. That single research queue can be utilised for as long as you’d like of course, but once you start hitting the 2-3 hours it takes to build units later down the tech tree, it becomes a no-brainer to subscribe when you need to.
Building and research queues are limited to one a piece unless you’re shelling out for a ‘premium’ token to unlock a five-slot queue in either, but fortunately prices are low enough to keep that within reach of most players (7 days of premium works out around £1.60 at current rates). In general, placing your wood-based buildings near the trees and your stone or iron-based structures near the rocks will suffice, but it’s key to learn micro-management at this stage rather than later on. It should quickly become apparent at this stage that placing your buildings is of absolute paramount importance, which each section of land offering up different efficiency rates for various structures. You’re offered up a simple plot of land for your newly-crowned village, and you’ll soon be up and running with a few wood cutter’s huts and stone quarries, allowing access to basic resources with which to build more advanced structures. To start with though, a thorough tutorial covers all the essential basics. You’ll pick your starting location from anywhere on a semi-realistic map of the UK and get down to business mining resources, attracting new citizens, trading goods on the marketplace and researching your way to power down a massive tech-tree on which - even after a couple of weeks of play - I’m still barely scraping 50% completion. And for the most part, they get it absolutely right.Īs you might have guessed then, Kingdoms is - at its heart - a medieval village management game and castle builder, in much the same spirit as its predecessors. Stronghold Kingdoms is Firefly Studio’s attempt at getting that balance right, offering up a rich massively-multiplayer strategy game with some serious monetisation hooks for those that want to invest.
Offer your customers too little and you end up with a glorified demo, offer them too much and they’ll never pay - leaving you with an expensive project to maintain and little hope of turning it into an ongoing business past that initial influx of players. There’s a fine line when it comes to free-to-play games.
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