Stronghold Kingdom’s 15th Anniversary is marked with the release of a new world – Clash of the Spartans!
Firefly Studios in 2020
As is now a yearly YouTube tradition, Firefly Studios starts the year by looking at the months of productive game dev ahead for our two upcoming games: Stronghold: Warlords and Romans: Age of Caesar! So join Nick as he takes you through all the exciting plans we have for both our East Asian castle sim and Roman co-op city builder in 2020.
After a packed 2019 Stronghold: Warlords is on track to be one of the best Strongholds yet. Armed with the classic RTS-sim gameplay of its predecessors, the core Stronghold dev team has spent the last few months implementing brand new mechanics, upping the ante with animations and of course making sure besieging feels as satisfying as ever. Now that we have our first foot planted firmly in this new decade we plan to move forward, squashing bugs and adding new features with video deep dives to accompany each major update.
While granaries are set alight from gunpowder experiments and Mongols harass local farmers, half way across the world in a small south London studio Rome is of course also being rebuilt! The other half of Firefly Studios is also waist high in game dev, with Romans: Age of Caesar in development as the first ever online cooperative city builder! With our second alpha now well under way, with more major updates coming soon, we are nearly ready to showcase our first ever gameplay trailer! So make sure you’ve hit that subscribe button with notifications on to be the first to see it.
Online Round Up 2 (ft. New Romans Alpha!)
This week Nick’s back with another Firefly Studios’ Online Round Up, featuring new updates from Romans: Age of Caesar and Stronghold Kingdoms. This episode takes you through the latest and greatest from our online titles as Alpha 2 comes to Romans bearing a multitude of online city building gifts, while Stronghold Kingdoms receives new tournaments and worlds. Among a range of improvements and optimisations made since Alpha 1, Romans is now equipped with an extended Empire Map, Forum relocation, multi-city capabilities, quest lines and Advisers. All this makes for new co-op grand strategy possibilities and a much easier to understand experience for new senators.
In addition to weekly tournaments occupying our resourceful Lords and Ladies, Stronghold Kingdoms gets a whole host of new worlds to begin fresh adventures with friends and foes alike. There have also been community requested changes as things get more competitive on Heretic worlds and we’re introducing brand new AI castle types to boot! If these updates sound like reason enough to get conquering in our online titles you can register for Alpha 2 using the link above or download Stronghold Kingdoms for free now on PC, Mac and mobile.
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Stronghold Kingdoms – China World
Conquer this new game world today and experience the latest map expansion for Firefly’s free-to-play ‘castle MMO’ Stronghold Kingdoms. Join over six million Lords and Ladies who already compete online for control over six unique Kingdoms and a brand new world map. Negotiate your way onto one of six thrones with a silver tongue or take power by force with the help of your faction or house! ‘China 1′ is our first game world focussed on the lands of the far east, featuring accurate real-world maps of six unique countries. Rule over your own corner of this new map, before setting your sights on world domination as you scout, trade, explore and attack across our latest game world. Be among the first to secure land and the last standing in Kingdoms’ race for glory, honour and loyal followers as you reach for the crown.
Tournaments Now Live
We are happy to announce that Stronghold Kingdom’s long-awaited Tournaments Update is now live across all game worlds! Following up on last month’s community-driven update, we’ve been building the new ‘Tourney’ system for some time now. It therefore gives us here at Firefly Studios great pleasure to finally launch the feature with our first ever tournament: ‘Canine Control’!
As Nick demonstrates in our latest video Tourneys are time-limited contests in which players compete across all game worlds to complete various PvE activities in search of glory and in-game loot. These activities cover pretty much all aspects of the game, making each facet of Stronghold Kingdoms even more rewarding. This new update is designed to combine the short-term dedication of quests with the world-wide competition of the popular Domination Worlds.
Stronghold Kingdoms: Tournaments
The more eagle-eyed Stronghold Kingdoms players may have noticed a new golden laurel wreath icon in the game… We are excited to reveal this is for our new ‘Tourney’ system! This new gameplay update will allow players to compete in a series of medieval tournaments for special prizes and bragging rights on all-new leaderboards. Starting with the first tourney scheduled for 3pm GMT on October 31st, players will regularly compete in a wide range of contests changing as often as every few weeks.
Medieval ‘Tourneys’ will soon take place across all game worlds as limited-time events, with various PvE challenges designed to test players’ mastery over different areas of the game. New leaderboards and tiers also offer those at different skill levels unique challenges and loot based on their rank. Tournament objectives will eventually cover all areas of Stronghold Kingdoms gameplay including economy, trade, military, exploration and religion.
To find out more about the Tournaments update please visit the new ‘Tourney’ page on the official Stronghold Kingdoms Wiki.
Kingdoms Comes to Windows 10
Now available on Windows 10 via the Microsoft Store, Stronghold Kingdoms is the next evolution of the classic castle-building series from Firefly Studios. Kingdoms invites players to conquer countries, continents or an entire medieval world with grand strategy gameplay. Win power through trade, diplomacy or force as you explore a vast research tree to specialize and carve out your corner of each game world.
Completely free-to-play with all in-game items obtainable through gameplay and special events, Kingdoms rewards long term strategic planning above all else. Infiltrate enemy Houses, bankroll your allies with a fully-functioning war economy or take them head on. How you conquer the world of Kingdoms is entirely up to you with the fate of each game world yours to shape in the months and years to come.
Stronghold Kingdoms – Dev Q&A
Seeking new challenges? Contests? Prizes? Then allow us to update you on our immediate and longer term plans for Stronghold Kingdoms. In our latest developer interview, two of Kingdoms’ programmers cover everything from new village features, UI improvements, balancing, larger updates and more to give you a clear idea of what the immediate future looks like for the game. We also reveal new details about the upcoming events-based ‘Tournaments’ system and share what players can look forward to across all worlds and platforms!
If you’d like to know more about the Tournaments update or if there happens to be a particular topic not covered in this week’s video please let us know! We’re constantly listening out for questions from the Kingdoms community in the comments under each new video, so make yourself heard and we’ll try to feature your question in a future release.
Stronghold Kingdoms Dev Update
Earlier this week we borrowed an hour of time from our very own Matt Smith to discuss all things Stronghold Kingdoms! We’ve edited together 10 minutes of highlights from the full discussion, along with a number of answers to your community questions. These were collected over the course of the past week and picked from discussions in the forums and on social media over the past few months. That said if you have questions of your own just let us know in the comments and we’ll try to include them in future videos. Continue reading