Play online? Want to learn more strategy?

[Lord Vetka 63]

I will say that I do not have a lot of experience with online play, along with a few more people I'm sure, and could use some pointers, even veterans can still learn something!

 

Any help would be appreciated!

[Lord_Chris 224]

The single most important thing I have learned in multiplayer is to get your settlement built up as quickly and efficiently as possible. Now that sounds very brief, and you may ask yourself what that may entail - so, I'm going to explain all the tricks I'm aware of, strategies and any other means of help.

 

You'll know having played stronghold 2 for years that the closer that a building is to the place the worker needs to go to, the quicker, greater in number and more efficiently the worker creates resource X. This is very much so in multiplayer, and much more important. For example, I'll use the armoury and industry buildings: the armoury needs to be a stones throw away from these buildings - and if possible, line all of your buildings up in straight lines and categorize them.

 

I.E.

 

Poleturner = P

Fletcher = F

Armourer = A

Armoury = AR

Blacksmith = B

Stockpile = S

 

P P P P P

F F F F F

A A A A A AR

B B B B B

 

S

 

The armourer's workshop should go the nearest, as armour takes the longest amount of time (for any weapon I believe) to be created, and you need to mass produce them. From now on - think this: Your #1 priority is weapon production. You only need a fairly stable economy to start you off with, it doesn't have to be great. Once you have three to four apple farms placed, two or three hunter's posts, maybe one or two dairy farms at the most, your food production will do until your population reaches about sixty.

 

When starting off, you should place all saw pits apart from one apple farm. Then place your treasury, a market - sell all your food and buy five of each type, putting your rations on double & your tax rate on high.

 

You'll find you get a promotion within seconds, and extra gold. When you next get your supply of wood (or you promote yourself, whichever comes first) reduce your taxes to normal, your rations to normal and place several hovels, more saw pits and alternate ways to collect food - this is the part I always forget - reducing the ration level. Not reducing the ration level here will cause you to become unpopular and will take a while to build your food back up.

 

Don't waste wood on placing walls unless you are fighting dishonourable people who would attack you early in the game. You should place a stone quarry after your first promotion, a lord's kitchen and between five to ten pig farms and a gong pit (for obvious reasons)

 

Place several more saw pits until you are never short on wood, and you should shortly get promoted. Once that happens, more mass production is needed. Place a similar amount of vegetable gardens to that of your pig farms and more farms to produce food. More saw pits, and a couple of iron mines with ox tether. Now the iron will come in providing a very big source of income. Build the maximum amount of iron mines that you can, and ox tether to make sure that more are likely to be idle than transferring goods to the stockpile - it needs to be a constant cycle - they should either be always on the move or idle waiting for iron.

 

After the next promotion, place several sheep farms, weaver's workshops & other buildings available for the lord's kitchen. The quickest way to earn a lot of honour: cloth. The page boys give the cloth generated by the weaver to the lady in the bedchamber, and she will turn it into dresses. When four dresses are made, a dance will be held in the keep which will provide 200 honour - from such a simple task!

 

Start mass producing your industry by placing multiple fletcher's workshops, and a jousting filed when you can afford one - this will provide a steady supply of honour, as well as a boost to your popularity, meaning you can increase the tax rate to provide yet more gold.

 

If you want a steady supply of gold, build several chandler's workshops and bee hives and sell all the candles you make. I always do this, but never ever use a church unless the number of my candles are so high it's ridiculous and I can afford to sell them with loads left over.

 

Crime: Place a humiliation mask and other very slow methods of rehabilitation to increase the amount of honour you get. There are two reasons for this:

 

1.) You get more honour

 

2.) You get two workers that would otherwise be used in the torturer's guild to rehabilitate/execute the prisoners.

 

But the price of slow rehabilitation comes at the following: more prisoners will stack up in the queue to be rehabilitated, meaning more are in the dungeon, eventually meaning that your popularity will decrease. To avoid this, place six or seven methods - mostly the same. Now mass produce more industry buildings and start to slowly build your castle up with the stone in your stockpile.

 

Note that I said stockpile, not stockpiles. Only ever place one stockpile and sell any excess goods. When you can, place a traveling fair and mass produce more weapons. Use Estates - they are extremely useful - even though the population limit is slightly higher than the usual, it's still nor brilliant. So you need to rely on estates to produce a lot of the goods for you. For each estate you purchase, make sure that you assign it one area of mass production. For example, I assign weapon production of bows to estate X and this estate only produces bows. Estate Y produces armour and armour alone - or iron - or wood - or something completely different. Estates provide honour, gold, and a resource of your choice. They are very useful things to have online indeed.

 

Statues generate honour every month in the game, so naturally you get a lot for them.

 

This is basically how to start off - it's up to you how you continue, but this method is what I use and you *should* be able to get an ecomony built up fairly quickly using it. Hope I at least get a rep point for all this ;)

[Lord Vetka 63]

Very good, did you get the rep point? I'm not sure if it went. edit, looks like you got the point 36 to 37.

 

Looks like a good start, I will have to learn to work this way and work faster.

 

Not quite the same as a custom war scenario...

 

Thank You very much!

 

Now I will copy this to a note pad to read later.

[Lord_Chris 224]

You're welcome, glad it helped. Once you use that method, or a similar one that works well for you, you'll do really well - I was exactly the same when I first started on multiplayer, I expect even Bradley was and he's certainly a power player.