The titular warlords of the game are basically mini-factions scattered around the map you can bring to heel either through military force or a sort of diplomacy, which really involves building an embassy, setting it to auto-spend the influence it generates swaying the warlord in question to your side, then demanding they pledge obedience to you. This creates the bizarre situation of Genghis Khan having access to Samurai, Toyotomi Hideyoshi being able to use Mongol horsemen, and Qin Shi Huang deploying ninja.Ĭapturing or persuading warlords on the map to join can have several benefits, including resources and soldiers. You’re not really representing any specific Asian culture, though – it’s sort of a mixture of all of them, mostly Chinese, with a couple of Japanese or Korean or Mongolian units included too. The game focuses on East Asia and has campaigns for Vietnam, China, Mongolia and Japan, covering that nebulous “A long, long time ago” period that Kung Fu movies tend to be set in, nominally from about 250BC through to the 16 th or 17 th century. Space management is an important part of the game, because (as with real castles) there’s only a finite amount of space behind castle walls so working out whether you’re going to put a swordsmith or another rice farm in a space can have some important implications, especially once you start factoring in distances between resources and storage etc. The game, as its title suggests, puts you in charge of building a castle and laying siege to enemies in a matter very similar to the Age of Empires games, right down to the harvesting resources such as timber and iron, and then having craftspeople turn them into weapons and armour. Building your own castle and managing the different elements inside it is a key focus of the Stronghold games – including Strongholds: Warlords.

Stronghold warlords mods