A Stronghold 3 Interview with Simon Bradbury

Recently Stronghold Heaven staff put some of your questions to Simon Bradbury of FireFly. Here is that interview:

Hello my name is Simon Bradbury – Designer on Stronghold 3

It goes without saying; all of us at Stronghold Heaven are looking forward to exciting improvements to everyone’s favourite castle RTS series, Firefly Studio’s Stronghold/Crusader series. You have discussed before how building your own engine took away valuable time from focusing on the game itself. Now you are using the Trinigy Vision Engine that Settler’s 7 used. Were there other options for you or was this an easy decision?

It was an easy decision to use Trinity’s Vision engine – they are an up and coming engine and so have both lots to prove and are also small enough that we gets lot of their time for bug fixing and the extra features we need.

Physics implementation as well as advanced lighting will be delightful updates, will there be any other tech advances that will be utilized such as 3D vision, crossfire/SLI support or multi-core optimization?

No 3D vision – but we are talking to Intel and will have multi-core in.

With a new engine one would expect some major changes to gameplay from the previous versions of Stronghold. SH1 used signposts with an exclusion zone while SH2 had a system of estates. How will land ownership and building zoning be restricted across the map and how will the map sizes compare to other SH titles?

On map sizes first! They will be similar – we have experimented with very large maps – but have found that this really only adds an extra 5 minutes while you wait for your troops to get into combat – which goes against our philosophy of always keeping the action fast paced.

In keeping with our stated desire to go back to Stronghold 1 basics – we will be using the estates system from SH2!! Well in a modified form anyways – we are looking to keep certain elements from 2 but usually in a simplified form.

The SH2 crime system is out and the good/bad buildings from SH1 are back. Buildings such as hovels will scale in strength relative to how close to the Keep they are and the Keep itself will have several levels of advancement. We can see a new Church is some of the screenshots that have been released, how has Religion changed from the other games?

It is back to being more like Stronghold 1 – so it will now not interrupt the vital tasks your workers are carrying out.

You’ve mentioned lessons learned with the overambitious SH2, what did you learn from the stripped down economy of Stronghold Legends and what will hold over from SHL? Will there be an achievement/trophy system? Have you conquered mounting troops on attacking siege towers?

Hopefully we have stopped the ninja horses yes! Yes, we are looking to have achievements – same as legends and link them in to what you can do online as well.

One economic lesson we have taken from Legends is with honour, for example. Honour goods are now taken directly to the keep not via a range of honour collector buildings as was the case in SH2.

How was the idea of Day/Night developed into a ‘fog of war’ and how will it be integrated with the time scale, being an event based circumstance? It seems like a natural idea but, I would bet it had its difficulties.

No difficulties there – we are not integrating it in to a time scale!

We control the time of day via events – this means that when dawn rises it does so with a visually clear flourish -rather than a continual incremental change.

So maps that feature you attacking or defending at night will typically start at, say, dusk and require you to do what you need to before dawn – where the mission may end or it may just get harder…

Part of the thought behind SH2 was to bring the battle out of the castle and to the field more. How has this changed for SH3? Will the troops types be more limited than the wide variety available in the other 3-d games in order to achieve a better balance?

Yes – we are going back into the castle for this one! – with a more limited set of troops – more than 1 but less than 2 – as you correctly point out more is often less in terms of trying to get a tight balance in our experience

The map editors and the ability to easily mod SH games counts a lot towards replayability and SH maps are still being played five and ten years after their original release. SH3 will come with an editor, will the game be as open to modding as former incarnations? Will there be more in-game options, forgoing the need for mods, like choosing your own color or gender or a fully customizable Lord, as well as the traditional custom Crests?

Yes – we want Stronghold3 fans to make more maps this time around and are planning to allow the best ones to be showcased in the game. Speaking as some one who has spent a LOT of time with both editor systems in the past – I must say I am enjoying the ease of use and flexibility that the current editor has added to this vital part of Stronghold armoury.

In terms of crests we are hoping to be able to include access to the Stronghold Kingdoms shield designer – and allow shields designed through it into the game – this is not certain yet – but high on our wish-list.

Protecting your work has always been a business necessity, what type of DRM will SH3 use and will you need an internet connection to play?

It will be via Steam and you will need an internet connection to activate your copy the first time you play. After that you can play offline which won’t need an internet connection – but if you have one then you will get all sorts of online extras available to you – for example scoring on our live score server. Nothing makes you want to replay economic mission 1 over and over more than trying to shoot up the score board I can tell you!

Everyone has their own idea of what would be a great addition to SH3 and there is no shortage of suggestions that can be found at various places on the internet. How influential are fan suggestions? Has there been anything that made you say ‘why didn’t we think of that’?

We pay a lot of attention to fan feedback and our return to a simpler game than 2 bears testament to that. We do take ideas, but they tend to be smaller refinements rather than bigger ones that would change the game drastically – a good example is the introduction of sappers which elegantly allows us to return to troops attacking walls directly as in Stronghold1 – but without it looking quite so silly !

Some fan suggestions from Stronghold Heaven include growing trees, AI in multiplayer and more dis-mountable horse troops. Is there a chance of these making an appearance?

Strangely all 3 of those items would make it in to Crusader 2 should we make that next! Ai in multiplayer as that’s were it belongs, dismountable troops as Crusader always has a greatly expanded troop set and re-growing trees as that would fit well with the oasis system.

Your previous games came with a Castle Attack, when can we expect Castle Attack 3?

We would like to do one believe me – but With Stronghold3 and Stronghold Kingdoms – we have too much going on at the moment.

Thank You

Thank You, Simon. May Firefly Studios be blessed with success on this new game and thank you for the best castle games ever!