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EaglePrince

Your opinion of rats, gong, and criminals in Stronghold 2?

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I am making this thread for you to tell us what is your opinion about those three stuff. Some of us don't like it, some of us do, and those of us who don't like it - they may avoid to play the whole game because of that fact. I am one of those who didn't like it much, and who wanted Stronghold 2 to be at least a little bit more simplified, but now I do like it! I believe one can easily build falconers post and gong pit to solve the issue with gong, which is a quite natural problem in a medieval city; also when one builds several of those, he doesn't have to care about it anymore, workers will just do their job and keep the castle clean.

 

There is also another issue which you may, or you may not like, and that is: building courthouse, lords kitchen, bedchambers, church, etc... may require some more space; but again, I do like that we have this as well. Indeed, one does not have a have it all in his castle; having to make some choices can make the game somewhat more interesting I think. Also, these buildings force a player to build a larger castle which makes defending it more interesting - one needs to plan carefully how to defend himself.

 

What is your opinion about this matter? :)

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The rats & gong (as well as crime actually) can all be turned off on any custom game except Kingmaker. But in Kingmaker, you can just start as a low rank, therefore bypassing the need to use them.

 

Here is an article which shows the triggers & events of SH2 along with a detailed explanation of each (including the Gong, rats and no crime ones) : http://www.stronghold-nation.com/article/77-triggers-and-events-overview

 

We are going to be adding a much more in-depth example, but this is all we have for the moment. ;)

 

Back to the original question now:

 

As you say, there is nothing to be worried about after placing about two to three Gong Pits and two falconers posts (depending on the size of your estate). However, I have seen many people via multiplayer who have placed them all in the same spot (in one occasion six all in one place) - which is completely pointless. The reason for this is because the Gong can appear anywhere at random in your estate - and gong farmers will only travel so far to get to the Gong. So if the Gong is out-of-reach of the Gong farmer, then he just won't go to it. By placing several around your estate, you will make ensure that Gong is permanently taken care of, no matter how much it comes back. Normally, I never place more than three.

 

Crime is just as easy to beat. You place one Guard Post next to the granary - I've seen cases where people place two or three, which aren't needed. Next, you place a torturer's guild, some non-torturer rehabilitation methods as well as torturer required ones. The reason for this is that the Judge will not be able to constantly trial criminals if the Torturers are all busy rehabilitating criminals. By placing some rehabilitation methods that don't require the torturer, the Judge will take the criminal from the Courthouse to another method, which means that he can continue on the cycle of continuously rehabilitating any criminals. Criminals still have a negative effect even in the Dungeon, so this can help quite a bit.

 

As an added note: Just like never placing more than one guard post, don't place more torturer's guilds - it's wasting peasants on jobs that, if carried our correctly, alleviate the need to even place them in the first place.

Edited by Lord_Chris

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Interesting, I wasn't thinking about that - I mean placing one non-torturer rehabilitation method, so pure criminals wouldn't have to wait for their punishment. :)

 

Speaking about kingmaker, we have to admit, even though one can play as a low rank not to have rats, he wouldn't have many other buildings as well...

Edited by EaglePrince

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@Lord Chris -- You cannot set events, etc in freebuilds

 

Also, its just gongs and rats I'm worrired about, Crime is an interesting feature (except when your falconers and gong farmers decide to become criminals,.....)

Edited by Isaiah

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Also, its just gongs and rats I'm worrired about, Crime is an interesting feature (except when your falconers and gong farmers decide to become criminals,.....)

That is why you can chop off the guys head. :D Instant "rehabilitation". :lol:

Edited by EaglePrince

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Speaking about kingmaker, we have to admit, even though one can play as a low rank not to have rats, he wouldn't have many other buildings as well...

 

Yes, I agree that it isn't ideal and makes it much harder on yourself, in terms of military .etc. But maybe some people prefer it hard. But it is still possible.

 

@Lord Chris -- You cannot set events, etc in freebuilds

 

Yes, good catch.


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⁠— Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales: The Knight's Tale

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I find that the mechanics are a bit... Pointless. It doesn't really add anything to game-play, other than forcing you to use resources on a few buildings that take up a moderate amount of space on maps which are smaller than those of the original game. Then once in a while it causes your carefully balanced popularity to drop when both of your gong farmers and one of your falconers all decide to get together and form the largest criminal syndicate the castle has ever seen, which in turn backlogs your courthouse until you get some gallows up and running. I feel like if the intent was to create a more in-depth non-military side of the game, it could probably have been done better. As it is, these are simple nuisances that eat up resources and space when (in a multiplayer or kingmaker game) you have neither to spare.

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I still think it's not waste of resources and space, as this way when your economy, and your popularity and population are down, you need to care about more stuff then usually in Stronghold 1/Crusader 1... But in the end, it is a matter of taste - we can simply like it, or not. :) I used to feel like that about this matter as well, but now I just look at it like this - it's like they made economy a little bit slower, or something like that. :)

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We all start out with the problem of dealing with crime gong and rats, but once you learn how to deal with them then it's an easy thing to do.

 

Gong- 3 or 4 gong pits around the castle will do the job.

 

Rats- 2 falconers one by the granary and one across the way from it. I usually use one.

 

Crime- one court house close to the guards post one guards post close to either your housing or the granary, the thieves go from the houses to the granary and back, next set up 3 gibbets and no more crime problem, add more as your castle increases in size.

 

Or make a custom scenario and script them out of the picture completely!

 

Maybe I should make a map where gong rats and crime are turned all the way up to hard and lets see you deal with these problems, throw in some diseases and you have a real time on your hands:-)

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Usually what I do is make a town and keep the starting eight peasants. I usually only use archers and crossbowmen from then on, so I send three peasants to an Orchard, a Cheese Farm and Hunters post and thus giving a steady +2 honor increase and another 2 peasants to sawmills. When this is done, I build a treasury and set "low taxes" with the granary rationing on "extra". Then I wait until I am promoted to knight where I am able to build weapon industries and I put a fletching station to make bows and surround my town using stone I bought from the market. Later I add towers and able to build ballistas even with one peasant by building multiple armed peasants and disbanding them immediately, leaving a number available for recruitment.

 

Basically, the advantages of this whole scheme is that it prevents any crime, gong or rats appearing in your kingdom, which is really helpful to me because I waste so many resources trying to stop it spreading through my kingdom. In multiplayer, this works except that gong is the only thing that appears and it isn't much trouble to resolve, it only involves having one less sawmill and replacing it with a gong pit.

 

However, unless you have another really good tactic or you think this is a good idea, I would deter you from using this method because it is militarily and economically disadvantageous due to the lack of a larger labor force and general human resource.

 

Also, I don't really like this crime, gong and rats system, I find it a bit tedious and a waste of time. I understand firefly wanted another way to handicap you, but I find it more annoying than challenging.


35011y1.jpg

 

"To Strive, To Seek, To Find, And Not To Yield." - Alfred Tennyson

"Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori" - Wilfred Owen

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Well, it is not much challenging, but what we can say is that it is harder to bring up a castle in ruins then it is in Crusader 1 or Stronghold 1.

 

I haven't tested it, but I assume that in Stronghold 2 if my castle and economy went down along with the popularity, the one who wants to rise again need to deal with: rats, gong, crime, and food supplies - not only to deal with food supplies. On the other hand, it is not much challenging if your economy is up, and everything is working well - keeping rats, gong, and crime under control under good conditions is pretty easy. At least that's how I look at that. :)

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Yeah that sounds like a perfect way to sum it up. To be honest, I have only played Legends and Stronghold 2 so I don't really have good comparability skills but I can infer from what your saying is that SH2 is different in terms of economic growth and production.


35011y1.jpg

 

"To Strive, To Seek, To Find, And Not To Yield." - Alfred Tennyson

"Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori" - Wilfred Owen

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The economy is easy in SH2, getting the pop up is easy to, when I first started learning the game these were real problems, then I starting making my own war scenarios and just left them out, now I find myself adding some back in once in a while, you should try a few of my war scenarios and see if your systems works on those!

 

If your people get angry with you and leave your castle, just buy food set to double for a bit, or let it drop to 0 then wait a bit and it will automatically come back to 70.

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If your people get angry with you and leave your castle, just buy food set to double for a bit, or let it drop to 0 then wait a bit and it will automatically come back to 70.

 

That's a really useful feature which I like. I can't remember noticing it in Legends, but then again, it's much easier to do in Legends and there isn't any real economy compared with Stronghold 2.


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⁠— Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales: The Knight's Tale

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I mean it's not like someone one living in the medieval times would be walking along when suddenly "a wild piece of gong appears" or "uh-oh, you're gonna die son because that rat near your feet is only kill you with the plague and no-one else because this Stronghold plague is noncontagious ". They were unnecessary features and didn't really add anything to the game other than be really annoying when you're amassing an army or focusing on more pressing activities. If there was some incentive to clear gong and get rid of rats, say, honor given for every rat cleared and gong removed, then people would be more inclined to actually do something about it rather than just let it sit there and rot your kingdom. The crime system did this but it was not exactly "productive" because you were losing some of your workers to gain honor and it was a very long and arduous system until this actually happened. The best solution to get back that building which the supposed "criminal" was working in is to delete it and then rebuild it which is a pain to manage when you have to fight a war as well. This is one of the main reasons I do not build any hovels to avoid getting all these penalties, because it actually gave me a chance to beat the King in kingmaker. Honestly it was one of the really bad things about this game. :angry:


35011y1.jpg

 

"To Strive, To Seek, To Find, And Not To Yield." - Alfred Tennyson

"Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori" - Wilfred Owen

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At first I hated it. I'm still not sure that I like the extra work. All in all though I'm still getting use to stronghold 2. I'm die hard crusader 1 more or less. There is just something about that old 2D board that I love for these games. Sometimes the maps just don't ever seem big enough in stronghold 2.

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Gong, rats and crime are supposed to be a nuisance and so one has to think - why are they playing the game?

Most players want to just arm up and fight, but that gets boring too. At least the GRC prolong the game and add the extra setbacks that games need to 'balance' the activity.

making your own scenarios is really the best way to play SH2. Editing the ones that come with game and downloadable mods has extended my enjoyment of the game for years. Yes, I have wish lists but they are unfulfillable as, for some reason few players like the game and Firefly was forced to drop it.

Along came Legends but it got silly with giants and fairies etc.

Then Stronghold 3 changed the game again to another mess that fans don't seem to like. and dropped the editor for some inexplicable reason and replaced it with a basically unuseable program that makes scenario design a chore not worth the effort.

Obviously, the only way to keep customers happy is for Firefly to concentrate on killing, destroying and placing lots of half dressed girls in the game.:rolleyes:

Naturally these are only my opinions.

LS

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Interesting points! If you're interested in sharing some suggestions for what could improve Stronghold 2, we have a thread here: http://forums.stronghold-nation.com/topic/727-official-stronghold-2-suggestions-list/


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⁠— Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales: The Knight's Tale

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Although I agree with you that Firefly wanted to make a game for majority of players who would prefer fighting over castle life, we have to agree that they could have thought a little bit better when they were making Stronghold 2 and newer Stronghold games. Fighting, besieging castles, and defending a castle is way more interesting in those older Stronghold games, but not because those were simpler in Stronghold Crusader, but because those were way more complex in Stronghold Crusader. In Crusader you are able to choose which troops would be the best to defeat certain opponents, so while swordsmen are great if you want to attack the Pig, macemen would be far more efficient in killing the Caliph. In newer Stronghold games it's all about knights unfortunately. That's why I love to play with swordsmen. :P (which becomes impossible if your opponents have tons of knights, then you must have knights as well) There's nothing that can stop knights as efficiently as another army of knights.

 

But still, I do like Stronghold 2 multiplayer games as well!

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I made a game that has gong, rats, crime and disease set to the highest amount. With 2 hovels I easily keep my peasants happy with 1 guard, 1 gong guy and 1 rat catcher at a time., with 3 hovels I always have at least 2 criminals in jail at a time, gong and rats are always a problem especially if I have a church and the gong/rat guys are religious. During services they don't do their jobs and my important workers drop dead when they walk into fresh gong.

Production drops with a church but the honor goes up. As my estate is 'christian' I don't allow pubs, so no drunks wasting time. (Only lords and the gentry are allowed wine, sometimes).

Also I notice that a petty thief spends almost 3 months waiting for trial and well over 18 months in the stocks - for which I gain 1 honor per month.

Another thing I found out is if the peasants decide to leave the castle and it's down to 5 left (say out of 32 workers), if I crank up the tax to the highest and cruelest tax rate, almost immediately the happy goes from red below 0 to green 70% and they come back and if I then drop tax back to normal, low or no tax, they stay until the next perceived wrong.?

Another recent observation I have made: If your barracks are inaccessible and cannot be walked to, new recruits can still be chosen and they gather by the campfire.?

LS

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I've noticed in the past when a low amount of peasants are left in the Castle, the popularity level appears to randomly become better, though I didn't know that about the tax rate. I assumed it was a natural occurrence, after all, it happens in all Stronghold games I've played.

 

If your barracks are inaccessible and cannot be walked to, new recruits can still be chosen and they gather by the campfire.

 

By this, do you mean that when you recruit new soldiers they gather by the campfire? And does the Barracks have to be pre-placed or can you place it in-game?


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That with the popularity, if you population drops to zero or few peasants, then your popularity jumps to 75, i think they made this in purpose so they would give a chance to a ruined player to rise again. I used it free weeks ago when I was playing a mission given us by Chris. I didn't give them taxes to +8, plus ale to +8, but I just shut down the workshops, and I trained troops. With this population dropped to 1 (I kept the inn working), and popularity jumped to 75 from 0.

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I love it, it makes it so... real but they often appear quickly after one another.

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happy goes from red below 0 to green 70%

 

If I'm correct, I believe that's called an integer underflow. A similar thing would happen in the older Civilization games when Ghandi became too passive. It started on 1, and since nobody put a line of code there to ensure it wouldn't drop below zero, (since negative numbers can't be stored on certain binary integers), it would lap over to the highest, which was an aggression of 10 (or 15, I don't remember properly), he'd then start declaring war on everyone.

 

Meant to add, you can store negative numbers on a signed integer, that can handle negative numbers, but that's not important here!

 

I've never really noticed this issue, although, never have I tried to have such terrible popularity :P

Edited by Mathew Steel

"Gofyn wyf am galon hapus, calon onest, calon l?n."

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If I'm correct, I believe that's called an integer underflow. A similar thing would happen in the older Civilization games when Ghandi became too passive. It started on 1, and since nobody put a line of code there to ensure it wouldn't drop below zero, (since negative numbers can't be stored on certain binary integers), it would lap over to the highest, which was an aggression of 10 (or 15, I don't remember properly), he'd then start declaring war on everyone.

 

That's very interesting. I always assumed that this was built into the game once your popularity got too low so that it gives you a chance to rebuild your economy (e.g. to stop all workers from leaving and not coming back again) though maybe this is the reason after all - or maybe it is a mix of both.


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