Certain things that will help you play slightly… okay not sure if this will help you.
Tips and Tricks to Economics
Note
I am assuming you are playing on Highest limits (please don’t play on 100 or below like, why do that?). And on the Easy difficulty, a thing you may not know is that Difficulty affects Food Consumption, and i think only that. Now some may say why not just play at Hard, well in my opinion ever since this game Food has been a hard thing to maintain, normal rations are fine but double is very hard to hold, plus number of buildings to even hold normal is quite high. If you are on MP save the trouble and just play on Easy, plus there are many buildings that take Build slots like Oxen, Barracks, Aurmory, all of which are more important, and i believe this will save MP hastle with the already low Building count of 125.
Also be very careful, the most similar game to this is Crusader 2 but this bassicaly plays like Stronghold 1, Unit balancing (besides useless Man At Arms) is scarily similar to SH1, except with adition of Rangers which in melle are better than Macemen, but worse than both Ranged units, and inclusion of ever game balance breaking Knights).
Economy resembles SH1, peasants coming to castle is slow, general its all around a slow game, honestly if you just imagine you are playing Stronghold 1 you are prob already playing better than most others. There are similarities to Crusader 2 such as over expensive economy, tax superiority and Hovel sizes, but honestly its less Jank and i feel like Units listen to your commands better (you can use Formations without worry for example and Rangers actually are dangerous in melle)
Housing Basics
One of things i saw people do is botch the housing, now housing is extremely important due to happiness, its uncapped so more you have the better, now houses in this game go towards the Building limit total so you do want to build only a certain amount while maximizing population.
Here is an image of optimal housing i found, consisiting of only 10 and 8 peasant houses. Now in stronghold 3 you can fit 8 Largest houses with some careful lining up, however this means you can fit less of 8 peasant houses. In the image i curently have 228 population. This pattern is also simple to memorize as well. Start from back of your keep with a house on top left and go to the right, thats around 4 hovels, turn around and from corner again build hovels, repeat that for other sides as well. The outer hovels are a bit tricky, you can’t fit any more hovels from the front (the Distance is measured from the Keep and not the build area, i know, weird) So you can fit only 3 from back, left and right, back isn’t a problem but left and right can be an issue, especelly since Hovel 6 is Longer but thinner, so the build area will shift easily and mess up placement. Once you done this you bassically most peasants with only building big hovels.
Food
Consumption is, whatever. all you have to know that its VERY HARD to keep anything above Normal rations, double comes out quickly and i don’t think triple and above are worth it. With that said lets talk about foods. There is Apple, Chesse, Meat and Bread. Apple is the best food, there is nothing else you should use but Apple. Even Bread falls short to Apples. The optimal placement if you aling bread as close to Stockpile and Granary with Wheat/Mill/Bakery should be 2 1 9, this has proved to work pretty good. However in this game time to bake bread is very large, plus walking from and to stockpile and granary takes a very long time. For only 24 units per delivery.
May seem good until you think of Apples. Apples only give you 9 food, but they can go to Granary almost 3 or 4 times in time it takes for 1 bakery to produce bread, that is 27/36 units, a BIG difference, and they don’t go to Stockpile.
Cheese only produces 8 and while it has a shorter startup time, it has random times of Downtime so it just ends up being slower than Apples, the advantage to cheese is Space and only 15 wood cost, which ill admit there are times where you might consider Cheese over Apples.
Pig however is useless, its 100 wood for 12 units per delivery, but its almost the same as Cheese, eventuelly it will be outproduce by apples simply due to it standing still at points and doing nothing.
The only real Advantage of Pig is that it has the highest sell size, now admiteddly its actually not that bad, but id say this only really works if you produce it along side apples and sell it regularly, or just produce Meat and then sell it at certain times, but you are spending 100 wood per pig farm, i at times end up making at least 25 Apples/Cheese if space allows it, and 2500 wood can be spent on better places.
Now Fear Factor Negative could possibly give you better results with Bread, but honestly Negative Fear factor should be used to boost candles and ale to get you to -90 tax, not more food.
Might as well throw in Royal food, just buy it, its cheap.
Weapons
Just buy them, weapons are so cheap its stupid, 200 gold for 20 bows, let that sink in. SH2 was 660 gold.
Why in the world would you spend 100 gold on Workshops? MAYBE if you got weapon trade off, that is fine. But otherwise why? Make 8 bow makers for 800 gold and it will take quite some time to make that back, or buy 80 bows. The taxes you get in this game make up for whatever weapons you buy. I mean Pikes cost 160 gold for 20, and Weaponsmith is 200, you are LOSING money if you try to make pikes.
Again, maybe Negative fear factor, but its not worth it.
Ale and Religion
This is fun, Ale at max gives you 30 pop, Candles gives 40.
No reason to go for Ale but its not so bad.
Hops to Brewery ratio is 1 to 1, i know sad, but it is what it is. But Brewery produces more ale than Chandler does Candles, now to be fair you do need Hop farms as well, but still that is something to consider. Either way placement is VERY important, lets say you have 32 Chandler Workshops, any distance or bad placement will hurt your Chandler Workshops, 1 thing to know is that building Workshops next to each other will block the path in between them, so they must go around. This is crucial to know when making rows of these buildings as to not make them go around too long of a way. This isn’t Crusader 2 where you can have some Distance, any distance hurts these buildings a lot and you must account for it. Still 32 workshops should be enough for high pop if placed well.
Fear Factor changes this, if you go for Negative, go for both, Brewery will produce insane amounts and Chandlers will be efficent enough, and it will easily counter act any negative pop you get from FF.
Fear Factor
Now very big issue with Fear Factor is that there are limited buildings.
If you build every positive FF building, you can support 87 ACTIVE peasants before it starts to drop down from Maxming -50% efficency/ +200% HP and +20 pop. By active i only mean workers plus 24 around campfire, so 87/ – Whatever number here, the 228 from the first Section for example. This is important since, well you do wanna keep up this number right.
Anyway 200% HP is no joke, your Peasants will start being a force to be reckoned with, you Knights will be invincibile to Death itself, Pikemen will be most annoying thing to deal with, Crossbowmen and rangers will be dangerous, you will be thankful monks can’t be recruited since those bastards are straight out of hell. Your economy is trash but honestly max FF is fun, anyone decent will prob be able to outmanuever you, but most players playing this are… not that great, so have fun killing people with Peasants only.
Food will be hard to keep however, i use either Apples/Cheese to like a 25+ number, on Easy the food level wont go down but if FOR SOME reason you decide to play on Medium or Higher, you may not be so lucky.
Negative supports 98 ACTIVE peasants, giving you +300% efficency, but -50% HP and -20 pop.
Your units will die, no going around it.
Your economy will just Skyrocket. Hop farms start making more hops so you can support from Breweries, plus even like 8 produce more than you can imagine, Candles don’t get buffed as much but it makes them easier to hold. Your single woodcutter camp produces absolute insane ammount of wood. And Bread might NOT be useless when using this.
Now big issue is having 98 peasants, -90 tax is cool and all but you won’t be getting too much tax, still tho its quite a cool number to see, and you can still sell your stuff so its worth it. Very fun thing to mess around with.
But you don’t need 300% now do you. Very interesting thing in this game is that even 1 FF building will give you a bonus, so even 1 gallow at i dunno, 300 peasants will give you -2 FF. +20% efficency, is only -5% HP, which is alright, but that +20% is actually very good. With careful enough placement this means you can have both ale and Candles in my experience at, well ALMOST max, i think im more often -1 tick off one of these, but still that 20% gives you very good consistency, for just 5% Troop HP i see no reason not to do this. You can feel the effects on your economy and it sticks even on high population, id say even at start of game you should perhaps immedietly build 1 Stocks, it gives lowest FF , is smallest and cheapest, very effective.
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