Follow your advisor’s advice and start to build up your village, this will provide you with the many goods you need to progress. Then you should concentrate on getting more honour to allow you to rank up and thus carry out more beneficial research. Build up you castle to be able to withstand enemy attacks and maybe carry out some raids on small wolf lairs. Build some scouts to allow you to collect free resources on the map. Other things to consider after you start to build up your village are finding yourself a liege lord and getting involved in your local parish.

Popularity is the measure of how happy people are in your village. If you are in positive popularity people will come to your village if there is room for them in your houses. The higher your popularity, the faster they will come. If your popularity is negative, villagers will start to leave. Positive popularity also gives you honour, as you are seen to be treating your people well.

Clicking on the popularity icon will open the village management controls. Here you can adjust the tax rate (lower is generally more popular), set rations and adjust ale consumption rates if you have an inn and some ale. These will have a direct effect on popularity. How crowded your housing is also has a bearing on your popularity, placing more houses is usually a popular move. Other factors are both popular & unpopular buildings that you place and external events such as the weather, or enemies in your parish for example.

People come to your village if there is enough housing space available (build more hovels if not) and you have positive popularity. Manage your population wisely! Villagers not working at a building will still consume food and ale, so you never want to have too many idle peasants or they will quickly be eating more food than your village is able to produce.

Honour’s primary function is to allow you to increase your rank. You gain honour in several ways, initially you get honour every day based on your villages popularity. If your village has a positive popularity then that is multiplied with your honour multiplier. You can boost your honour multiplier in several ways, for example by researching arts or placing honour giving buildings like gardens. Click on the “Honor Report” icon in your village to see a detailed view of your daily honor production.

To gain honor more quickly, you can hold banquets, the more types of banquet goods used, the more honor you will receive. You also gain honour by destroy threats to your parish and by defending successfully against the various enemies that attack you. There are also a variety of strategy cards which will help you increase your passive honor, increase the honor from banquets, as well as give you a boost to your honor points. Additionally, as a new player you can pledge yourself to a liege lord.

Research improves all aspects of your kingdom, whether that is in food production, or the speed of your armies, the capacities of your granary, or the speed at which your buildings get built. There are over 700 researches to be carried out across over 80 categories. The order you choose to do them reflects your style of play. Some researches allow access to other categories, a fantastic way to understand this is to click on the ‘tech tree’ tab in the research screen.

The main way to get more research points is to rank up, you get three each time you increase your rank. Research points can also be bought for gold, but the cost increases each time. You can sometimes get extra research points from strategy card packs too!

The first way you build up your gold is tax. The higher the tax rate you set and the more peasants you have, the more tax you will collect. Once you have researched the ability to trade you can also sell off your surplus good to local markets, but always check the prices at parish markets near you as prices change frequently based on demand.

If you have free peasants in your village who aren’t working at one of the village buildings, you can turn them into troops by clicking on the army icon. You need to have researched the troop type first and some troop types such as an archer will require that you have made the needed weapon (bow) to recruit the unit. The overall size of your army is governed by the ‘Command’ research, which increases the number of units in your army. Note ‘units’ are also used when you add scouts, traders and monks to your village. Over time you will adjust this balance to suit your play style.

The parish is the geographic region that your village can be found in on the world map. There will over time, be other players there along with resources that can be collected with scouts and where enemies will appear from time to time. In the center of the region is the parish capital, you can click on the capital to select it, view it, trade with it or send it resources. Clicking on the Parish icon on the interface will also bring up a view of the parish capital and what has been built there.

There are hundreds of different strategy cards to collect and play in the game and deciding which cards to play, when to play cards, and in which combination is almost a game in itself! There are cards that effect every aspect of the game and in multiple ways, typically they are used to boost those aspects of your kingdom that you are currently focusing on. Be that trade or castle building, banqueting goods production, or engaging in political wars later in the game.

Cards can be bought in packs from the store, each pack has a different flavor of contents. Card pack are also often given away as prizes at various points in the games life. You can get free individual cards every day, by clicking on the free card icon, the higher your Kingdoms veteran level, the faster you will get free cards.

Premium tokens allow you to do more when you are not online. You can queue up multiple researches as well as multiple buildings to be built in your villages, as well as move buildings in your villages. Along with a host of other features such as the village overview screen, auto scouting and more. It’s a bit like having your own personal assistant working for you while you are not logged in!

Scouting is a great way to get more resources, so take a look on the world map and check for resource stashes. Recruit scouts and click on the stash on the world map to dispatch the scouts there and snag the goods before someone else does! You can also research the production rate of goods, the higher the research level, the faster all of your villages will produce them. Of course, the fastest way to get more resources is to play cards strategically. Certain cards will instantly give you goods, while other cards will increase the production rate of goods. Additionally, you could play a card which boosts the production of all types of food or all types of building materials, thus stacking the bonuses of the two cards!

To buy and sell goods, you must research the first level of Merchant Guilds; this is available when Level 2 of Mathematics has been completed. A market will become available via the industry buildings menu, and can be placed anywhere in the village. Once the market has been built, you can recruit merchants. As you advance in rank, research will become available for more merchants per market, as well as the ability to trade with more markets.

For a new player, one of the most important things you can do is to find a higher ranked player to be your liege lord (that makes you the vassal!). You will get a daily honor boost from having a liege lord as well as be able to use the troops they station at your village to defend your castle. Having a liege lord also signals to other players that you are under your liege lord’s protection and that if they attack you, your liege lord may retaliate against them! The higher a player’s rank, the more vassals they can have, and the greater the difference in rank, the more honor the vassal will receive, so if you haven’t received a vassal request, try sending a friendly mail to some of the players at the top of the leaderboard and ask if they will be your liege lord.

As you advance in rank, you’ll be able to own more and more villages, so don’t worry if you’re starting far away from your homeland or friends at first, soon enough you’ll be able to send one of your captains to get a second village wherever you’d like. It is also common for experienced players to “trade” villages or give them away to other players in exchange for resources or other assistance. While your first village may not be in an area to your liking, just remember that it is only the first of many!

Once you reach rank 12, you will be able to research Leadership and then Captains. Once you have recruited a captain you can use them to either buy a village charter or send them with your army to capture a village from another player.

Building up a strong castle is always recommended, but with pillage and ransack attacks you need to build a bit further out as once attackers get inside the white line, each attacker inside continually reduces the success counter by one. Building further out will help you target incoming troops with your archers more quickly.

Your castle never sleeps, but you can! As a new player with a single village, you do not need to worry too much about the safety of your castle. While the AI in your parish may ransack or pillage your village, they will not destroy it completely. Higher ranked players are also unlikely to attack you, since they will incur a high honor penalty for doing so and get very few resources in return. If you have a liege lord, the attacker will have to answer to him as well! Being friendly with the other players around you is an advantage here as well, since you can work together to deal with threats. As you progress in the game, you can also research monks and use their interdict skill to make your village unattackable for periods of time.

The AI (Artificial Intelligence) are the red icons on the world map. They are not other human players like you, but instead game controlled opponents. The AI will act in predictable ways, cannot repair their castles, and while they may pillage or ransack you, they will not destroy your village completely.

You and the other players in your parish all have an interest in building up your parish capital buildings so you can enjoy the bonuses that they provide to every village in the parish. All the players in the parish can donate goods from their villages in the parish to the buildings in the parish capital. Donating goods to the buildings upgrades them and increases the bonuses that they confer to the villages in the parish.

Just as you control your village, the parish steward controls the parish capital. The steward can set the tax rate, construct parish buildings, fortify the castle, and use the troops stationed at the parish. To become the steward of a parish you must be voted in by the members of the parish

The parish can get gold in diverse ways. The parish gets a percentage of gold from all the goods that players buy and sell at its market, as well as a small amount of gold from the parish tax rate set by the steward. The parish steward can also use the parish army to raid gold from other capitals.

Each parish will begin generating flags every 24-48 hours once it has an elected leader. Flags are needed to construct buildings in the parish capital. The members of a parish can use their village armies to attack other parish castles to steal their flags, or the parish steward can use the parish army to steal flags. Factions will often work together to take flags from enemies or inactive parishes to help their own capitals grow more quickly.

A faction is a group of players who work together to achieve common goals. Joining a faction is an important first step into the vibrant political life of Stronghold Kingdoms and even new players can contribute to the faction’s success. Each faction has a leader, called the faction general (FG), who appoints officers and tends to the needs of the faction members. Once a faction has five or more members, it may apply for admission to a house.

A House is a group of factions working together to achieve complex political goals on a grand scale. Once a faction’s general applies to a house, the generals of the other factions in the house can vote to admit or refuse the faction entry to the house. The generals also vote on which faction should hold leadership of the house. The general of this faction is then also the House Marshall (HM).

There are twenty houses, each represented by a distinct color. The color of each different administrative region on the map is determined by the alignment of the region’s leader. If the region has no leader, or the leader does not belong to a house, the region will have no coloration.

Faith Points are used in later stages of the game to perform a variety of different political actions using Monks.

Some buildings can only be placed in certain village types. The first village you start with is a ‘Lowland’ type village, however to place a vineyard you will need a ‘Valley Side’ type village, to place a pitch rig you will need either a ‘Highland’ or ‘Marsh’ type village. You can select the type of village you’d like when you send a captain to buy a village charter.

Tourneys give players the opportunity to compete in a series of medieval tournaments for special prizes and bragging rights on all-new leaderboards. Tourneys are limited time tournament-style contests in which all players of a given world compete in completing various activities in game (e.g. ‘Total Wolves Killed’). Players are automatically entered into a Tourney once they complete a Tourney objective.

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