Mostly, these are negative effects like a plague, fire, or wild bear attack. To make matters worse, you’ll occasionally be struck by random events that can give you a positive or negative boost to popularity.
![stronghold 3 homepage stronghold 3 homepage](https://static.taigame.org/image/screenshot/201609/stronghold-3-gold-3.jpg)
Managing this would be doable, if you didn’t also need workers to gather the wood necessary to construct buildings and housing to support your economy and population growth. If you don’t take care of the high demand of the food cycle quickly, you’ll eventually run out of food and reach a very punishing stalemate where you lose population due to the negative effects the lack of food has on your popularity, even though you need more workers to increase your food supply.
![stronghold 3 homepage stronghold 3 homepage](https://raidofgame.com/uploads/posts/2020-01/1578929394_screenshot-3-stronghold-3.jpg)
Peasants eat a ridiculous amount of food, forcing you to be a bit of a douche lord and cutting their rations almost continuously, until you have the vast majority of peasants working in farms it’s almost as if instead of a feudal lord you are actually a Maoist governor. On the economy side, the balance between food and resource production is vastly skewed towards food production. Unfortunately, Stronghold 3 is riddled with so many issues and weird design choices that contentness is the last emotion you will feel while playing it. The systems behind Stronghold 3 are of the kind that should keep your playing for hours on end, watching your initially small hamlet turn into a well-oiled castle economy that you can look back on contently. If you do everything right, you should be on your way to create the castle of your dreams.
![stronghold 3 homepage stronghold 3 homepage](https://images.fanpop.com/images/image_uploads/Caernarfon-Castle-Wales-castles-789298_1920_1285.jpg)
These ornamental types of buildings offer a modest increase in popularity at the cost of productivity (gardens), or increase productivity at the cost of popularity (gibbets). Your popularity or peasant mood is affected by the tax rate, food rations, provisions of ale for the inn and candles for the church, spare housing, and certain ornamental buildings. To support the economy you need peasants that appear as long as there is sufficient housing and provided your popularity is a net positive. Food production buildings deliver food to a granary, other resource buildings deliver resources to a stockpile, and some buildings take resources from the stockpile to process them into things like bread, weapons, and ale. The Stronghold 3 economy itself should be familiar to fans of Stronghold. Although the same economy and resource gathering system is present in both campaigns, the former focuses a bit more on building troops while the latter is a bit more centered around tinkering with the most efficient economy. Once again the Stronghold campaign mode is split into a military and an economic (peace) campaign.
![stronghold 3 homepage stronghold 3 homepage](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/ZGGy7m1zXs8/maxresdefault.jpg)
Now, ten years after the first game, Firefly is back with Stronghold 3. Other than Stronghold: Crusader the spin-offs and direct sequel were not very well-received, and Firefly’s games in general weren’t particularly great for the past 8 years or so. It was the kind of game they go nuts over in countries like Germany, but thankfully it became pretty popular all over the world. Finally you could build up an entire castle from the ground up, man the walls with your units, and manage the feudal economy to support all of it. 2001’s Stronghold was a very good, and very European game.