Stronghold Kingdoms: Gold and Honor Strategy
In Stronghold Kingdoms, the two most important things you need are honor, to level up and research new technologies, and gold. This guide will help you focus on producing a village with high gold and honor output.
First off, town planning is key. Different buildings have different bonuses depending on where they are placed on the map. Obviously you will want to focus on food, lumber and stone production as these are the basic requirements. But the key factor is to place Dovecotes and gardens close to your village hall. These will provide a boost to the happiness in the village. This in combination with religious structures will help boost your honor.
Ideally right away you want enough farms to sustain your village at about 80% capacity, with one ration of food per day. Likewise with the alcohol. Your first priority with research points is to focus on food production. Fill out as much as your able to in all aspects of farming. This will allow those farms to produce far more then 1 ration a day. You will want to be able to produce 4 rations a day, of food and alcohol.
This focus will likely leave you lacking in defense preparations early in your game, but at the same time, you are just starting out and unlikely to be a target of anything except Enemy AI attacks which will not raze you. After you have your food research completed as far as you can go, you will be producing so many troops and/or gold. Ideally in the early stages, you will want to ramp up your gold reserves, so don't be afraid to ramp your taxes up very high. You won't get as many people, nor will you level quite as quickly with honor, however you will build up a nice stockpile of gold, which you can dip into if you notice your research points run out.
Always keep research running unless it drains your gold faster then you can make it.
As you level up, and once you begin running your second village you can start focusing on building troops and leveling up that aspect of the research trees. Focus first on defense. I can't count the number of times I have seen people who are higher level players with very crummy castles. Your first order of business is to enclose your keep with at least 8 blocks thick of stone walls and towers. Place archers only on towers if you can. Usually behind the keep is where I position my guard houses. These are almost as strong as towers at their max research level. 200 archers should be a general goal to aim towards.
As I said, focus on the inside near your keep first, then build a wall around your castle along the white line. I like to use small towers with 2 blocks of stone wall between each. You can place Great Towers at the 4 corners and Large towers in the middle of each outer wall. You will still need a gatehouse, but that can be added in beside a Medium Tower along one wall in place of the Large Tower.
You will want to build your army to about 200 archers on defense, 200 pikemen, and the balance with catapults. Often you will not have many more then about 20 to 30 catapults, as the other spaces will be taken up by merchants, scouts and/or monks. A captain is also key in every town, mainly for the ability to use that towns army to raze or take out a threat at any time if need be.
As for Vassals, be sure that they are regular players. Ensure that their rank is sufficient enough that they will not be kicked out if they remain inactive for a few weeks. You don't want to build a 500 man army at a vassal, only to have it all get deleted one day when the town no longer exists. Vassals should be placed in some strategic locations around the map, near your town in order to offer support if need be. But you can also vassal further away and use your vassals to extend your armies reach for peaceful purposes like killing Wolf Lair's and Bandit Camps and such.
Timed attacks are key when focusing on a player vs player mach, and we will go into that more in depth later. For now, I hope that this has helped.