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The issues plaguing the game are not limited to just one side of the wall. A pack of wolves can charge into your village and wantonly devour your entire peasant population, but without any audio or visual cues, you'll only realize it once your population is half of what it once was and you began to wonder why. You must try to place a building to find out if you can, or you could manually click on the granary or hover over the rations population slider to see how much food you have. While the UI displays many tidbits of useful information, such as your current gold, population level versus capacity, and the number of idle citizens, it doesn't include any information on how many resources you have. However, that level of helpful feedback doesn't extend to the rest of Stronghold 3, which is unhelpful in many respects. You actually see the villagers moving from place to place, so you get good visual feedback about where your plans are deficient. Again, in most cases these goods are manually taken from place to place, so proper city planning really boils down to intelligent placement of your processing, source and storage buildings to minimize the transport time. These goods can then be refined into other avenues of production in other buildings, such as creating new buildings, weaponry for your army, or other useful causes. In this game, such management can be key, and if you have an advancing army at your gates, you will sometimes need to gather and spend resources as quickly as possible in order to succeed. Quarry and wood workers are certainly capable of walking to and from their camps to get their goods, but any time spent walking to deliver or retrieve goods is time not spent producing them. Pig farms, for example, require arable land to facilitate their production, whereas buildings like wood camps and stone quarries should be placed near their respective material sources. Other building placements can have (or strongly imply) land type requirements. These goods have to be carried from where they are made and placed in the stockpile or granary by the involved workers, so building placement is important to minimize the travel time. Your stockpile contains the processed goods that your work buildings produce, such as bricks, candles and lumber, whereas your granary contains the apples, bread, cheese and pork harvested from your farms. You start by placing basic buildings, with the two most important ones being your stockpile and granary.
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Likewise, if you have no food and your city is being ransacked by outlaws, you can expect people to leave quickly - the ones who haven't been murdered, that is. If the number is positive, people will enter your population, and if you have low taxes and high numbers of the other factors, they'll flock to you. Properly controlling the levels of these is important, as they determine the rate at which people enter or leave your population. The flux of your castle's population is dependent on many factors, including the ale supply, church services, food supply, housing available, tax rate, and randomly occurring events that can be both positive and negative. To properly wage war, you must first establish a solid foundation for the effort, and it's all built on the backs of your peasant population. The real threat to your castle isn't the potential for famine or fighting, but rather the gameplay's veritable army of bugs and otherwise rough edges. Just think of the strategy and tactics involved! The gameplay in Stronghold 3 encompasses both sides of the wall in such sieges, so you not only have to worry about the catapults and advancing army on one side but also the needs of your population on the other. It's an excellent gameplay premise: repelling an army of invaders as it tries to breach your castle's defenses.