Whoa! New Stronghold MMO!

It's apparently the "wave of the future" in city building games.

TM was or is maybe working on that Nile thingy game. I haven't visited over there in a long long time so don't know what became of it, whether they've made it out of beta yet or not.

Cities XL is in essence a City Building MMOG. After all, you have a city on a persistant map. I think we will see more of these in the future if the first round does well. However it's been tried before in Starpeace and from what I remember of it pretty much flopped flat. I don't know the whole story or even little bits of it, but I retried Starpeace a few months ago now that somebody else has taken over the duty of running it and it still felt like the old starpeace to me and was not very entertaining for .

Now we have Cities XL in closed beta and in essence a MMOCBG, you choose a plot of land and develop your city, trade with your fellow players or other ways and share your city by allowing your friends to come in and move around your city. This type of gameplay (mmocbg) screams out for contests, and competition at least with the "online" portion of the game.

Yup, i'ts the wave of the future. However with regards to strongholdkingdomes I don't have a clue how it would work, but if it's set in a persistant world, then what happens when the user is offline and a neighboring kingdom decides to attack your kingdom while you are offline? I would wonder if the system would go into some form of an automated mode where your troops attempt to protect your kingdom and push back the enemy (usually the AI is no match for good players of RTS games so....

Or maybe it puts everything on hold until both players are online and can resolve the situation, or maybe it will be more of an abstract number system, so overpowering forces of 200 knights beats 100 swordsman and 100 swordsman beat 10 rock throwers etc, or hell maybe it will be a elaborate "rock, paper, scissors" system.

I love playing my MMORPG's (or I should say that I used to, I haven't played WOW or Guildwars in atleast3 to 6 months now), but for a game where I have a kingdom and I have to protect that kingdom even when Im offline and can't control my troops doesn't exactly make me want to run out and buy the game.

Never the less it will be interesting to see where their imaginations lead them in this endeavor. Personally speaking, Im way past wanting to revive my stronghold times. It was an enjoyable game for it's time but I don't think that it kept up with the times and it always felt to me like they were basically living in the past. Yes you all know that im a total graphics whore and need my visual eye candy to keep me happy, and that last game that they put out in the stronghold vein didn't do anything at all for me. It would be like going back to play Diabo 2 from 1999, today after playing WOW for the past 5.something years, it's no longer visually stimulating and so feels dull.

Currently playing Sims 3 happily building houses for myself and others. We've got a whole production system going, a bunch of people are building houses and a bunch of gals are decorating them, then playing in a beta and under the NDA.