Citadels Review: Terrible

Set in Arthurian England, Citadels is an RTS that immediately presents as something of a hybrid between Age of Empires and Stronghold. With a mixture of castle design and more traditional RTS elements, Citadels could have been something great, unfortunately it fails to be merely competent.

Citadels begins with an introduction describing the downfall of King Arthur; he and the treacherous Mordred have met in battle and have both been killed. The game then begins at the start of Arthur’s rise to the throne. There is no explanation given for this oddly disconnected introduction and initial mission; it simply is. The rest of the story follows Arthur’s uniting of the land and the start of the war with Mordred and Morgana. I’ve not seen everything as both campaigns have at least one mission which crashes the game making progress quite literally impossible. Whilst a large patch did arrive during the review, the problems persist and those missions remain impossible to complete.

The story is presented between missions in a series text boxes as the next mission loads and reads like a summary paragraph from a history textbook, giving a brief overview of troop movements and the occasional shifted loyalty of some lord or other. Needless to say, this is not particularly interesting and there are never any story developments that occur during missions. For a story that features such a huge plethora of characters, the heroes and villains are rarely seen and have little to no effect on the missions other than introducing a fail state should they die. For instance, King Arthur, despite Excalibur and his legendary battle prowess, is significantly weaker than most second tier units, making him a non-factor in the few missions that he is present.

Technological progression within Citadels is very similar to Age of Empires: the player will upgrade their town hall and this will determine their maximum technology tier at any given point. Unlike Age of Empires, each building has to be upgraded individually so it’s entirely possible for a player to have a third tier town hall, but still have some first tier buildings. For the most part, upgrading a building increases its efficiency in some way, whether just by increasing the flat number of workers who can be assigned to a given resource building or unlocking more powerful units in the military buildings.

There are nine resources within Citadels: wheat, wood, ore, stone, weapons, stone blocks, wooden planks, bread, and gold. All of these, with the exception of gold, can either be collected from around the map or refined from other resources, but require the correct building to do so. For instance, wood cannot be harvested without a lumberman den. The resources are also split into two tiers, with the basic resources – wheat, wood, ore, and stone – being collected from certain points on the map, and the second tier of resources – stone blocks, wooden planks, weapons, and bread – requiring a secondary building at which the basic resources are refined. The final resource, gold, is earned passively over time and other resources can be sold at the market if the player is in need of some quick gold for upgrading, or gold can be spent if the player is short on one of the other eight resources.

The resource situation in Citadels can make the games unnecessarily long. The maximum population limit, 99, is fairly low as is the rate of resource income which makes it very difficult to set up an efficient economy and maintain a sizeable army within any good amount of time. Often times, the first 10 to 15 minutes is spent very passively setting up the basics of an economy and fans of other RTS games, Starcraft players in particular, may be sad to learn that there is little to no opportunity for early pushes and economic harassment is nearly pointless as both players have a limitless supply of peasants who respawn almost as soon as they die. In addition to this, the player will likely never be able to kill an important building before a counterattack wipes out the raiding party. Aesthetically, Citadels can only be described as boring. There is only a single tile-set within the game and that tile-set mostly consists of one shade of green and a strange grey colour I presume to be gravel. This is spruced up by the odd path or river, but the overall effect these have is not really significant. The town buildings are not much better, with most being indistinguishable from the rest, although the problem with the buildings is relieved somewhat by the technology advancement mechanic within the game with buildings’ appearances changing as they are upgraded.

The missions of Citadels leave a lot to be desired. For the most part they involve building a town and destroying the enemy town, taking control of a premade army and destroying an enemy town, or guarding a hero whilst destroying an enemy town. Occasionally there are some side quests that reward the player with extra units or resources, but these side quests always involve destroying a very particular part of an enemy town so they don’t really add much variety to the main objectives. It would be nice if Citadels had even managed to communicate the main objectives clearly. It’s often the case that the main objective is a very vague description of the mission, for example “breach the enemy fortress”, which seems a simple enough task, with no further description as to what is needed to actually have counted as having breached the enemy fortress (spoiler: breaching the fortress walls and killing the defenders is not enough, nor was levelling most of their base).

The example I gave above is one of the earliest missions for Mordred. In the mission, the player is given a large task force and has to pillage their way through the countryside and then attack a fortress. The only fortress on the map is a small redoubt on top of a hill with a castle on the one side. The logical conclusion is that the player needs to knock down a few walls and kill the defenders. Upon doing so, however, the player will find that the mission remains incomplete. Completely levelling the fortress is not an option, either, as destroying the castle results in failing the mission. I have no idea how I managed to win the mission, in the end; as with previous attempts I had destroyed the majority of the fortress and was moving my army up to the Northern side of the map to check for remaining enemy soldiers when the mission registered as completed and I was left to proceed through the campaign. I still have no idea whether this was a bug, a hidden mission timer, or if my army had killed something without my noticing. Either way, I finished several more rather tedious missions before encountering a bug that caused the game to crash at the start of a particular mission.

Balance-wise, Citadels does not do very well. The optimum unit composition is massed archers as their high damage output, range advantage, and reasonable mobility allow them to deal with any other unit composition in the game. It is entirely possible for second tier archers to wipe out a significant number of third tier cavalry, and considering the build time and resource cost disparities between the two units, this will result in a war of attrition that will only ever have one winner. Infantry seem to be entirely useless as they only excel at killing peasants, but even then archers and cavalry do it much better, and infantry will lose every fight against either archers or cavalry. It’s not even advisable to use infantry to assault fortress walls as the number who would die before the ladders reached the walls would stunt any assault and, once again, archers backed up with siege engines will deal with the fortress in a much more efficient manner. Simply put: archers cheat at rock-paper-scissors and Citadels suffers because of it.

Citadels has an incredible number of bugs and a distinct lack of polish. The unit pathing is so bad that units can become stuck on lone trees, on the edges of buildings (sometimes permanently), in between iron or stone ore veins and the cliffs that invariably accompany them; units will also sometimes take the longest or even an entirely random route to get to a given destination; without instruction player-controlled units will often cease attacking enemies to move to a nearby position (I’ve yet to discern any reason for this behaviour); peasants will periodically and randomly stop collecting resources, again, for no real reason; the frame-rate, which is normally a very nice 150 or so frames per second, falls to 10 or 15 frames per second when placing fortress walls; there are several aspects of the HUD and some buildings that lack tool tips and noticeable effects (for instance, there’s a percentage counter in the town hall that seems to do nothing and has no tooltip); the controls section of the options menu is incomplete (as an example it doesn’t contain any mention of control-groupings or the many different keyboard shortcuts, despite these being present in the game); there are no tutorials of any sort.

The final nail in Citadels’ coffin is the horrendous AI. During games the AI won’t build a proper fortress to defend itself, will not build very many if any military units, will not establish a proper economy – it will build the correct resource buildings but will only sporadically man them with peasants - , and will spend the whole game trying to raid your base with peasants. Increasing the difficulty of the AI doesn’t actually do anything except maybe make it attack earlier and more frequently with larger groups of peasants, which are still easily held off with a handful of archers. The awful AI makes the skirmish maps entirely pointless as the AI will not attempt to fulfil the victory conditions of any of the game modes: gold rush, death match, defenders mode (build a town and survive until you are overwhelmed). Adding to all this, there’s no multiplayer within Citadels so even if the game was well suited to competitive play, it would be an irrelevance.

Unfortunately, whilst Citadels seems to initially present elements from both Age of Empires and Stronghold, Citadels has none of the quality of either Age of Empires or Stronghold. In almost every way Citadels takes either an uninspired ‘good enough’ approach to the RTS genre or it fails to meet the most basic of standards. It cannot be stated enough that Citadels is not worth anyone’s time or money, this game is an unmitigated disaster.

Final Verdict

1 out of 10