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
