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Stronghold (game)

From Biocrawler, the free encyclopedia.

Stronghold is a game by Firefly Studios which combines real-time strategy elements with a Medieval castle simulation. The game has a sizable community following and is well known for it's addictive gameplay. Stronghold combines elements of RTS games and building games like The Sims. There is also a second installment to the series, "Stronghold Crusader", released in September of 2002. This rehash took place in the Middle East and featured more finely tuned gameplay and increased the RTS elements.

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Gameplay

In Stronghold, players take the role of a kingdom's lord or other high-ranking official. The goal is to create a stable economy and a tough enough military to defend against invaders and destroy enemy castles. Peasants, the skeleton of any castle, must be kept happy; this is achieved by maintaining food in the granary, imposing low or no taxes (or even bribes), providing entertainment, and many other things.

To defend the kingdom, players must build a castle by strategically constructing physical defenses such as walls and towers. Usually, because of limited stone resources, players must also choose which buildings are necessary to place inside the castle walls, and which buildings are expendable.

Military units are created by first constructing the necessary building to create the unit's weapons. For example, to create an archer, a player must first create an archer shop, which a peasant will then go work for. The peasant will gather wood from the supply pile, create it into a bow or crossbow, and then will deliver it to the armory. If the player has any spare peasants, he can then create an archer in the barracks. To have a renewable wood source, the player must also create a wood hut (usually several), and to keep the peasants happy (and alive) there must be some sort of food source such a dairy farm. This may seem like a complex process, but once all the buildings are constructed every unit does it's job automatically, minus archers being automatically creating.

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Stronghold 2

The sequel was released in April 2005. The game engine is enhanced to provide for full 3 dimensional graphics. Other changes include new military and peace campaigns and the addition of crime and punishment which allows players to torture unruly peasants. This is the first complete overhaul of the franchise since the first stronghold appeared on selves in 2001.

Upon it's released, many players were outraged by the game's frequent crashes, lag (even while playing offline on a computer with exceptional hardware), and overall buggyness. Firefly studios paid much attention to the playing community's complaints, and promised fixes in later patches. Soon after, patch 1.1 was released which fixed some issues. However, it was not until patch 1.2 was released that a majority of complaints have stopped.

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