Stronghold Crusader HD

8697ppoü0üoüo++

This is the best strategic game i have ever played. i got the demo in 2002 from PC mag. and i have loved it... its so real and so perfect.... i will request a remake of this coz its really Swett.. thank you firefly studios.. i love you .....

this Good Old Game still blowes my mind

I was really looking forward to Stronghold Crusader, but as mentioned in another review, this game has some serious problems on several fronts. The game lacks a decent AI engine, consequently excluding "realistic" opponent behavior in single player mode. The computer opponents are way faster in managing its castle and troops than the average human player can possibly match. Furthermore, the tutorial does not go into details about the several buildings and their properties, making you blind at knowing what to spend resources on. It would been great to see a new game with the same graphics and details, but with an improved AI engine.

I can't play this game for any length of time without getting a headache. The amount of multitasking demanded of the player is absurd, and then there are no hotkeys, and everything is time-critical because the enemy will rush you, and then the game won't alert you at all if your dudes are getting attacked, and your men won't attack the enemy without orders (and even then, archers will just stand in place and shoot at approaching enemies as the enemies walk right up to them and slaughter them), the interface is confusing and unintuitive, the terrain is pretty and detailed but also incredibly difficult to read (why do some trees block buildings but not others? exactly which points along a river are fordable?), there are always a ton of tiny people running around your castle and it's hard to tell what's going on in the big picture, just... everything about this game is frustrating and disappointing. It's like, 75% of the time you're playing the game you'll spend trying to figure out what's going on and micromanaging, and then 25% of the time you'll spend playing a mediocre RTS with slow, dumb units. A bad game.