Stronghold Crusader 2 Special Edition
โหลดเกม PC ฟรี STRONGHOLD CRUSADER 2 - SPECIAL EDITION ทะเลทรายในตะวันออกกลางประมาณปี 1189, Stronghold กลับมาพร้อมกับเอนจินใหม่เสริมความสมจริงของการทำลายปราสาท ด้วย Havok Physics คง. The Special Edition includes Stronghold Crusader 2 and the following: - The official Crusader 2 soundtrack composed by Robert Euvino - The Art of Stronghold.
Price: £30 / $45Release: Out NowPublisher: Firefly StudiosDeveloper: In-houseWebsite:Multiplayer: 8-player, co-opAh, the holy land. That sacred place where people of all faiths have convened to massacre each other in the name of the same god since the year dot.
A particularly fine example of said internecine monotheism was the long period of the Crusades, when a load of nobles wearing steel onesies were pressure-cooked in the sun whilst hundreds of servants died killing the distressed locals in spectacular sieges. It's a great period for the Stronghold series to return to.The original isometric Stronghold Crusader was released way back in 2002, a year after Stronghold, and both were very well-received. This sequel follows that first title slavishly, moving the conflict from SC3's medieval Europe to the sandpit of the Middle East, and reintroducing many of the features that made the first game such a success - a load of fun new units as mercenaries, skirmish-based campaigns against AI enemies with personalities, and a whole lot of sand. The difference is that it's inherited the troubled and plain-looking 3D engine from 2011's Stronghold 3. The worry is that it's also inherited that game's bugs and tedium.A simple tutorial and two short campaigns introduce the game mechanics, after which the great majority of your time is spent in skirmishes or following set-piece battle campaigns.
These mostly take the same path - build your economy, then build your castles, then send out troops to attack your enemy, devastate their defences and kill their lord(s).All RTSes are, to some degree, resource-juggling games. Learning the optimal SC2 resource build takes a few tries, but crucially there is an optimal tree - literally, as without wood everything grinds to a halt. Other resources can be fudged, as you can feed your peasants less or lower taxes or even buy rare goods in, but your economy runs on wood. It's a pity then that the rudimentary UI hardly tells you anything about what goods you have or when they're under attack. The map is similarly useless, just showing big castle icons.Castle-building is the great pleasure of the game. Heaping up great mounds of stone into towers gives your archers additional range and protection, and you can make some truly spectacular castles.
Sieges can be fun too, as you carefully position your siege engines to whittle down opponents' walls, and watch them collapse satisfyingly. It's odd that you can only build castles in arbitrary squares on the map, however.The actual combat is classic scissors-paper-stone stuff.
Neither your troops nor the enemy's are particularly smart, so battles require a lot of micromanagement. The variety of new units is welcome, from dervishes to slave-drivers, though archers trump everything else, due to how cheap they are and their massive range.Firefly has resolved a couple of PCG's problems with Stronghold 3. Defenders now benefit from castle defenves. Archers will now attack enemies on the walls. Yet many other bugs are still there. Too many times, the troops who should have been peppering my enemies with shots were hidden in walls by crappy pathfinding. Too many times, I had to delete those walls and lose literal tons of stone.
And oddly, I could insta-repair those walls whilst they were under catapult fire, because enemy units have to be closer than their range to interfere with repairs.Additionally, the final section of every battle, where you kill the enemy lord stood atop his keep, is horribly protracted. For some reason, his keep is indestructible, siege weapons pass right through him and it, and arrows mostly bounce off. Other units don't seem to work at all; for example, every time I tried to use a flame cart, it would just explode on the spot.Like castles, great games needs strong foundations.
The core problem with the new Stronghold games appears to be that the engine isn't fit for purpose. These castle blocks don't want to sit in or on the smooth terrain and bugs are regular. The position detection is still poor - it often takes multiple clicks to repair a castle wall, and targeting the right castle section with a catapult can be tricky.
Sometimes I suspect there's no collision-detection at all, meaning troops just pile up in a spot. And the poor UI compounds the problem.The Stronghold series isn't like Total War, doing a hundred different things; it just needs to get the castles and combat right.
On the evidence of Stronghold Crusader 2, Firefly is moving in the right direction, but it still has a way to go.
Medieval games always get the short end of the stick. Neither the economy, nor warfare, not even the basics of feudalism are ever depicted correctly. However, Stronghold and Stronghold Crusader are probably the most beloved of the games dealing with the period. Medieval II: Total War might be grander, but Stronghold takes you closer to your peasants. And Stronghold 2 Steam Edition is a re-release of an attempt to capture that same magic in 3D.Just like the first Stronghold, the game offers a campaign in addition to other game modes.
The military one follows the exploits of the lord-knights who are out and about to find and restore the rightful king of sort-of-England-but-not to the throne. They are opposed by various conniving lords who enjoy the freedom to run amok.
The economic campaign has the king task you with the restoration of a severely unkempt region as the previous rulers failed their duties due to laziness, corruption or overseas adventures. Probably the most amusing fight in the game.Stronghold is a base building game at heart, with battle being a capricious beast at the best of times. The keep is the center of you castle; here is where your lord resides (lose him and lose the game) and holds feasts, while idle peasants lounge around the fire outside. Granary (for edibles) and stockpile (for anything can't/shouldn't eat) are the next buildings to be placed – they also store your starting resources. After that, you are free to expand as much as the scenario allows. Build lumberjack huts to get wood for buildings and weapons, place quarries on rock piles to get stone for defensive structures, and so on.
Don't neglect the peasants, either: starting with the hunter's hut, you'll try to keep them all fed with a variety of foods, possibly even increasing their rations. You will also establish industries to churn out gear for your soldiers and keep your peasants happier.Stronghold 2 innovated by adding honor to the fray.
Honor points are generated via various lordly events and peasant-pleasing activities (like increased rations). They are expended to buy titles (raise technology level) in skirmish, buy lands to have autonomous villages to feed your resources, and hire troops more advanced than armed peasants and spearmen. And while you can passively get more honor by being generous towards the peasantry, you will want at the very least to have the lord's kitchen preparing food for feasts – just set up the building chains and the rest will be sorted automatically.
And just like most of the buildings added with honor in mind, these economy systems will be totally detached from the normal economy. Want to feed any excess pork to your peasants? Naked vikings are as susceptible to arrows as catapults are to clipping.However, you still have to keep an eye on the peasantry. If stockades and such were previously just props that increased oppression in your castle, now they are a part of the newly expanded 'sanitary' system. You need a gong pit and peasant to collect poop and a falconer to hunt down rats. And the justice system is an entire economy on itself, where, in the end, you need to decide between punishments that take a long time to carry out, but are more lenient (stockade, shame mask) and ones that are quick, yet brutal (burning, cutting heads off).
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Peasants will “go bad” (that's what the announcer say) at random and won't work at their building until they are caught, sentenced and carry out their punishment. This causes no end of commotion with the castle economy and since executions are the only way to get industries back to work at appreciably time scale, you might end up chopping heads.And this is basically the only violent action that you'll carry out efficiently. Combat was never the strong suit of Stronghold, and it hasn't improved since. Units are hired from your constantly refilling pool of idle peasants (that is, if you have any) and more often than not need gold, honor and weapons from your armory to take to the field. They are trained instantly and individually, don't require leaders of any kind, pretend to take up formation (before clipping through each other in combat), fight fearlessly and die easily. The biggest different between units are “ranged or not” and “armored or not.” The aim of the game has always been to establish an economy that would let you to either alpha strike the enemy castle or establish a lasting, running siege during which you'll cripple the enemy economy before whacking off their lord.
Those facial textures will make you fondly remember Deus Ex.Combat is where the game has taken the biggest hit in quality. Archers, the cheapest – even with the ridiculous honor tax, without which the peasant will only deign to take up either the spear or the pitchfork – and the earliest ranged unit, can be cranked out in almost endless numbers. And when put on castle walls or, God forbid, towers, they'll defend you as well as an MG company holding off an assault of Prussian landwehr on their trench. They will mow down any unarmored infantry and will only be countered by either endless hordes of cheap troops or great numbers of metal-clad soldiers.The troops can no longer tear down stone walls with their hands, so you will need to either brave the endless deluge of arrows to reach the walls with ladders or build siege equipment.
However, archers outrange catapults to the point of tragedy, and towers make them almost immune to their attacks anyway. Oh, and you can build balistae on the bigger towers which not only outrange catapults, but are also really good at killing them. Archers are the supreme bang-per-shilling unit of the game, and there's no doubt about it. If you think that a siege can be anything other than a complete messHowever, unit AI is terrible enough that if you order a ranged unit to attack someone outside their range, they won't do anything. This is especially horrible with catapults, as you need to manually move them in range to start firing (before archers massacre them). This also makes moving units in mixed groups a bad idea because a ranged units will only join the attack if the enemy is already in range.
And in the end, your melee units act mostly as speed bumps to pin the enemy in place so that the archers would have more time to slaughter them.It is all really sad, because the sieges have seen some potentially interesting improvements. You can now launch burning logs and stones from positions on your walls. You have even more traps to set for the enemy soldiers.
And there are neat stuff like protected towers which allow your archers to arch with impunity while preventing siege engine placement on top and sally ports which are hidden doors that would allow you to sally out against the enemy. If you ever had the need.
This shot makes the game look so functional.And while talking about the visuals of a 2005 game is largely useless – this isn't an HD re-release – I will note that audio design is terrible. Stronghold had always had strange voice acting, but now the unit barks are unforgivably bad, to the point where my girlfriend was complaining about it while I was playing.
Other problems, like archer supremacy, honor price to build units, no ranged AI, lord food being unavailable to peasants – all these and more were present in Stronghold 3. Not only did the developers not learn from previous criticism, they actually found new ways to make the game bad.Now, Stronghold Crusader is still clearly the best game in the series. The trail of conquest, merely an ever more difficult chain of skirmish battles, was something that everyone loved, and it's entirely missing from the game.
The historical scenarios were also better than those offered in S2SE. In fact, S2SE's trail of conquest is just a chain of battles from historical scenarios, only you don't get to choose the sequence or whether you're attacking or defending. The setting was better done, in both visual and design sense, with mercenary units providing a stark Arabian contrast to the European forces of the crusaders. The mercenaries exist in S2SE, too, but two units are just naked, horn-helmet wearing vikings.Stronghold 2 Steam Edition is a weak entry in the series.
The economy system was expanded in a way that only adds boring busywork to the game, while the combat was weakened even more that it was. And since the game didn't receive any visual overhaul, it looks really bad, too. Outside of scratching that nostalgia itch, I wouldn't recommend it over Stronghold Crusader HD.