by glamdring
From the Developer
Journey to distant lands renowned for brave warriors and fearsome weaponry in FireFly Studios' Stronghold: Crusader. This highly anticipated successor to the bestselling Stronghold combines the finest aspects from a city builder and a real-time strategy game. Lead a determined group of crusaders, forged by centuries of barbaric conflicts, or wage war against a powerful foreign invader amidst the haze of the desert heat.
Within impenetrable walls beats the heart of a thriving society full of fletchers, brewers, and armorers, while outside stalk enemy assassins, mighty war engines, and the constant threat of fire. As European nobles or Arabian warriors, conquer this unforgiving wasteland, defend desert fortresses, and lay siege to fearless enemies during the legendary crusades of the 11th and 12th centuries.
Requirements (Windows 2000/98/ME/XP)
Processor: 300mhz (550mhz+ preferred)
Memory: 64MB
Hard Drive: 850MB
Video: 4MB DirectX 8.1 Compatible
Sound: DirectX 8.1 Compatible
CD Rom: 8x Speed
Modem: 56k (for Internet Play)
Price: $14.99 from Amazon.com, $9.99 at GOG (DRM Free)
Installation
You will need Wine to play this game, so load up Synaptic and download Wine, if you don’t have it already installed. If you have the CD edition, I suggest you copy the entire disc onto your computer, so you don’t have to use the disc every time you want to play. You do not need to save it as an ISO. Just copying all files will work just fine.
After you have successfully installed Wine and either copied the CD or have a digital copy on your computer, open up the “Stronghold Crusader” folder and launch “Stronghold Crusader.exe.” Stronghold will now start.
Game tips
Getting started
If you play through the campaign, it will give you a tutorial. However, if you just want to jump in, make sure you build a granary, market, and add stockpile tiles as soon as the game starts.
Food
If you are limited on oasis on the specific map, I would suggest focusing on wheat. This is a small farm and can develop the most food. The down side is the time it takes to produce food is much longer. After wheat is grown, it must be milled before it can be baked into bread. If you have an abundant amount of resources, dairy farms are the most useful farm, they can provide you with food, leather, and cows to launch.
Resources
If you have enough wood, you will want to build all the iron mines and stone quarries you can immediately. The resources never deplete and are valuable. Iron is very valuable in both crafting and sale. Stone is your first line of defense, you need it to build every piece of wall and tower. There are other resources too, like pitch and wood. I don’t focus to much on pitch, other than as a money maker, if you learn to use pitch correctly it can be a great defense, but it takes much more time than simpler alternatives. Wood is one of those resources you will often find your self running out of, so get lots of it.
Attacking
The best way to learn what works good is to play around with units. Some key things to use in an attack are units that don’t get hurt much by archers. The down side to these units is that they are very slow and prone to fire, so watch out for pitch around castles. To test for pitch, I often use horsemen and run around the castle to get the enemy to light the pitch before making my assault. Because this game is rather old, the enemy will always build similar castles, depending on which character they are, so pay attention and you will learn what the best attack method is. When assaulting a base with lots of archers, you can try and use assassins to climb the walls and kill the archers in the towers. Also, if you can build a tower close enough to the enemy base, put a catapult in it and tell it to keep attacking that area. It will fling rocks at the base, which continues to destroy parts of walls and killing people.
Defense
Your first line of defense is your walls. Make them thick and try to put some wall around the outside of towers to help protect against sieges. Don't’ use stairs unless needed. The minute the enemy gets on your walls they will kill archers fast! Try to place towers sticking out a bit, so archers can shoot at units attacking the wall. Remember to place fires in the towers to give your archers fire arrows. Also, siege equipment can be placed in the towers that can deal heavy damage to attackers. Use dog cages around the walls to attack enemy units, but remember the dogs can die. Spike traps work good, but require excess amounts of wood. You can also build wood cutting huts far outside your base. As the civilian takes the job, they will attempt to travel to it along the way, attacking any enemy they see.
Summary
Additional game play
screenshots are available here. Be sure to look at the previous web site
for online extras and additional downloads to supplement
your copy of the game. There are many more things you
can learn like using fear or making your people happy,
but I don’t want to give the whole game away. So have
fun!
