Stronghold Crusader Review

 Stronghold Crusader... The legendary strategy game to me. Old, yet still quite fun and challenging. In this thread, I will review the mighty real time strategy game, Stronghold Crusader.

 The game is made in 2001 by Firefly Studios. It can be said that the game is the eastern, *crusader-ish version of Stronghold. The game is a quite simple strategy game. You start in a map with your allies - enemies, build your castle, gather resources, interact with your ally lords - generals, fight and win against your opponents (You must kill the lord of the enemy to do so). The most important reason that I really like the game is, I love to defend. I love to make strong, big castles and build traps around it, defend it with my archers. If you like to defend like me, you should give the game a try.

 If you get tired of the skirmish mode, try campaign. To talk about the campaign, there are 50 linked crusade missions that you need to complete to finish it. You can use 3 chickens (The chicken thing is about bypassing a mission that you don't want to complete or you couldn't complete), after that it still leaves you 47 missions to complete. As you proceed, the enemies get more crowded - stronger and you get less - weaker allies fighting with you. Quite a challenging and addictive campaign to be honest.

 About the resource collection, there are iron, stone mines, trees, grass fields (To build farms on) and clay pits. Build mines, farms, ox transportes to transport your stones, windmills, bakeries breweries, weaponsmith workhouses and a lot more to gather and produce. You will need food to keep people happy and make them join your army, wood to build buildings, make bows - weapons and stuff, iron to make weapons - armors, stone to build your castle walls - towers - gates, beer to make your people happy.

 There are two types of soldiers. First type is crusaders. They require low gold to hire but you must provide their armors and weapons. Second type is mercenaries. These arabic warriors will fight for you and you do not need to provide their needs. The problem is, they require much more gold than the crusader type soldiers. If you are in a rush and need couple of archers before start your attack, just go get 'em from the mercenaries. If not, I'd prefer the crusader army which will cost much less gold and will be cheaper both in gold and resource long term.

 Stronghold Crusader, the game that true strategy game players must try...