![]() ![]() You'll also have to tax your peasants if you want money, which in turn means managing their rations to keep them happy, and also making sure to build dwellings so you have peasants to tax. Then you'll need to assemble an army, and while soldiers are ready to fight instantaneously (as are buildings, which is a nice touch), you'll need to make sure you've bought enough weapons to supply them. Aside from getting to build a castle in whatever configuration your funds and materials allow, you'll also have to start harvesting food, lumber, stone, iron, and other resources from your estate by building appropriate structures. Judging from my time with it, however, Stronghold Crusader II has plenty of layers even without villages. "That is a really nice way we've tried to improve the series without really changing the basic gameplay." "Rather than just build my castle, defend, or just go straight for your castle, it adds some new things, like if I take those two villages, over time I'm going to get the advantage against my opponent," says Bradbury. Even so, says Bradbury, adding them as resources to compete over creates a new layer of strategy. It's also possible to capture neutral "village estates" and exact tribute from them, although you can't actually build there. Others are more subtle, like "estates." Your castle is the centerpiece of your base, and you're free to build it however you like, instantly laying down as many walls and military buildings as you've got resources for – but you can only build them within the pre-defined borders of your estate. Some of the changes are big and immediately noticeable, like new units and disaster events, such as locust swarms and tornadoes that can throw your soldiers off walls. "We don't want to go, 'Yep, now it's got unicorns flying around and things like that.' … So what we've tried to do with it is add on things that give the game more depth." "What we've tried to do with Crusader II is take that gameplay that everyone liked, and first of all not screw it up," says Bradbury. But the goal, says Lead Designer Simon Bradbury, isn't so much to reinvent the original's 12-year-old gameplay, but to build on it. A long-in-coming sequel to 2002's Stronghold: Crusader, it sports an impressive-sounding list of features, with skirmishes against up to seven customizable AI opponents, co-op in which two players can manage the same army (ideally overseeing different aspects of it, and not simply contradicting each other’s moves) – and the simple thrill of seeing your enemies' castle walls crumble in 3D, with Havok physics. Battles in Stronghold Crusader II won't always be this tough, but my humiliating defeat is a little taste of what's in store when the medieval RTS/castle-building sim arrives on September 2. ![]()
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