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3-D does nothing for this game!

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 8 / 14
Date: April 20, 2005
Author: Amazon User

The 3-d does nothing to enhance the game and actually makes gameplay more difficult.
To really see the 3-d effects you must zoom way in, but then you see such a tiny piece of the map you must zoom all the way out. The camera is jumpy and the animations get jittery as you add more units.
This is on a 3Ghz machine with 768 Megs of RAM and Serial ATA RAID drives!

I ran right out and bought this game and played for several hours...it left me wanting to replay the original.
Save your money play the original until this one to goes into the bargin bin.

Hmm - needs some polish

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 7 / 10
Date: April 20, 2005
Author: Amazon User

I got this game today after waiting over 2 years for it to be made. My PC is pretty good (1 gig Ram, Athlon 64 3200+ and 128mb 9800 Radeon PRO) - but after your units start to build up there is a serious performance issue - the game stutters and starts to slow down. Obviously the 3D game engine is nice - but not if it's going to affect gameplay so much. The camera angles are almost useless and very finickity - you won't want to waste time playing with them.

I really want to love this game, and it's a sold 3 stars so far - but areas of it seem to suggest that it's lacking polish in certain areas: - the cut scenes with little or no attempt to lip-synch - zoomed in animation of units sliding or 'walking on air' as they clumsily negotiate the environment.

On the plus side - with so many options and the chance to play a peaceful campaign or even just free build - if you love castles then this is your game.

However, I am now waiting for the first patch to be released to see if they iron out these performance/animation issues. We'll see....

Very Fun, with a few bugs.

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 9 / 11
Date: April 22, 2005
Author: Amazon User

I very much enjoy playing both sim games, and real time strategy games, so this game is perfect for me. This game has about everything you'd imagine to see in a castle sim. However, if you are a pure RTS fan, I'm not so sure you'll like this game. Before you start doing anything related to rts, you have to wade through every aspect of "castle sim" part. In other words, you can do the "castle sim" (so to say) without the RTS, but you can't do the RTS without doing the castle sim. I will say that the castle simulation part is super simple. The main thing you have to worry about is your popularity, which is directly effected by other factors; food, taxes, crime, rats, gong (human waste), religion, ale, and entertainment. The big things that cause your popularity to fall are rats, gong, and crime, which can be managed with falconers posts (falcons kill the rats), gong pits (gong farmers remove the gong), a courthouse, and guard posts (guards take the criminals to the dungeon on the courthouse). You can easily increase your popularity by adding a church (religion), inn (ale), traveling fair (entertainment), and a jousting arena (entertainment).

Once you have a steady population, you can start producing an army. However, your army needs weapons, and each type of weapon has it's respectful building, such as the Fletcher's Workshop. The Fletcher gathers the resources needed from your stockpile (filled by other citizens with wood, stone, iron, wheat, etc...), and takes them back to his workshop. If you zoom in on the Fletcher's workshop, you can actually watch him make the arrows. When he's is finished, he will take them to your armory. If you have idle citizens, they can be recruited to bowmen from your barracks.

As for the game play, there are still several bugs, which I hope to see fixed in a much needed patch. I have an athlon XP 3000+, 512mb ram, and a 128mb geforce fx 5200 Ultra, and I have to run the game at 800 x 600, 16 bit colors, medium model detail, medium texture quality, and no DX shaders. The particle effects are spectacular, but they'll cost you. Several catapults firing on stone walls at once can cause a very noticeable lag. I've also noticed that the collision detection between units is very faulty, sometimes units will stand in the same spot. I've noticed as many as 5 or 6 in the exact same spot.

This review can't be ended without mentioning the castle building features... Everything you buid in the game appears instantly (this is an instant build game). Regarding your castle structure, uou can create both wooden and stone walls, square towers, round towers , gate houses, and a few others things of all sizes. You can also attach logs, and stones to the edges of your walls, which can be used as defencse against your enemies below.

Overall, I find this game pretty fun. There are far to many aspects of the game to list them all here, but I hope this gives you a general idea.

lots of new choices but too many new problems

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 4 / 6
Date: April 22, 2005
Author: Amazon User

This game i thought was going to be great! i have been looking online ever since three months ago i realized they were making a sequel. Never have i been so excited for a game to come out. then once it finally did and i got to play it i was truthfully disappointed. the new 3-D i found to be a distraction slowing the game down and making it difficult to look at what you want to look. also another difference from the first game is that now there are several more ways for popularity to decrease, including crime which requires at least five or six buildings in itself and then you still can't seem to get it to stop having a negative effect. Then there are the gong farmers and falcons for rat hunting. if they had to put these things in the game why did they have to make them occur every five seconds so that you spend more time trying to keep the popularity up then building your castle or fighting. Besides these things i must say that there is still one more thing that i was hardly satisfied with and that is kingmaker mode. Oh it was the complete opposite of what i expected. i thought that you would be given a surplus amount of space to construct and fortify your own initial province and then be given smaller plots to serve as estates. i was terribly wrong not only is the space a tiny block of land hardly large enough to support even a village but in times of need you can no longer send messages to your allies to ask for resources or aid. maybe i just haven't found it yet but it sures seems nonexistent. Besides these things i must say the game did do quite a bit to increase production for most building such as food and weapon produces and fighting as certainly improved if you ever get to fight at all. One more tiny thing though is that for some reason when i was playing kingmaker and my ally was olaf i suddenly became his enemy for no apparent reason and he started attacking me with catapults and destroyed many buildings. Then i was not able to attack him back to defend myself. Ohh the frustration oh well better pray that Stronghold 3 is better if there is one.

*for all who rates this game*

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 4 / 10
Date: April 23, 2005
Author: Amazon User

Please Update the game with the patch from the web, then fix your review if you think the game has improved !

its not fair to mark 3 stars on the game if u dont aply the patch, but then again , publishing the patch so close to the official date of the game does seems as if the game was published perhaps too soon ?

PATCHED AND STILL SLOW

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 6 / 8
Date: April 26, 2005
Author: Amazon User

Even with the 1.1 Patch this game runs slow after a while, the more on the map, the worse it gets, until you click on an area with nothing much in it.

Im running athlon 64 3200+ with Radeon x800xt platinum, 1gig ram

It is still slow even when using recommended detail. Either the system autodect is bad or the game is bugged.

But anyway the game is great, better than previous version in my opinion. Id give it 5 stars if it ran good.

Don't fix what isn't broken

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 5 / 13
Date: April 27, 2005
Author: Amazon User

I have just returned this game for a refund. I was a huge fan of the previous versions and will continue to play them. They were easy to control and fun to fight. This new version is not worth the money. The gameplay is slow. The new additions to civilian affairs are tedious and time consuming. And frankly I was not impressed by the graphics. They were fun at first but they get in the way of playing a game. I will continue to play the original version until Age of Empires comes out later this year.

Really Bad! Don't waste your $ on this!

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 3 / 19
Date: April 27, 2005
Author: Amazon User

Come on! This game is bad! Don't waist your time with it. Heck, Medieval Total War is ten times better than this and it is about 4-5 years old now!

There are much better RTS/Tactical games out now. My advise, try Rome: TW a great game no castle sieges but ancient cities are there! Or wait until Empire Earth 2 comes out today. These titles will not disapoint as this title did. Now if you will excuse me I gotta see if I can return this lemon to the store for my refund!

A very mixed bag, to say the least

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 120 / 125
Date: April 28, 2005
Author: Amazon User

I would really love to give this game a better rating, because there are some aspects to the new version that I rather enjoy. Some people have complained about the new details of castle life, such as the piles of human waste & criminals running amok. I suspect that these are players who take more pleasure in warfare than in the management of infrastructure, and find anything that detracts from the waging of war to be an unneccessary intrustion. However, I have always enjoyed the micromanagement aspect of Stronghold, which set it apart from other games, and that the additional details by themselves are not a problem. Yet I would agree that there is now one detail too many, to the point that you are frantically trying to keep all of the balls in the air. It ceases to be enjoyable when you are simply racing from one problem to another.

This is compounded by the fact that, even after the downloading of the new patch (after only ONE WEEK from the game's release), the new features do not always work as they are supposed to work. In particular, I would point to the criminals, the Courthouse, and the punishments. Ideally, the guards catch the crooks, take them to the judge, and then the judge or a torturer will mete out a punishment to rehabilitate the crook. However, the game has a bug that results in no crooks receiving punishment --- instead, they pile up in the dungeon, never going to trial. The consequences are a tremendous negative number from all of the unpunished criminals, plus industries that languish indefinitely while the peasant assigned to that building rots in prison. Meanwhile, the player is forced to double rations or bribe the remaining peasants in order to stave off disaster. This alters a fundamental aspect of the game, and detracts from the overall enjoyment.

As many other reviewers have noted, this game runs very slowly, regardless of your systems specifications. The patch has not helped this problem, and I very much doubt that any future patches will improve this aspect of the game. I am not someone who has to have top of the line graphics in a game, but when one has the game set at top speed and the peasants are slogging across the screen looking heavily medicated, I tend to get frustrated after awhile.

The 3-D graphics? Novel but unnecessary. When it comes to warfare, it actually interferes with gameplay at times, particularly when I am trying to select military units and target enemy troops. Another reviewer mentioned Medieval TW and I regret that I have to agree that Stronghold 2's graphics and gameplay fall short of a game that is several generations older in terms of development. It is disheartening that the developers could take the great franchise that the Stronghold games represent and turn out this tepid, uninspiring effort. I can only hope that there are many more patches to come, which may help improve the game's many problems.

*******************************

Patch 1.2 update (6-7-05): it seems only fair to note, after commenting on the game's many deficiencies, that the developers seem to be doing their level best to address the problems. The latest patch seems to have corrected a great number of the problems. I don't play multiplayer, so I am in no position to comment on any problems on that end, but solo play seems to be much less buggy.

However, speed issues continue to bedevil the game, and I do not believe that it is simply because everyone is working on elderly obsolete machines. I am left with the impression that the developers simply piled too much detail into the game --- again, it leaves the player micromanaging to a frantic degree while causing the game speed to become sluggish.

Having said that, it appears that the developers are trying to make this game as playable as is possible. This gives me encouragement. I would now give this game a four-star rating with some qualifications.

The negative reviews are unfortunately true

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 8 / 12
Date: April 29, 2005
Author: Amazon User

This is a big step backward from the 2 previously great Stronghold games. The graphics are indeed an unnecessary distraction, the bugs and gameplay lag really drag the game down, and there was simply no reason for such an extreme makeover when the gameplay in the earlier games was so simple, straightforward, customizable and fun. It's very difficult to play this game now with any degree of control, which is about the worst thing you can say about a RTS game. What a shame.
***For the reviewer who suggested that we patch the game and then try it again "to be fair" I patched it out of the box before playing it and before this review. It ran so badly with the patch I can't imagine how it performed without it.

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