Firefly Games Stronghold




Stronghold Crusader Extreme (Full Rip/ENG)
PC Game | Windows | Strategy | FireFly Studios | 172 MB

Stronghold: Crusader Extreme is an updated version of 2001's Stronghold expansion, Stronghold: Crusader by Firefly Studios. Crusader Extreme is set in the Middle East during the Crusades era. Stronghold Crusader Extreme has additions of larger armies of 10,000 men, new buildings and missions.

Stronghold Crusader Extreme includes the following new features:
# New Extreme mode which covers over 10,000 units on the battlefield
# New buildings (outposts generating attacking enemies)
# New tactical special powers (reinforcement, field hospital, rock volley attack, arrow volley,
engineer team, macemen squad, uncover gold horde, call for knights).
# New Crusader Extreme trail with 20 linked missions as well as new stand-alone maps (for single or multiplayer mode).
In addition, Stronghold Crusader Extreme features new AI previously
obtainable opponents (The Wazir, the Marshal, The Emir,
The Abbot and The Nizar from Stronghold Warchest edition).

It also contains an updated version of the original Stronghold Crusader, which includes everything except for outposts,
the god powers and the Extreme Crusader Trail.

Minimum system requirements:
# Operating system: Windows 2000, Windows XP, Vista...
# CPU: Pentium III 500 mhz (1Ghz recommended)
# RAM: 128MB (256MB recommended for multiplayer)
# HDD: 850MB



This game is a tragedy. I speak as someone who owns all of the previous Strongholds and someone who spent almost a decade playing them. First of all, this game lags horribly even on the newest and most powerful computers with absolutely nothing to show for it, the graphics are just horrible. The maps on which you play are tiny, so tiny that most of the maps included don’t even have enough space for a computer player to build half of his castle! You can forget about building all kinds of different industries in your castle because you cannot have more than 100 peasants in Kingmaker mode, this is the mode where you play against computer players. You can have allies but you are unable to communicate with them in any way, shape, or form. You cannot change your player color and you always start out with the same size keep. The troops are all historically inaccurate and have arms, amour, and dress styles from different centuries; some of them are just completely out of this world and a work of fiction. Viking mercenaries, for example, are completely naked with the exception of fur underwear and horned helmets… There are many glitches and technical problems in this game. Most of the time, people, both civilian and military, get stuck on the stairs outside your keep. There is no way to heal your injured soldiers. The voices of the troops are horrible and they don’t talk like it’s the middle ages. Battering rams cannot damage anything except gates. Soldiers throwing rocks loose life for every stone they throw and also damage every unit around them until everybody eventually dies. There is NO blood and slain soldiers disappear instantly, those killed by arrows never show any arrows but just drop and disappear. Buildings cannot be built next to each other or next to walls; every structure now needs one square of free space from all sides. The AI personalities are absurd, historically inaccurate, and cannot play half as good as those in Crusader. The moat is just squares of slow moving green water with NO transition to the nearby ground. Multiplayer has NO features at all. You cannot talk to your allies, there is no treaty option, there is no record of any of your wins or losses, when you win or loose, the game just ends and takes you to the main menu, you cannot have a unique avatar that other players can see, you cannot implement any custom settings, and there is no way of keeping track of other players such as a friends list or the like. And what’s sad is that I haven’t even begun to scratch the surface. The original Stronghold was a masterpiece and you can tell it was made with love. They should have just remade Crusader with bigger maps, more units, and all the new concepts from Stronghold 2.
Pro : new buildings and concepts
Con : everything else