Medieval games always get the short end of the stick. Neither the economy, nor warfare, not even the basics of feudalism are ever depicted correctly. However, Stronghold and Stronghold Crusader are probably the most beloved of the games dealing with the period. Medieval II: Total War might be grander, but Stronghold takes you closer to your peasants. And Stronghold 2 Steam Edition is a re-release of an attempt to capture that same magic in 3D.
Stronghold 2 Download Full Game Mac. By laupuposthamp1974 Follow Public. Stronghold 2 Game Free Economic Campaign; All trademarks are property of their respective owners in the US and other countries. With 21 missions to test your mettle and four renegade lords to defeat, it is up to you to reunite medieval England and take back your lands. Stronghold Crusader 2 Crack is a real-time strategy video game which is developed by the Firefly Studios. It is the first of the Crusader series to highlight a 3D graphics engine. Stronghold Crusader 2 Cracked Free Full is an adventure-war simulation game by the Firefly Studios. The original castle sim, Stronghold HD allows you to design, build and destroy historical castles. Engage in medieval warfare against the AI in one of two single player campaigns or online with up to 8 players. Game Details: Welcome to the “Stronghold 2” for Mac game page. This page contains information + tools how to port Stronghold 2 (Part of the Stronghold Collection) in a few simple steps (that even a noob can understand) so you can play it on your Mac just like a normal application using Crossover.So if you haven’t Crossover yet, then sign up here and buy the program or if you want to test.
Just like the first Stronghold, the game offers a campaign in addition to other game modes. The military one follows the exploits of the lord-knights who are out and about to find and restore the rightful king of sort-of-England-but-not to the throne. They are opposed by various conniving lords who enjoy the freedom to run amok. The economic campaign has the king task you with the restoration of a severely unkempt region as the previous rulers failed their duties due to laziness, corruption or overseas adventures.
Stronghold is a base building game at heart, with battle being a capricious beast at the best of times. The keep is the center of you castle; here is where your lord resides (lose him and lose the game) and holds feasts, while idle peasants lounge around the fire outside. Granary (for edibles) and stockpile (for anything can't/shouldn't eat) are the next buildings to be placed – they also store your starting resources. After that, you are free to expand as much as the scenario allows. Build lumberjack huts to get wood for buildings and weapons, place quarries on rock piles to get stone for defensive structures, and so on. Don't neglect the peasants, either: starting with the hunter's hut, you'll try to keep them all fed with a variety of foods, possibly even increasing their rations. You will also establish industries to churn out gear for your soldiers and keep your peasants happier.
Stronghold 2 innovated by adding honor to the fray. Honor points are generated via various lordly events and peasant-pleasing activities (like increased rations). They are expended to buy titles (raise technology level) in skirmish, buy lands to have autonomous villages to feed your resources, and hire troops more advanced than armed peasants and spearmen. And while you can passively get more honor by being generous towards the peasantry, you will want at the very least to have the lord's kitchen preparing food for feasts – just set up the building chains and the rest will be sorted automatically. And just like most of the buildings added with honor in mind, these economy systems will be totally detached from the normal economy. Want to feed any excess pork to your peasants? Tough!
Naked vikings are as susceptible to arrows as catapults are to clipping.
However, you still have to keep an eye on the peasantry. If stockades and such were previously just props that increased oppression in your castle, now they are a part of the newly expanded 'sanitary' system. You need a gong pit and peasant to collect poop and a falconer to hunt down rats. And the justice system is an entire economy on itself, where, in the end, you need to decide between punishments that take a long time to carry out, but are more lenient (stockade, shame mask) and ones that are quick, yet brutal (burning, cutting heads off). Peasants will “go bad” (that's what the announcer say) at random and won't work at their building until they are caught, sentenced and carry out their punishment. This causes no end of commotion with the castle economy and since executions are the only way to get industries back to work at appreciably time scale, you might end up chopping heads.
And this is basically the only violent action that you'll carry out efficiently. Combat was never the strong suit of Stronghold, and it hasn't improved since. Units are hired from your constantly refilling pool of idle peasants (that is, if you have any) and more often than not need gold, honor and weapons from your armory to take to the field. They are trained instantly and individually, don't require leaders of any kind, pretend to take up formation (before clipping through each other in combat), fight fearlessly and die easily. The biggest different between units are “ranged or not” and “armored or not.” The aim of the game has always been to establish an economy that would let you to either alpha strike the enemy castle or establish a lasting, running siege during which you'll cripple the enemy economy before whacking off their lord.
Those facial textures will make you fondly remember Deus Ex.
Combat is where the game has taken the biggest hit in quality. Archers, the cheapest – even with the ridiculous honor tax, without which the peasant will only deign to take up either the spear or the pitchfork – and the earliest ranged unit, can be cranked out in almost endless numbers. And when put on castle walls or, God forbid, towers, they'll defend you as well as an MG company holding off an assault of Prussian landwehr on their trench. They will mow down any unarmored infantry and will only be countered by either endless hordes of cheap troops or great numbers of metal-clad soldiers.
The troops can no longer tear down stone walls with their hands, so you will need to either brave the endless deluge of arrows to reach the walls with ladders or build siege equipment. However, archers outrange catapults to the point of tragedy, and towers make them almost immune to their attacks anyway. Oh, and you can build balistae on the bigger towers which not only outrange catapults, but are also really good at killing them. Archers are the supreme bang-per-shilling unit of the game, and there's no doubt about it.
If you think that a siege can be anything other than a complete mess…
However, unit AI is terrible enough that if you order a ranged unit to attack someone outside their range, they won't do anything. This is especially horrible with catapults, as you need to manually move them in range to start firing (before archers massacre them). This also makes moving units in mixed groups a bad idea because a ranged units will only join the attack if the enemy is already in range. And in the end, your melee units act mostly as speed bumps to pin the enemy in place so that the archers would have more time to slaughter them.
It is all really sad, because the sieges have seen some potentially interesting improvements. You can now launch burning logs and stones from positions on your walls. You have even more traps to set for the enemy soldiers. And there are neat stuff like protected towers which allow your archers to arch with impunity while preventing siege engine placement on top and sally ports which are hidden doors that would allow you to sally out against the enemy... if you ever had the need.
And while talking about the visuals of a 2005 game is largely useless – this isn't an HD re-release – I will note that audio design is terrible. Stronghold had always had strange voice acting, but now the unit barks are unforgivably bad, to the point where my girlfriend was complaining about it while I was playing. Other problems, like archer supremacy, honor price to build units, no ranged AI, lord food being unavailable to peasants – all these and more were present in Stronghold 3. Not only did the developers not learn from previous criticism, they actually found new ways to make the game bad.
Now, Stronghold Crusader is still clearly the best game in the series. The trail of conquest, merely an ever more difficult chain of skirmish battles, was something that everyone loved, and it's entirely missing from the game. The historical scenarios were also better than those offered in S2SE. In fact, S2SE's trail of conquest is just a chain of battles from historical scenarios, only you don't get to choose the sequence or whether you're attacking or defending. The setting was better done, in both visual and design sense, with mercenary units providing a stark Arabian contrast to the European forces of the crusaders. The mercenaries exist in S2SE, too, but two units are just naked, horn-helmet wearing vikings.
Stronghold 2 Steam Edition is a weak entry in the series. The economy system was expanded in a way that only adds boring busywork to the game, while the combat was weakened even more that it was. And since the game didn't receive any visual overhaul, it looks really bad, too. Outside of scratching that nostalgia itch, I wouldn't recommend it over Stronghold Crusader HD.
Stronghold 2 Steam Edition is only very arguably an improvement over the previous game in the series and hardly something you should be playing today.
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The original Stronghold and its miraculously topical expansion Crusader had their share of warts — an interesting but ultimately easy to master economic model and endearingly crude AI — but were so wedded to the uniquely laidback and charming gameplay that they too came off as laidback and charming, spicy kernels in keeping with the authentically scruffy atmosphere. And the designers were on to something. No other game before or since has so gracefully integrated maintaining apple orchards with setting hundreds of screaming knights on fire.
Stronghold 2 mostly sticks to the winning formula established by its predecessors. Returning to the conventional setting of lush green English pastures, you reprise the role of a faceless British baron who rules over a steadily increasing population of peasants, expanding your power and lands by adjusting taxes and rations, and much more often by placing configurations of buildings that will keep your citizens well fed, well defended, usefully employed, and happy.
Happiness is one issue. Where before peasants could be kept content with different food types, churches, and taverns to keep their minds dulled, they now turn against you in a heartbeat, often for no visible reason. Even long-trusted clergymen and blacksmiths will turn abruptly to crime and begin raiding your storehouse, regardless of your popularity at that moment. And since you’re not notified or expecting it, critical industries like falconry posts (which reduces your city’s rat levels) or gong pits wind up going untended, which leads to people suddenly abandoning your castle in droves, all at once.
You can shut down certain buildings, but since you’re strangely unable to shut down any structure without also deactivating every other building of the same type (a problem passed over from Stronghold 1), such iffy measures can throw your entire economy out of order. Making it worse, it can happen during the middle of a large, distracting battle, before you’re even aware there’s a catastrophic chain reaction of shortfalls in progress. This lack of control and notification is endemic to Stronghold 2. Fires mysteriously ignite, wolves show up and eat your farmers, and your people steadily, and quietly begin to loathe you. And virtually all you can do is look on.
Repelling invaders, hosting jousting tournaments, and keeping your peasants cheerful (or in line through fear of punishment) now gives your lord “honor points†that can be used to purchase equally powerful and expensive knights, or to “tech†to more advanced buildings like cathedrals. Despite all the new architectural bells and whistles, though, most of the maps give you surprisingly little acreage to build on. One eight-player map offers barely enough room on some inlets to support more than a storehouse. Your only option is to systematically destroy buildings as fancier ones become available.
Stronghold 2 offers two vaguely story-based modes of play: Peace or War. “Peace†features a series of challenges in the form of punishing economic quotas or attacks by thief armies. But even with the new intricacies of religion and falconry thrown into the mix, mastering the economic game doesn’t take long.“War†is all about sieges, and these battles merely serve to showcase how wretched the AI is. Computer armies in Stronghold 2 won’t bother deploying siege equipment from a distance, and neither your ladder-men, nor theirs, behave in a predictable manner. A bug whereby your defensive rock throwers strangely disappear in the presence of invading ladder-men is much more consistent by comparison.
The sequel’s purported money shot was its ambitious leap to 3D, and it proves to be a leap indeed; however, it’s backward, both graphically and in terms of performance. In 2D, your gameplay-distracted imagination obligingly filled in the details; now you have stuttering snapshots of blocky textures from myriad angles to distract you from the gameplay. Zooming-in to get a good look at a peasant vomiting from plague or slowly hammering a spear into shape can be fun, but when the battles start, the action turns abruptly choppy. Merging groups of units ooze into indistinguishable smears. Then there’s the lag spikes, which are fierce, random, and at their worst during large-scale engagements.
Stronghold 2 Download Full Game
Then there’s the downright adversarial camera control. It’s all but impossible to center your view without hunt-and-pecking the minimap; panning to the screen’s edges is twitchy and spasmodic. Aside from the basic bird’s eye view, you now have up to six different camera views to choose from. These range from useless close-ups of your usually unoccupied dining table to useless close-ups of your drawbridge or some random cornerstone brick. Some buildings you can rotate when you place them, others you can’t.
There are a few cool new innovations. A terrific straight-down camera view lets you easily spot gaps in your walls. The sound, music, and voice acting are casually light-hearted and effective. And there’s certainly enough content. The new buildings and animations are individually inventive and often amusing. In addition to the two campaigns, Stronghold 2 features a “Kingmaker†mode, which lets you play against up to seven other friends or AI’s, and a “Siege†mode of visually diverse historical battles that let you play as either the castle garrison or the invaders.
Stronghold 2 Mac Download
Much like a siege, though, the sheer weight of bugs, technical frustrations, and overall lack of polish grinds you down. Stronghold 2 joins the ranks of games that were rushed and ultimately over ambitious. It wows you with features, options, game modes and building types, but ultimately can’t string everything together cohesively.
System Requirements: Pentium III 700 MHz, 256 MB RAM, WinXP
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