Why I buy this one ?
- Fight daring duels through castle keeps, over walls and inside great towers
- All new troop units and seige equipment and now formations allow epic warfare
- Look inside buildings and watch as medieval day-to-day life unfolds
- Hold lavish feasts and spectacular jousting tournaments that bestow honor upon you

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What our customer's say!

"Stronghold 2", I liked this title. Simulated siege warfare is always exciting, especially when the graphics are tuned enough to communicate the particular brand of chaos and action inherent in medieval conflict. And I've always enjoyed the idea of building a massive fortress.

In Stronghold 2, the object of the game is to build up a castle and, in some modes, to build an army and overwhelm your enemies' castles. The focus in the game on both of those things, really, and not one over the other. You have to pay attention to your settlement's economy. Is there enough food in the granary? Enough variety? How do the peasants feel about you? Are they happy or sad? Should you lower your taxes, or just build an inn and a brewery to make the peasants not care?

These considerations are not unimportant, because if you manage your castle badly enough, peasants will start to leave. This means no one will be working your orchards, and there will be no one to recruit into your military. In other words, your development halts completely.

Once you've built a semi-stable economy, you can concentrate on your military. You'll want to build walls early for protection. These can be anything from simple wooden palisades to triple-thick stone behemoths. Once you have the walls of your castle built, you can fortify them with several different tower designs. Don't forget to send archers up the towers. They can achieve incredible range if placed correctly, and will devastate enemy troops who aren't wearing metal armor. For metal-clad foes, stick a ballista or two on your towers as well, then watch the fun when someone comes too close as a three-foot spike is launched at them your tower-mounted Barry Bonds-like crossbows.

In this game, the best offense really is a good defense. Make your castle an impregnable fortress, and you can take your time preparing sorties against the enemy.

There is a wide range of unit selection, and each has a situation in which they excel. Thieves infiltrate the enemy castle and steal gold for you from their treasury. Assassins (incredibly useful) use grappling hooks to scale castle walls and open gates for your troops. Swordsmen and Knights are tough to bring down thanks to their armor, and make excellent front-line troops. And if you manage to run a unit of Crossbowmen up an enemy tower, they will dominate the entire courtyard below with their bolts.

Fighting a large-scale siege is a singularly thrilling experience. Watching several hundred individual units charge a wall, set up ladders, and climb up to do battle with defenders all under a withering hail of arrow-fire and ballista bolts is incredibly fun. You feel sort of like a warlord from ages past when you give your swordsmen the order to charge and hear them roar a battle cry as they run.

Set up a few trebuchets for some real action. Imagine those swordsmen charging while boulders fly over their heads, smashing into walls, spraying chunks of stone in every direction and sending wailing archers head-over-heels through the air.

But wait. If warfare isn't your thing, would this game hold any allure for you? Sure!

There's a whole campaign dedicated to castle life rather than siege warfare. And while combat still has a role, it's rather limited. In this campaign you'll be more concerned with keeping rats out of the settlement or providing enough food to keep a neighboring ally's peasants alive, or reducing the local wolf population.

I found this campaign to be just as fun as the combat-oriented one. The peasants are funny, and their working animations are interesting. Curious onlooker-type gamers will find themselves following around individual peasants to see what they do, and what they say while doing it. For example, vintners make a subtle Kids in the Hall reference while stomping grapes: "I hate grapes. Hate 'em. I'm crushing you, grape. Crushing your head. Die, die, die." And since all those who share the same profession look alike and have the same voice, it's only natural every now then for them to break the fourth wall and comment "Do you ever get that feeling of deja vu?" Tax them too highly, and they'll complain when you click on them. Feed them double rations, and they'll laud your generosity.

If you like siege warfare, or castles in general, or realtime strategy games, or simulations--you'll probably enjoy this game. The only quibbles I had with it were a paper-thin story and a rather un-customizable multiplayer experience.

"Fun, but flawed", Overall this is a very fun game, but it suffers from some bugs. There are two parts to the game. The first is really just an extended tutorial that shows you how to build up and manage your castle. I found this part kind of boring. The second part is where you defend your castle and attack others. This is when the game got fun for me as I explored different strategies. Unfortunately once I got good at the game, it became too easy to outwit the very stupid computer opponents. For example, on one of the missions I had to defend my castle from a large squad of invaders. The definition of success was that my lord stayed alive and all of the attackers were dead. Even if the computer destroyed all of my castle and all other units, as long as my lord stayed alive I would win. So as an experiment I literally did nothing to protect my castle and let it got completely overrun. I left all of my defenders where they were when the mission started without issuing any orders and watched as most of them get slaughtered. Then when the bad guys came for my lord, I just had the lord run in circles. They followed him all around the map, but could never catch him. All the while my handful of remaining archers on the walls managed to shoot and kill dozens of heavily-armored knights who were ignoring the archers. I also could lead them to walk over and under traps.

Pro:
* Low cost ([...])
* Good sense of humor
* Great 3-D graphics
* Nice balance of making your people happy and making them your slaves
* You can build and issue commands while the game is paused
* It's fun to build castles
* It's fun to defend you castle
* It's fun to attack other castles

Con:
* Too short
* High system demands
* Non-combat missions can be boring
* Very stupid computer opponents (they often don't realize they are being attacked and just stand there and let you kill them)
* Estate system doesn't make sense (there is rarely any reason to take over another estate since you can't effectively use its resources)
* Serious bugs where you cannot produce certain resources under certain circumstances (for example, it sometimes would not let me make bread or wine), which kept me from being able to complete one of the missions

"Challenging medieval strategy game", Excellent game. You have to build your city and the commodity chains as well, including the production of food and military supplies. Very exciting and challenging, you'll have great time trying to organize your city to get to the objective just in time.

"3 strikes you're out Firefly", I bought the first, and was disappointed. Then I fell for Crusader. Better, but still fell short of expectations and just not fun enough to recommend. Now we get this garbage. Rather than fix the management of the game and the actual warfare, what we get is more BS to juggle. Goodluck if you choose the warfare campaign, you'll be too busy trying to deal with ever growing crime problems while the computer either a.) sits back and does nothing the entire game or b.) attacks you with hundreds of troops 5 minutes into the game. At no point in the week of playing this have I been able to build a attack worthy army, nor even a decent castle. Not to mention that most of the maps, the terrain is so cluttered and setup that castle building is essentially impossible. Not that it matters because you pretty much don't have time to collect sufficient stone to build one anyway. If you are looking for a game of castle defending and sieging, look elsewhere.
Other cons: slow and buggy

"Outstandingly accurate", Having been a competative swordfighter for years (medieval fencing- full contact martial art), I'd been exposed to and done a great deal of research on the intricacies of medieval life and warfare. I was astounded to see the level of detail in this game... combat AI is absolutely enjoyable and the enemy lords are relentless. I love the strategies and tactics they use because they really do paralell those of the medieval age. And just wait until they decide to put a seige on your castle! You'll have your hands full! Game speed is fully adjustable, and the enemy has to go through the same build-up that you do, so it's not like thgey're going to rush you with unbeatable troops in the first 5 minutes of the game. The Map-maker is great though the trigger/event module does require a learning curve. In the end, sights, sounds, and action is brilliant. (And you don't have to fight... there's a peace mode where you can concentrate on civil matters.)

All in all, a fun real time strategy game!

Read this reviews before You buy...

"Excellent strategy game", I got this game four weeks ago and this one is excellent. You can play in builder (path of peace) or warrior style (path of war). I have medieval total war (a great game) but i love in stronghold 2 the simulation elements and that you need take care about people necesity (you are their lord). Please download latest patch to solve some freeze effect and adding new missions to your game. Enjoy it!

"Stronghold 2", Ok, this game's got a large selection of really cool features. I havn't even gotten around to playing much of the the storyline mission. They have instant battle, also known as "siege" battles. In this, you are thrown into an historic battle.

The voice acting is well done, in my opinion. The physics are surprising good. Also, graphically this game is quite good. I have to turn them down because my computer doesn't even meet the minimum requirements. I've got 640 ram, 1.0 Ghz processor and a 128 video card. It lags, sure, but it is such a fun game I still play it, although I've cut back.

One bad thing; the update for the game, which includes some very important patches, is somehow not compatible with my game, giving me an error that says the game isn't even installed on my computer. This may have something to do with the shape of my CD, however.

Either way, this is the best strategy game I've ever played. Lastly, I have to say the funnest thing is the multiplayer.

"Stronghold 2 Reviewed After A Month", With gameplay similar to the original, this game is great. Stronghold 2 has some added goodies, fixes where the original got jacked up, and the whole honour/promotion deal (do good things for your people to gain honour which lets you raise an army or get promoted by the king). It also looks better than the original. I thought the campaigns were a little weak, so I stopped playing them and just played the scenarios--again...and again...and... This is one of those strategy games that has a great replay value by the way.

I give it the following scores: (5 being the highest)
Graphics: 5
Fun: 5
Gameplay: 5
Campaign: 2
Scenarios: 5
Replay Value: 5
_______________
Overall: 5

"This game is under-rated !!", Let me preface this review with two data points. First I have played every RTS and civilization type game that has come out - its my favorite type of game. For me resource management and city building are cool and the fighting is just a test of what you've built. The second data point is that I do have a modestly fast machine - its a 3Ghz Dell with appropriate Ram and video card.

I didn't buy this game for a long time because the reviews were so mixed - many compelling reviews complained that the resource management was over the top and the castle details, particularly the "Gong" or dung piles, and the crime were just too much. The game seemed too complicated somehow - also there were many complaints about bugs and slowness.

However, I have found this to be the most fun games in my collection of the moment and in fact my kids also think its the greatest. Why? Well it takes a little practice to learn how to play it but once you do its really rewarding.

Of course the graphics are great: Most games seem to have that these days. But the game play is really good. There are some neat concepts here like estates which are independent lands that can be owned by you: you can receive important resources from them as well as income, and they need to be protected. There are intestesting aspects of village life that must be ballanced such as crime - the bigger you get the more there is. Rehabilitation is time based - It takes longer to rehab a criminal in the stocks than it does on the rack! The sooner he is through rehab the sooner he is back to work. You have to earn money of course, but you also have to earn honor in order to get access to more and more Castle items. To earn honor you have to make the items neccesary to hold dances, feasts, jousts, etc. If you don't keep up with building your honor your castle will fall as the enemies will come on with progressively stronger attacks which only the more up to date technology can stop.

The AI is also very good. You can set up all sorts of enemies of different calibers and they will attack in good order and with reasonable effectiveness. Your castle will get a good test. Basically they will keep after you until you knock their castles down.

Regarding the complaints about crime and "piles of human waste" this is very easy to manage - build a few extra "gong" pits and there won't be any waste problems, build a few inspiring "rehab devices" and the population won't want to commit crime anymore. Its part of the challange of running a castle. It takes a little practice to get it all done in time before the attacks come, but thats why its fun and enjoyable to play many times.

Regarding the complaints about bugs: it simply hasn't been an issue for me -the game automatically updated itself when I loaded it and there haven't been any bugs in many hours of play. Regarding the complaints about speed - well what can I say here? - its no problem at all on my 3Gig. Since play is effortless on this machine with all the settings maxed, I have to assume that you can still get good game play on lesser machines - up to a point. I think this game woudn't work too well at 1Ghz and below - just my estimate.

We use the very powerfull map editor to create our own maps - it took about 30 minutes to master but once mastered you can do a lot. You can use all the features of the games including estates, mountains, cliffs, rivers, fog, bird flocks, dear heards, terain sounds, bridges, etc. You can pre-set boundries between different estates and castles. Once the game gets going, the AI will automatically start building up communities in those areas.

Here's a few ideas for the game creators for the next version from me and my kids. First, the voices need improvement - its a fine ballance between realism and comedy that's required- We think you had a better ballance in Stronhold 1. We love the regional British voices for different classes of population - keep this up and extend it without too much comedic reading. Second, We were in a village in France recently that defended itself by throwing behives over the walls at attackers - As you have behives already why not add that to the defence? We would love to see attackers coming up the ladders only to receive a behive on the head. Third, the burning logs and rock boxes are great but we wish that they could be set to automatic. One of our favorite things to do is set up a castle and watch it defend itself - you need the defences to work automatically for this.

Overall I strongly recommend this game for anyone interested in RTS and civilization type games -the price is great, the playability is great.

"Incredibly Disappointed", I loved Stronghold Crusader, it was great fun to play. I was looking forward to Stronghold 2 and read the negative reviews but I told myself that this can't be bad, its gotta be good. Wrong. Its buggy, loading takes forever, and is the enemy even playing. They either sit back and never attack or attack right away with 500 men. Normally though they just sit there, one of the funnest things about crusader was building up your castle and watching 500 enemy troops try to take it from you and fail.

I heard they are making Stronghold: Legends. Hopefully it will be like the first two in the series, but I wouldn't know until the price drops to $20. Oh, by the way the 3d sucks and does nothing for this series. My advice, keep playing the first two and pray it gets better with Legends.