The game suffers from some bad thing, which make the game REALLY DISAPOINTING!
You start with your castle's heart the Donjon and several workers. You then begin creating barracks, buildings which can collect materials and so on. there are to different places to build your castle. The castle bricks and the outer village. The castle bricks are for building your castle building which is meant to be behind the castle walls, and right outside you build the village.
You can train from a big array of units, all from archers to pikemen. though the 3 different country's isent so different. They share all units and has about a few special ones, which make each country remind deeply of each other. Its quite cool that you can see the new weapons and armor appear on the units when you upgrade them. Many rts's miss that thing. Als you cant recruit cavalery directly. You have to train a horse in the stables, which also is quite cool since your men then can jump on the horse of it again. Thats another thing many rts's should have.
Building your castle is extremly entertaining. The walls can also be upgraded many times. Another cool thing is that you can place your units on the walls so that they can shoot or protect the castle from enemy siege towers. (i'll explain about siege equipmen later) the thing with that soldiers can go on the wall is again another thing many rts's miss.
The sound works well. The germans now dont speak common english but german. The same goes for france, and the english does of cause speak english. The game also had a some good soundtracks.
Graphics look GGGGRRRREEEEAAATTT. Thats is the games strongest site. Extremly detailed, and gives you a true dynamic fealing óf that you are in the middle ages.
There are tons of different siege equipment, but i never tried it out exept in training, and here's the reason.
Now where i've said many good things about graphics, sound, upgrades and so on, its time to switch to the dull and bad things. There isent many bad things, but sadly they are bad enough to ruin the whole game.
The game misses some diplomacy. It would have been nice with some advanced trading system.
At a point of the game, there is more war than building up your castle, which ruins the whole point of the game. War should be more optitional and should first be set in motion much later in the game, except from if you waged it yourself.
The third and worst thing of the game is the computer AI. The computer player play like it have played it for years, even though its on easy. As soon as you get platemails, the enemy will come with ballista's catapult's battering rams and a whole army of top trained well armed elite warriors. Did te computer start an hour before me? Even though i sent the whole army at him plus archers from the towers, it crushed my army like a bug. I dident kill a single opponent even though i sent the whole army on one front trooper. It must have cheated, cause im actoualy a veteran in stategy games. Also putting archers on the walls dosent help much at all. The archer can be shot anyway, and even when he shots, he misses all the time. I tried to make the archer run from the other archers by running on the wall but he was shot down anyway.
Castle strike nearly finished the race by making a complete great rts, but it triped right in front of the finish line. The AI was what ruined the game, not really the missing diplomacy or to much war, or yes there was all to much war, so that you couldn concentrate in a long time in building up your castle. I wouldn't play the game online, cause i dont really feel like it will live up to the experience the game was supposed to offer. Also i like making my opponent life and then build up a big city. After three or four days a strange bug infested my castle strike cd. It was not a mark or a scratch, but i could just not play it. It said internal error. The game had many good ideas but it was all blown up cause of the AI. A total waist of 250 dkk!