Stronghold: Crusader Preview

Last year, Firefly Studios released the original Stronghold, an unusual real-time strategy game that, at a glance, bore a striking resemblance to an advanced session of Ensemble Studios' more-conventional Age of Empires II. That's because rather than focusing on churning out hordes of units to pummel enemy soldiers into the ground, Stronghold focused on laying siege to huge castles. While Stronghold didn't have the great variety of soldiers or the many different architectural wonders of Age of Empires II, it did have scaling ladders and boiling oil. The original game featured two primary modes of play--economic and military--as well as a free-form castle-building sandbox mode. While Stronghold's economic mode was a bit simplistic, the overall game was so varied and so unusual that many fans still had fun storming the castle.

The legendary King Richard I joins the ranks of Stronghold.

The successor to Stronghold, Crusader, will improve on the original game by including only the best parts of the original game--besieging and defending castles--and it won't bother with any purely economic missions, which tended to be a bit too straightforward in the original game, anyway. Stronghold: Crusader will instead focus mainly on battles loosely based on the Crusades, the campaign in medieval Europe that brought the likes of Richard the Lionheart into the Middle East to do battle with Saladin, King of Syria. You'll be able to play through one of four single-player historical campaigns on either side of the Crusades and will also be able to play through an additional crusader campaign, which will consist of a whopping 50 scenarios. And Crusader will also feature the original game's sandbox mode, which will let you build either a classical European castle or one of the game's new Arabian castles.

Historically, the Crusades were characterized by invasion and siege campaigns. Though European armies had previously swept eastward and captured the holy city of Jerusalem, the Syrian ruler Saladin and his armies besieged and sacked the city in 1187 AD. Two years later, King Richard of England set forth to retake Jerusalem, but his campaign was unsuccessful--the siege ended in a stalemate. The first three campaigns of Stronghold: Crusader will follow these events. In the first campaign, which will comprise the first Crusade, you'll play as the European armies on their mission to seize Jerusalem, while in the second campaign, you'll play as Saladin's armies, and you must drive the crusaders out of Palestine. In the third campaign, you'll take up the standard of Richard the Lionheart and attempt to retake Jerusalem, while the fourth and final campaign will consist of fictitious skirmishes among various nobles who fought to control small crusader states after the major campaign came to an end.

You'll need huge armies like these to prevail.

In both the game's campaigns and its improved instant-action skirmish maps, you will be able to take up crossbows and Damascus steel and fight on the side of King Saladin. The Arabian side will have eight brand-new military units, including assassins, which can scale walls and open gates from the inside (rather than having to beat down walls with a battering ram), and the fire ballista, a new kind of siege weapon that can set buildings and walls on fire. That's in addition to standard siege engines, such as catapults, trebuchets, and mangonels, which both sides will have access to.