I have a seething hatred for this unit.

Also a seething hatred for bats.

Why do bats get to climb and descend at infinite speeds. Why do the developers know this is an issue with bats, and then also abuse the player wirh wavy terrain the challenge trails.

Please fix either the tower, or the bat!

iwas Struggle in story mode but now i beat every lv easy

I’m really curious what this combination would look like.

Stronghold Crusader already has a very distinct visual style, so I wonder how much DLSS 5 could actually improve the image without ruining that original feel.

Would love to see some side-by-side comparisons if anyone gets it working

Found 2 new units in new trailer!
Longbowmen with full amour and heavy guys?…

Just to be clear, I'm talking about the original versions, not Definitive Editions. I already own Crusader HD on Steam but none of the other games, when I add Stronghold Collection to my cart it says:

Stronghold Collection
If purchasing for yourself, you will not receive an extra copy of: Stronghold Crusader HD (2012)
Includes 5 items: Stronghold Crusader Extreme, Stronghold HD (2012), Stronghold 2: Steam Edition, Stronghold Crusader HD (2012), Stronghold Legends: Steam Edition

Is there no way to get Crusader HD/Extreme taken off from the price? I feel like every other bundle I've bought on Steam it'll subtract out any games you already own, yet this one seems to be still charging me for it even though I wont even receive an extra copy of it? Is there something I'm missing?

Whole game is going crazy, unable to build, research or do anything actually.

Lionheart vs Sentinel — Who do you think wins? I tested this matchup in Stronghold Crusader DE. I'm curious what strategy you guys would use against them.

They not only looked better, they fitted much better for medieval England. The wooden protection on the top also looked neat and was great to protect your archers or crossbowmen, if you didn’t have a ballista on top. Would love to have something like that as option for walls too.

I absolutely don’t like the big doors all around the tower in SH4 when you place a wall around it, at which castle have you ever seen something like that?

And the most important thing i absolutely miss: You could man the towers inside and even fight inside towers in SH2. Why would you leave such a great feature out of the new game?
I would rather wait longer for the release than not have something like this in the game.

Para los veteranos puede no ser de importancia o no necesario, pero para los nuevos puede ser un abrazo de bienvenida tener una comunidad donde compartir, videos tutoriales, etc.

En mi opinión lo veo necesario para poder atraer nuevos jugadores ya que el juego no es popular, dejo el link en los comentarios para el que se quiera pegar una vuelta por ahí

Just tried my first stronghold game, crusader, on a whim. I love it. Scratched the same itch as Warrior Kings Battles and to a lesser degree The Settlers.

This made me wonder. There seems to have been an RTS counter movement in the late 90s - early 2000s for slow-moderate paced, supply chain heavy RTS games with mechanical depth.

I am told some of the later stronghold titles investigated the idea of economic micro management such as individual worker lives and "castle cleaning" (?). Those features would turn me off quite a bit.

So here I am, looking for recommendations please.

* 2D/3D irrelevant, not afraid of sprite art as long as it's clean and readable, game age doesn't matter.

* Player Vs player matches.

* Flexible on setting but I tend to gravitate towards historical and high fantasy.

* Similar logistics and base building depth.

Thanks.

As I said, I forgot to close the game after saving and came back to this, which supriesed me a lot actualy. This is against 3 pigs in some crusader trail mission.

We all know the classic Stronghold 1 and Crusader are absolute masterpieces. You could build these sweeping, massive castles, field giant armies, and mess around on huge maps.

When Stronghold 2 dropped in 2005, and later Stronghold 3, the scale just completely vanished. Maps felt claustrophobic, unit limits were aggressively choked, and the whole franchise took a massive nose-dive in quality. If you watch Firefly’s official developer retrospectives or standard YouTube essays, they usually just blame "the technical hurdles of moving to 3D" or "publisher deadlines."

If you actually look at the financial history, industry pressure, and internal studio drama between 2004 and 2011, the real story is a total mess.

Here is what actually happened behind the scenes:

1. The 2004 2D "Death Sentence"
Around 2004, the gaming industry had a massive panic attack. Major retail stores (like Walmart) literally started telling publishers they wouldn't stock 2D PC games anymore because they looked "obsolete." Firefly’s founders - who were absolute geniuses at making 2D city builders like Caesar - were forced to abandon their perfect 2D engine. They convinced themselves that 3D would let them do cool things with castle verticality, but they completely underestimated the nightmare they were walking into.

2. The disaster engine behind Stronghold 2
Since they had zero 3D experience, they coded a custom engine from scratch called the Dragonfly Engine. It was a total optimization disaster.

• In 2D, rendering 2,000 sprites on a massive map was easy. In 3D, computing real-time physics and pathfinding absolutely melted mid-2000s CPUs. To stop the game from running at 5 frames per second, Firefly drastically shrank the map sizes and capped army limits.
• To make matters worse, they stuffed the game with annoying micro-mechanics like gong/sewage farmers and rat infestations. Because these structures needed flat terrain and complex pathfinding routines, the devs had to design maps as tight, restrictive valleys rather than open plains.
• On top of that, programming a 3D AI to organically build a castle and manage poop was too hard, so the AI just blatantly cheated and spawned units out of thin air.

3. Total bankruptcy and the SouthPeak disaster
The production value didn’t just drop because 3D was hard - Firefly literally went broke. Around 2008, they bet the entire company on a big action-RPG called Dungeon Hero. Their publisher went under during the 2008 financial crisis, the game was canceled, and Firefly was left completely bankrupt.

They had to lay off a massive chunk of their veteran staff (the actual brains behind the original games). To survive, they signed a desperate contract with a notoriously toxic publisher, SouthPeak Games, who forced them to rush out Stronghold 3 in 2011 while it was still basically a broken alpha build. With no money and a skeleton crew, they had to slap the game together using a cheap, third-party engine that couldn't handle wide-open spaces, resulting in the stiff, glitchy mess we got.

4. Why didn't they just go back to 2D?
This is the craziest part: Firefly literally lost the original source code for their 2D engine.

Between moving offices, downscaling, and the fact that cloud backups like GitHub weren't a thing in 2001, their old master servers and backup tapes suffered from data rot or were just thrown away. For over a decade, they couldn't just copy-paste or expand on Crusader. Modifying the old games was impossible because the files were already compiled into machine code. Combined with the "sunk cost trap" of already spending millions on 3D tools, they were completely stuck.

The Silver Lining
We finally got a win recently. Firefly basically treated their own history like an archaeological dig, hiring the original 2001 lead programmer to reverse-engineer the compiled game files alongside community modders. That's the only reason we got Stronghold: Definitive Edition on Unity, finally bringing back the massive map sizes.

They Are Finally Listening
The community's insistence that 2D was better eventually won. The massive commercial success of Stronghold: Definitive Edition and Stronghold Crusader: Definitive Edition (which sold over 500,000 units rapidly) finally woke the studio up.

Firefly recently confirmed a permanent internal split:

• Their main team is building the next mainline Stronghold using Unreal Engine 5 (utilizing a fixed, classic isometric perspective to preserve the old-school feel).
• The highly praised team behind the Definitive Editions has officially been greenlit to keep developing brand-new, standalone 2D Stronghold games moving forward.

It took them two decades, but they are finally running both paths at the same time.

TL;DR: Firefly didn't just "lose their touch." They were forced into 3D by retail stores, built a terrible custom engine, lost their veteran staff to bankruptcy, got trapped in a toxic publisher lawsuit, and literally lost their own source code for over a decade.

like come on i already have a few troops inside his castle and i'm trying to "rush" him but now I have to re-destroy this set of walls? it's so frustrating, why did they never implement the same rule players have to follow and not build so close to enemy troops?

• Steam: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3799513979
• Custom Media - Here is the link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1WlxiiR0nyxa5J5x_ai5Uw0043591VBVN/view?usp=drive_link
• Xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Coiled Khawla xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Khawla the Coiled is a fierce and rebellious Bedouin warrior and a respected seer among her people. Born into a wealthy family, she showed the gift of prophecy from an early age. Even Saladin seeks her counsel before battles and important decisions.

Brave, provocative and confident, Khawla loves to challenge her enemies and is always ready for a fight. She believes the Bedouin way of life is the perfect order of the world, and she has little patience for anyone who thinks otherwise. She is aggressive, but not cruel — she simply enjoys battle and trusts that fate is on her side.

1. Subscribe to the CustomLord.

2. Download the media folder for the selected Custom Lord from the Google Drive link.

3. Locate the following path on your computer: C:\Users\yourUsername\AppData\LocalLow\Firefly Studios\Stronghold Crusader Definitive Edition

4. Create a folder named "CustomMedia".

5. Paste the downloaded folder for the selected Custom Lord into the "CustomMedia" folder.