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Stronghold 2
 
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Stronghold 2

Other products by 2K Games
Platform:   Windows XP / 2000 / 98 / Me   |   ESRB Rating:  Teen
3.3 out of 5 stars See all reviews (63 customer reviews)

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Product Features

  • 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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Product Details

  • Shipping: This item is also available for shipping to select countries outside the U.S.
  • ASIN: B0007Z70YM
  • Product Dimensions: 7.5 x 5.2 x 0.4 inches
  • Media: CD-ROM
  • Release Date: April 19, 2005
  • Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars See all reviews (63 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,977 in Video Games (See Bestsellers in Video Games)

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    #87 in  Video Games > PC Games > Strategy

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Product Description

From the Manufacturer
Play the ultimate castle sim! Expand your lands and build and fortify your citadel. Entertain with jousts, lavish feasts, and tournaments or rule with an iron fist and dispense medieval justice to your overworked and slovenly peasants. Stronghold 2 is the most accurate, amazing, and dynamic depiction of siege warfare and castle life ever portrayed.

Features:

  • See the breathtaking medieval setting in beautiful 3D and choose from a variety of other views to survey your domain.
  • Be lord of a true-to-life medieval berg. Watch the falconers deal with the rat problem, discover how man and pig lived side by side, see weavers, candle makers, and ale wives go about their business.
  • Hold great festivals such as jousting tournaments, feasts, and dances or conduct public executions to keep the peasantry in line.
  • Brand new soldier types, siege weaponry, and castle defenses.
  • As lord, your gaze reaches far. Watch life inside castles and behind closed doors. View a trial inside the courthouse, see the lord's food being prepared in the kitchen, watch the ladyship taking a bath in the solar attended to by her maid servants.
  • Earn valuable honor points and use them to rise through the ranks from humble serf to mighty duke or use them to knight your own sworn liegemen and place them in charge of captured castles to expand your kingdom.
  • Design your own coat of arms or decorate your castle with flags and banners or heads on spikes--the choice is yours.
  • Nonlinear interactive story unfolds as you return to your earlier castle and decide which challenge to undertake next.


Product Description
Stronghold 2 is the third installment of the Stronghold franchise. The original Stronghold was the first and only game to combine a castle SIM with siege-warfare RTS. Stronghold 2 will be the first to bring the franchise to 3D. Players will be able to build and develop numerous types of castles and defenses while watching their peasants go about their every day lives. Players will see medieval life in all its forms from festivals and jousts to drunken wenches serving their lord dinner. Players will also be given more control over the strategic aspect of the game.

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Video Game Review by 1UP.com (What's this?)

Stronghold 2

By Eric Neigher -- 02/8/2005

STRONGHOLD 2 was seemingly built on an ambitious plan: Combine the economic model of the Settlers series, the combat model of the Total War series, and the fortress building of the Castles series--all while staying true to previous Stronghold games. Sadly, loose coding, numskull design choices, and "special-needs" A.I. turn what could have been a sleek, multitalented Bernard Hopkins into a muddled, out-of-control Mike Tyson.

BRING OUT YOUR DEAD
Stronghold 2 offers two separate single-player campaigns: a siege-oriented combat campaign and a hippie-fied wuss campaign in which you mostly gather resources. Neither is much fun, although for different reasons. The warfare campaign is weak primarily because of the A.I.'s total fixation with attacking whatever of yours is closest to it, regardless of tactical value. Obviously, this makes defeating a siege simple: Construct a bunch of throwaway structures (such as cheap wooden walls) just outside your main enclosure and have your archers leisurely install medieval air conditioning in the besiegers as they hack away mindlessly at the junk. Once you've got this "strategy" figured out, you won't exactly have to consult Merlin to create an effective stronghold.

Pathfinding is another A.I. foible. Unless you micromanage their every move, soldiers insist on taking the most geometrically direct route to a target, even if it means abandoning defilade for terrain that will slow them down and expose them to enemy arrows. There are also frequent traffic jams when troops move through a narrow area, such as a castle gate. And whenever a lot is going on, the framerate takes a harder dive than a Triple Lindy. All this is compounded by the lame combat controls, which basically consist of pointing at what you want to attack and hoping your soldiers make it through the ensuing mosh pit.

PENNY UNWISE
Less combat means the economic campaign doesn't have to deal with the A.I. deficiencies as much, but nevertheless, it has its own frustrations. First among them is the politburo-sanctioned economic system. For no easily comprehensible reason, raw materials in Stronghold 2 cannot be brought directly from the buildings that gather them to the buildings that process them. They must first be deposited into a central stockpile, from which they are then picked up by the processor, taken to his shop, and used to create second-order goods. These, in turn, must be brought back to the stockpile and doled out to "end users." Everyone must share raw materials, and no one can be given preference--kind of a Dark Ages version of art class. While this might be attractive for an anarcho-syndicalist commune, here it only makes long-term urban planning virtually impossible (you can't know early on which structures should be located closest to the stockpile) as well as largely irrelevant (other than the stockpile, it doesn't matter what buildings are next to each other).

Stronghold 2 allows you to retain your towns and fortifications from mission to mission, rather than starting over with a blank slate. While this sounds sweet, it actually ends up being a major bummer, as your stockpiles will forever be closest to buildings that were important for the previous mission. And just to further oxidize your chain mail, there's no way to shut down an individual shop if it's sucking too many resources (which the shops closest to the stockpiles naturally will). Your only options are to raze the culprit building or shut down the entire industry in which it is involved. I can't believe this amazingly lame design decision ever got past QA.

KING FOR A DAY
But hey, it's not all bad news. While the A.I. may not be the smartest head on the pike, playing against other humans via multiplayer can be entertaining simply because they make much more effective use of the diverse structures, defense mechanisms, and units. And the graphics, when they're not lagging, are colorful and highly detailed, conveying a real sense of being there.

In the end, though, there's just not enough fruit underneath all the rind. If it's an all-in-one medieval strategy game you're after, just Alt-Tab really quickly between Medieval: Total War and Castles II--that'll come closer than Stronghold 2 does.




The Comfy Chair!?
Criminals in Stronghold 2 are (unfortunately for them) subjected to a very authentic reproduction of medieval law-enforcement techniques. Marcellus Wallace would be proud of the wide variety of options a lord has for getting medieval upon the asses of the slackers in his midst. Your "torturers guild" can do everything from slapping a humiliating donkey mask on a transgressor to introducing the back of his neck to a battle-ax. Hell, you can even force criminals to form human pyramids while your soldiers give the thumbs-up sign. No, not really. But the game deserves props for its willingness to treat medieval "justice" realistically.



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Stronghold 2
76% buy the item featured on this page:
Stronghold 2 3.3 out of 5 stars (63)
$19.99
Stronghold 2 Deluxe
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Customer Reviews

63 Reviews
5 star:
 (17)
4 star:
 (15)
3 star:
 (10)
2 star:
 (9)
1 star:
 (12)
 
 
 
 
 
Average Customer Review
3.3 out of 5 stars (63 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

 
120 of 125 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars A very mixed bag, to say the least, April 28, 2005
By chefdevergue (Spokane, WA United States) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)      
Fun:3.0 out of 5 stars 
I would really love to give this game a better rating, because there are some aspects to the new version that I rather enjoy. Some people have complained about the new details of castle life, such as the piles of human waste & criminals running amok. I suspect that these are players who take more pleasure in warfare than in the management of infrastructure, and find anything that detracts from the waging of war to be an unneccessary intrustion. However, I have always enjoyed the micromanagement aspect of Stronghold, which set it apart from other games, and that the additional details by themselves are not a problem. Yet I would agree that there is now one detail too many, to the point that you are frantically trying to keep all of the balls in the air. It ceases to be enjoyable when you are simply racing from one problem to another.

This is compounded by the fact that, even after the downloading of the new patch (after only ONE WEEK from the game's release), the new features do not always work as they are supposed to work. In particular, I would point to the criminals, the Courthouse, and the punishments. Ideally, the guards catch the crooks, take them to the judge, and then the judge or a torturer will mete out a punishment to rehabilitate the crook. However, the game has a bug that results in no crooks receiving punishment --- instead, they pile up in the dungeon, never going to trial. The consequences are a tremendous negative number from all of the unpunished criminals, plus industries that languish indefinitely while the peasant assigned to that building rots in prison. Meanwhile, the player is forced to double rations or bribe the remaining peasants in order to stave off disaster. This alters a fundamental aspect of the game, and detracts from the overall enjoyment.

As many other reviewers have noted, this game runs very slowly, regardless of your systems specifications. The patch has not helped this problem, and I very much doubt that any future patches will improve this aspect of the game. I am not someone who has to have top of the line graphics in a game, but when one has the game set at top speed and the peasants are slogging across the screen looking heavily medicated, I tend to get frustrated after awhile.

The 3-D graphics? Novel but unnecessary. When it comes to warfare, it actually interferes with gameplay at times, particularly when I am trying to select military units and target enemy troops. Another reviewer mentioned Medieval TW and I regret that I have to agree that Stronghold 2's graphics and gameplay fall short of a game that is several generations older in terms of development. It is disheartening that the developers could take the great franchise that the Stronghold games represent and turn out this tepid, uninspiring effort. I can only hope that there are many more patches to come, which may help improve the game's many problems.

*******************************

Patch 1.2 update (6-7-05): it seems only fair to note, after commenting on the game's many deficiencies, that the developers seem to be doing their level best to address the problems. The latest patch seems to have corrected a great number of the problems. I don't play multiplayer, so I am in no position to comment on any problems on that end, but solo play seems to be much less buggy.

However, speed issues continue to bedevil the game, and I do not believe that it is simply because everyone is working on elderly obsolete machines. I am left with the impression that the developers simply piled too much detail into the game --- again, it leaves the player micromanaging to a frantic degree while causing the game speed to become sluggish.

Having said that, it appears that the developers are trying to make this game as playable as is possible. This gives me encouragement. I would now give this game a four-star rating with some qualifications.
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56 of 65 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Great gameplay, May 28, 2005
Fun:5.0 out of 5 stars 
I'm a huge fan of strategy games and of empire-building games. Stronghold 2 does a really good job of balancing the aspects of gameplay and warfare.

First off, I really love the graphics and atmosphere. I love medieval research and recreation, so I was quite impressed with the attention to detail here. The game is in fact educational, helping you learn how the complex interplay of economy, land usage, mineral resources and even social balance all helped to keep a village or castle area going.

I love the fact that there are management issues to deal with - that you're not just cranking out troops and blasting away at enemies. Those troops had to come from somewhere. The money to pay the peasants who mined the ore had to come from somewhere. If all you're out for is build-and-blast, there are plenty of games out there to do that for you. Stronghold lets you delve more deeply into the actual world that these struggles took place in.

There are in fact different modes of gameplay that focus either on world-building on or conflict. Depending on your aims, you can choose one path or the other, and focus on whichever pleases you more.

I've read some reviews where people complain about game speed. I haven't had ANY issues at all with the speed of the system. When I watch the little people on the screen, they appear to be moving at "actual normal" speed compared to the buildings and objects around them. What, do you want super-human little peasants that can zoom faster than Speedy Gonzales?

That being said, this is of course a new game. That means it runs best on newer systems. If you try to run a new, graphic-rich game on an ancient P-100, then of course it's not going to work. That's always true with any game. PCs are not meant to last forever. You need to keep them upgraded and RAM-filled to handle what the new games offer. I find that a quite reasonable thing. After all, I want new games to be as great as they can be. I don't want them to have bad graphics and tiny maps in order to still work with ancient systems.

I do have a complaint with the marketing which incessantly promotes that you can "see maidens bathing" as a selling point. Good God Almighty, isn't it enough to say it's a good game, without trying to push porn points? You don't actually SEE anything, for those who care :)

Well recommended!

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20 of 23 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars This game is under-rated !!, July 23, 2006
By Dallas "RTS Guy" (Dallas, USA) - See all my reviews
Fun:5.0 out of 5 stars 
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.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars Stronghold
My son really enjoys this game. It arrived in a timely manner, and in good condition.
Published 2 months ago by Sherri Lyon

1.0 out of 5 stars very disappointed
I really like strategy games and managing an economy, and I was excited to try this game since it was described as a "castle sim. Read more
Published 3 months ago by Danjo

4.0 out of 5 stars Good Entertainment
I really enjoyed this game. I loved the realism of crime, rats and piles of waste to be cleaned up. The graphics were passable, and the landscapes were not boring. Read more
Published 9 months ago by Falcor

4.0 out of 5 stars 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... Read more
Published 13 months ago by Z. A. Recht

3.0 out of 5 stars 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... Read more
Published 14 months ago by Wandering Eye

5.0 out of 5 stars 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. Read more
Published 17 months ago by Mario A. Bonvini

1.0 out of 5 stars 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. Read more
Published 19 months ago by S. Watkins

5.0 out of 5 stars 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... Read more
Published 19 months ago by D. Tatner

4.0 out of 5 stars Great
This game is pretty confusing to get use to, especially if you play Ages of Empires, but it's fun none the less. Read more
Published 21 months ago by A. Andersen

5.0 out of 5 stars I LOVE this game
Please be aware that a lot of these low ratings are a result of the bugs before they made the patch. I've had no problems after patching the game. Read more
Published on June 17, 2007 by Nachobiz

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