Stronghold Crusader 2 Walkthrough and Review(Description)Part 1-KJS
1I bought the game some time ago, but I forgot why I stopped playing it. Decided to try it again since I am a big fan of SHC1, so I really want to like this game. But I don't ...
To start on a positive note:
- The popularity system is much better. Everything you can change (food/ale rations, taxes, and mass frequency) is located in one convenient panel and you can use the popularity to regulate your population.
- I like the addition of the candles for use in churches to gain popularity (which originates from SH2 I believe). Although it is a commodity made out of thin air, it provides a more controllable way of regulation your religion as a means to gain popularity than the 'population blessed percentage' of the first game.
- You do not need a marketplace to buy/sell stuff anymore. However, the marketplace obtained an added feature to autosell and -buy. This comes in handy when you are focusing on destroying your enemy's castle.
- It still has the feel/ambiance/music/etc of the first game, which is nice. Although they removed the silly voices when selecting a peasant, which I really liked.
Onto the sad part:
- Many reviews already mention this: the balance of cost vs. production is insanely bad. If you do not start with 1000+ amount of gold you cannot start food/resource gathering, army production, and castle building at the beginning of the game. Mills, inns, quarries, etc. cost 10× more resources than in the first game, but the gathering of it is at most 1.5× as much.
- The most absurd part of this is building walls. A small stretch of wall will easily cost you 100 stone, which takes about 15 minutes to gather.
- AIs do not seem to be bothered by all of this for some reason.
- There is also no reason to gather meat/cheese since both are now slower than apples and are more expensive. You also do not need cows anymore for leather armour since it has been removed, nor for catapulting over your nemesis' wall. Similar to the first game, it is not really viable to obtain them for the multiple types of food bonus while carrying a large (60+) population. So bread will remain your main source of food, but mills costs a fortune and are less efficient than in the first game.
- Pointing with your mouse cursor is a disaster. I never seem to click on what I want to because it is both imprecise and the 'target' is at an offset to the cursor image.
- Moreover, you cannot drag to delete walls anymore which means you will end up with single columns of wall. Because of the previous issue you then have to focus to get the last bit away.
- There are a lot of bugs in the game. Most important/annoying:
· The game lags from time to time for no reason. I do not see CPU/GPU spikes while it happens.
· When moving units across a wall, they sometimes disappear into the wall.
· Moving units will sometimes either stop in place, stop their animation so they float like a ghost, or both.
- They have tried to make it look more fancy (and 3D) but it looks worse. It looks more realistic, but the simple drawing style of the first game was fine. Now it still does not look realistic but just ugly. More bugs as well:
· Terrain features (such as flowers or what seems to be waves in water) disappear at a certain drawing distance, which is lower down than you will ever be.
· Patches of terrain will clip through other surfaces or disappear altogether.
- The skirmish trail is short in comparison to the first game. In SHC1 we got 50 original challenges and an added 30 with the warchest expansion. Now you get 24 not including the DLC which I have not bought.
- There are also less maps, most of which are terrible. Most of the maps of the original game were brilliant.
- While defending the castle, I get the impression that all range units constantly attack the same (few) enemy unit(s). This means that 40 archers will lose out to 20 slaves and a slave driver even if they are on a wall.
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