Leaderboard

Hello All! Firefly Studios recently unveiled details about their next "Winter" update for Stronghold Crusader: DE, which is scheduled to release on February 3, 2026. Much like the Autumn Update, it will feature free additions to the base game, as well as a paid downloadable content called The Sergeant and the Lioness for 5 EUR / 5 USD / 4 GBP. Take a look at the contents below. Contents - Free Update 3 new maps A new cooperative trail Custom Trail Editor Create your own skirmish trail up to 50 custom skirmish missions, with a selection of opponents and maps tailored to your liking. Trails can be exported and shared with other players too! CPU Lord and Castle Editors Akin to our editors offered for SH2 and SHL (as well as the UCP!), Firefly will also grant us the ability to customise the preferences and castle layout templates built by any AI opponent. Both utilities seem to be standalone applications, with the Castle Editor visually greatly resembling its earlier counterpart for vanilla Crusader. Contents - DLC New Sands of Time Trail: Trail of the Cobra New AI opponent: The Sergeant Metal man! An aspiring veteran of a "dozen campaigns", who earned fame in his battles prefers his armored troops to chew through enemy defenses. Builds similarly to the Marshal, erecting large castles divided into multiple elongated quarters, and lots of towers on the sides. Seen using the sturdiest troops there are: Crossbowmen, Pikemen, Arabian Swordsmen, Demolishers. New AI opponent: The Lioness A bloodthirsty but playful dame? She is the proclaimed "Queen of the Sands", being an all-rounder overall. Her castles are much like an upgrade on the Kahinah, featuring an outer wall, moat and better productivity. Seen using a mix of Arabic and Bedouin troops: Arabian Swordsmen, Arabian Bowmen, Skirmishers, Heavy Camels.

I ended up finishing the campaign on easy mostly because I was kind of interested in just reaching the end, so I don't have too much to note about Mission 19 or Mission 20. They were pretty easy on easy (as one would expect); I'll have to do them again on Normal to see if they are any harder. That brings us to the final mission. Mission 21 - Final Vengeance This mission is another siege mission, and it is actually pretty difficult as I had to reload about 30 times. You have more options here than you do with the End of the Pig, but the Wolf has a very well-fortified castle with many defensive siege equipment as well as a lot of pitch ditches. I started the level by moving all my troops a bit south some to make sure they were outside of the range of the Wolf's tower ballistae and then waited. Like the Pig, the Wolf will send out some troops to harass you at the beginning of the level, so it's best to wait them out and let your archers and crossbowmen kill the knights and macemen as they run towards you. After they were dead, I used my engineers to build trebuchets. I built two of them to begin with to take out the two enemy towers with siege equipment that were closest to my starting position. This was successful, and the trebuchets also took out the first gatehouse which was also nice. Next, I took my portable shields and crossbowmen, and used them to clear out the enemies in the outer towers. This might not have been the smartest move as I lost like two-thirds of my ranged troops doing this (down to 19 + 11 and no shields from 52 + 27), but it didn't prevent me from winning the mission later. I just had to be a lot more careful with my remaining ranged troops. After this, I used two knights to trigger the pitch ditch in front of the moat. I tried to retreat them to safety, but one of them still died from the fire. Then, I used about 30 of my spearmen to clear the moat in front of where the gatehouse used to stand. I then bought another two trebuchets to take out the ballista tower to the lower-left of the second gatehouse. It would have been nice if I could do it with only one, but it seemed that I always had to destroy the smaller tower first before it would let me destroy the bigger tower. I use my remaining archers and crossbowmen to clear out a few more of the enemy ground troops now that the ballista is gone. I also attempted several times to get rid of the four archers in the tower to the left of the second gatehouse, but I never seemed to be able to do so without sustaining heavy losses, so I ultimately gave up on that idea. Instead, I send in two of my knights again to trigger some pitch ditches, and then I sent in the remaining knights to join in on taking down the second gatehouse. The knights were relatively safe taking down the gatehouse, so I didn't lose too many troops doing this. At this point, I only have one gatehouse between the Wolf and me, so I thought I could just do a reckless all-in attack and go for the Lord. Unfortunately, like the Pig before, the inner courtyard is also filled with pitch ditches, so I had to reload a few times and take a different tactic. I commission another trebuchet near the west wall of the Wolf's castle and use it to take down the mongonel on the lone round tower. I got lucky, and the trebuchet took out the mongonel without taking down the entire tower, so I told it to fire at the tower with the obnoxious unreachable archers with its remaining stone instead. It took out that tower as well. I then used my siege tower to dock at the lower left wall, and used my remaining ranged troops to clear out the remaining troops in the outer two gatehouses. (I set up there because it still kept me out of the range of the enemy's ballista near the third and final gatehouse. At this point, I'm running out of troops and want to still save my knights for the final courtyard. So instead of sending some knights towards the final gatehouse, I instead send my spearmen. They ended up all dying from the flames and the enemy fire before they could really do any damage to the gatehouse, but I sent in my battering rams in behind them, and the rams were successful in destroying the gatehousee. Once the gatehouse was down, I sent in all my knights to trigger all the flames in the courtyard. All the knights died, but at least the path towards the Wolf was now clear. I then sent in all my swordsmen towards the Wolf while I moved my archers and crossbowmen to the square tower to the right of the second gatehouse. I had the ranged troops pick off the remaining ranged troops while those troops were distracted by the incoming advance of my swordsman. The Wolf still had one boiling oil engineer that I wasn't able to kill off, so I lost some swordsman to the fire, but my men still prevailed in the end. All in all, after a ~3 hour siege, I managed to take the Wolf down! The image is a screenshot of the map as I head for the final kill.