Lord_Chris

As below, Reddit have struck a $60 million annual deal with an "un-named" large AI company to harvest its content and user submitted data. https://www.theverge.com/2024/2/17/24075670/reddit-ai-training-license-deal-user-content?utm_source=tldrnewsletter Just wanted to share also for discussion purposes, but personally because I find this disgraceful as it shows a complete lack of regard for user content or basic privacy rights in posts. I want to reassure members that no matter what company approaches us, or the amount offered, we will never provide, sell, share or knowingly allow AI scrapers to access our content or data.

Hello everyone! For some time now, @ Asophix has been working on refining and advancing the Stronghold Knights AI Castle Editor program, originally created to work with Stronghold 2. His intention is to create a program where the community can edit and create their own AI Castle Designs in Stronghold Legends. This is a truly historic moment and for the first time, you can now control aspects of Stronghold Legends which were previously never possible. The work far exceeds the original Editor built by the team at stronghold Knights approximately 15 years ago, and there are many more features planned in the future as well which will improve the program further. You can build & develop castles, place faction specific buildings, set faction-specific troops, patrol points and much more. The initial editor is approaching completion and we are looking for members who would be interested in having early access to test & design their own Castles. It is now stable to develop your own Castle, we need to test this on a larger scale before rolling out to the public for download. Your feedback is extremely valuable in helping to shape the future of this application for the whole community. Your thoughts and opinions, likes and dislikes will help to create the best experience possible for all global users who use this in future. For the first time you can now design your own Stronghold Legends Opponent Castles.. so what are you waiting for? Take this opportunity to develop that Castle for Vlad or Dietrich you have always been looking for! I'd like to commend @ Asophix for singlehandedly re-developing this application himself. On reviewing the old program we uncovered a number of serious issues which needed to be addressed and updated. Much of the program has been rewritten by him from the ground up. Without his hard work, this new editor would not exist. I know I speak on behalf of our whole community when I sincerely thank him for his time and show him great gratitude for his work. To display our thanks we have promoted him to an Administrator on our community. May I be the first to heartily congratulate him and welcome him to the team! 👏 Please leave a comment below, or PM myself or @ Asophix if you are interested in taking part in this Beta release and testing the Editor. If you are currently a non-member feel free to email me on chris [at] stronghold-nation [dot] com or Asophix on asophix [at] stronghold-nation [dot] com. Lastly, I have attached some screenshots of the program to date so you can see for yourself what can be achieved: 🙂

Moving to SHL Forum and featuring this topic. Should get more activity there.

Hi @ £ûƒƒý , Thanks for your message and welcome to the forum! I’ve split your thread off from our announcement as this is perhaps something which should be in the Stronghold Legends forum. There are a few members of old communities on here such as Stronghold Knights, I am sure some may find this thread and want to play 🙂 I would also be interested in playing Stronghold Legends with you if you are interested, my Steam is shnlordchris if you would like to add me, or we can play via GameRsnger if that is better.

Welcome to the Nation @ LordVolpe ! We've got plenty of things in the pipeline, you should stick around! 🙂

This sounds like a really interesting revelation! Do you have a map anywhere so we can see an example of this in action? We could perhaps add a proper tutorial on this as well for the site to teach others how to do this.

@ Asophix has already posted in response to your original thread here. Please do not hijack other threads when you already have an existing question open.

I think what we need to remember is that Stornghold 2 was released in 2005... so naturally the AI will be less advanced than what it is now, with less options and less configuration abilities. However, it should be noted that the following year or so later this problem was signficantly improved in Legends. I used to play Legends for hours on end, although the AI Opponents were much more limited, I never really encountered the same boredom I did in SH2. Legends also has much more depth in terms of overall Missions as well so perhaps this is more your style @ HorusXCV . I understand that it is frustrating in SH2 for the Opponents to always create the exact same troops, it seems to be poorly randomised or at the least not random at all. If I remember correctly @ SteelyProv , there was also some information in the manual that wasn't correct either along similar lines, or at least never implemented. Perhaps something to do with Jousting, I think offhand? One real joy for me in SH2 was when we used to play multiplayer games as we all had different styles and often adapted them, particularly to the map types. So Multiplayer is a very different experience to playing against the AI. I know @ Lord Vetka really liked the SH2 map editor and that's what made the game for him.... different people have different styles, likes, dislikes.... I suppose if you feel like there are areas or portions of the game you don't like, you could always try modifications to try and make them more interesting? And of course, you could always try creating your own Military campaign to replace the original one as well if you wanted, then upload it here so we can all check it out!

Hi @ naberios Since Stronghold 3, the Map Editor is a separate application and needs to be downloaded separately from Steam. The following guide specifies only SHC2 and SH3, but the same method is used to download the Editor for Warlords in exactly the same way: https://www.stronghold-nation.com/article/225-stronghold-3-editor-overview?_fromArticle=1 Let me know if you still have any issues!

Hi @ JustAVillager Your thread has been approved. Please do not submit multiple threads containing exactly the same content days apart from one another - you were warned last time you used the forums that due to your previous conduct, all your future posts would require manual approval by Moderators. This process is not instant, as you are aware, and duplicate posting increases not only the amount of work we have to put in but the length of time taken to approve your topic as well. It is not acceptable and hugely disrespectful, and you are well aware of this. If you are unable or unwilling to obey the community rules after this length of time, then we will simply begin closing your threads and suspending your account. It is ridiculous. You are the only member we repeatedly have these kinds of problems with, and we are no willing to longer tolerate this behaviour from you.

These are awesome! I'll spend some time splitting these down into separate files complete with previews etc, so they're more easily findable by search engines, but I'm sure I speak for the whole community when I say we're very grateful for your contributions here! In the meantime, I've promoted you to the Contributors user group to show our gratitude for the way you've helped the community. It's a terrific achievement and yet another reason I continue to run Stronghold Nation after all these years 🙂

Thanks for all this! These were actually the very files I've been meaning to get copies of for some time, but like you I've been unable to due to the WayBackWhen not archiving zip files. It is a shame, but then again they are archives and not really webpages. Don't worry about where you downloaded them from as we can put a credit on the download to let people know that they were originally from the CivCity Rome forums. I'm sure these will be appreciated by many, many people since they're no longer available. I will also do what I can about tracking down the previous owners of the CivCity forums to ask about us restoring these files on Stronghold Nation. I think I actually managed this in the past, if I recall, but for some reason it didn't seem much point to it as I didn't have any files and I don't think they did either. Let me check again. If it's easier I can upload them here for you under your own username to save you manually uploading them. Feel free to email me what you can on chris [at] stronghold-nation [dot] com and I will get that sorted for you.

I'm not quite sure what your question is. Can you possibly explain what you're trying to achieve a bit clearer? If you're referring to starting goods, you just scroll the other way with the mouse wheel.

That sounds amazing! It would make such a huge difference to the CivCity Rome community as there is a major lack of almost anything anywhere. I've often wanted to get some of the files back up from years ago, but I just never knew how or who could help, although I knew it was possible. Hopefully you may be the person I've been waiting for to help me, I'll look forward to seeing some of the maps soon 🙂 I like the scenario editor in CivCity Rome too, it's easy to create some good looking maps - kind of similar to Stronghold 2 and Stronghold Legends in that regard. My hope with having Stronghold Nation as a central hub for CivCIty Rome files going forwards is that people can start to learn different editor tricks, gain inspiration and hopefully revive the game a little. From these I can also spend some time writing some tutorials as well, so it could be a really good move forward. Really appreciated - thanks!

Hi @ UzerNayme ! Welcome to Stronghold Nation! 🙂 I'm afraid you are very much correct on this one. The CivCity Rome community never really took off like the Stronghold community did. There was a standalone community a very long time ago on the civcity forums, but that no longer exists now unfortunately so we bought the domain and redirect it here instead. I could only find a single other standalone website, but this was just a personal blog site. It seems that Stronghold Nation is the only active CivCity Rome fansite from what I can see. We do however have a downloads section ourselves which you may have come across: https://www.stronghold-nation.com/downloads/category/civcity-rome/ It does not have many files, but you're more than welcome to upload some of your own there if you would like, as all members are. It would be nice to create this as a central hub for CivCity Rome going forwards so the game can at least continue to have some traction 🙂

Does the same thing happen on other animals as well, or is it just with Wolves?

Hi Cortez! Have you tried taking the Wolves out of the map altogether for now and see if it continues? There are spawn rates on the various animals which are placed in Stronghold 2 by default, but I'm not sure what exactly they are offhand. It could also be a bug or by design since this was originally a Firefly created map. WHat might work as well is if you were to delete the Wolves and then re-add only the ones you want which should remove any custom logic added by Firefly.

When I was referring to an outdated V, I was referring to one that you may have used in the past and then continued using it for so than just within the past few weeks. Or perhaps one you have downloaded for instance. I must say I'm slightly confused as your original message was not clear. Are you are to provide a list of files you're trying to make into the .v, or better still - a video demonstrating what it is you're doing? It sounds as though you're doing a mixture of things and if you can explain a bit more clearly I think that will help.

One thing which may cause the crashing issue is if you are using a .v file from an older version of the game - this is a known issue. SInce a lot of the files are archived inside the .v, every time the game changes, changes are made in here as well. You'll want to make sure you are using the latest version. With the FSB files we do actually have a tool in the downloads section which allows you to convert these. It was made for Stronghold 3 but works on Crusader 2 and Warlords as well: https://www.stronghold-nation.com/downloads/file/629-fsb-audio-extractor/ We also have a tutorial available describing how to use it here: https://www.stronghold-nation.com/article/157-extracting-audio-assets-from-stronghold-3

Just confirming I replied to @ Asophix 's PM. I'm moving this thread to Stronghold Legends so it better reflects the theme of the thread. Thanks for reaching out - and welcome to the Nation! 🙂

Welcome to the forums! 😃 You should probably enable debug mode in Warlords - this is something you should always have enabled if you're playing around with the game files because it will alert you to any programming problems. It is possible that when you've changed the values, it could be causing some kind of mathematical programming error but because the game is handling it and error reporting is off, you don't know about it. To do this, locate the config.xml file in the bin/win32_release folder, and replace 0 with 1 on the following lines: <errordialog enabled=0 /> <!-- Enable/disable pop-up error/warning dialog. --> <onscreenprint enabled=0 /> <!-- Enable/disable drawing Vision::Message.Add() messages --> When you restart the game you should be notified if anything fails. If all you've changed is a certain value, it sounds as if it's reaching an upper limit the game can't exceed. Either that or the .v file itself is corrupt, which can happen sometimes if the instructions aren't followed carefully. The following guide is for Stronghold 3 but works just the same on Warlords, this is the correct way to do things: https://www.stronghold-nation.com/article/195-unarchiving-stronghold-3-files

The files change with each version so yes, you can only use the files from the current version of the game. I noticed this before a few years ago both with Crusader 2 and Stronghold 3 (as both use the same engine). Warlords is also the same as well. I'm pleased you managed to fix it, and welcome to the forum! 🙂

Sorry for the slow reply here - but I'd definitely be interested in a game sometime. My steam username is shnlordchris.

That's interesting I didn't know Firefly made an SH3 version for Linux. That's quite an unexpected thing for them to do that I'm surprised at to be honest. Linux is a totally different market to Windows with a totally different audience which personally I wouldn't have expected it to have taken off on. The one good thing about Legends is the use of Dragons and magical units - I always find they really help! But they can also be really powerful and often overpower other units as well. Yeah you're correct Arthur's Challenge was only available to the Gold version owners prior to Legends coming to Steam. Personally I think it's a nice addition to the game and I've only completed it since then. I'm now in the fortunate position of being able to say I've completed all trails and missions in Stronghold Legends. Some of them were pretty tough too. I think it would be nice to be able to create your own Skirmish trails - maybe a future modding potential 😄

I was going to suggest Wine actually when I first saw the title of this topic 😄 I haven't used it on SH2 personally, but I have heard it's very compatible with it. Offhand I think all Stronghold games are. I'm surprised and impressed at the amount of games that Wine will run, even very obscure ones, with hardly no issues. The problem is that Microsoft is a (shady) Corporation and has commercialised everything when everything Microsoft provides has been done better and in a more powerful, open, secure way previously. Just like the drivers for instance. Microsoft want a monopoly on the drivers because it forces people to comply with them and forces everyone to work around Microsoft. Hence increasing revenue etc because everyone always has to upgrade. There is actually an argument that Microsoft and Windows never should have taken off. It's built wrongly, it's not secure, hogs resources and it was deliberately done differently from perfectly acceptable existing solutions. It's interesting how all other major operating systems are based on Unix, even Apple Macs, and they are commercialised. The only reason Windows is as big as it is today, is because they did a deal with IBM to get Windows in as a default operating system on machines. To be honest it's so shady as to whether that was even legal it's unbelievable. The same is true with most Microsoft products to be honest, but that's probably for another thread 😅