EaglePrince

Sure, I will submit later. Now I need to study for my exam, but I would submit it some time later when I would make a rest. :) That's great to hear! What do you think, should I submit those new maps as 1.5, or 1.4.1? I mean, they were created before announcing 1.5, and it is possible that they were indeed created by 1.4.1. And not to discourage somebody from downloading them. :D Speaking of announcements. :) https://video.twimg.com/tweet_video/DLcyTA4X4AEFtci.mp4 And below of the text is a gif from Stronghold 2 stone keep which I also posted here with a link. :) But they still need to work on Steam Edition though. I have tried it, but I haven't played it much actually. My mom does however, and I do have a look now and then at how everything looks. :D There are some bugs with graphics, which I think I mentioned. Ballistae being invisible, one can only see the wheels and engineers, but it's invisible only until it fires. Also that colored thing on knights helmet, I don't know how it is called in English. (Crusader, sorry for disappointing you. :( ) When you zoom in, it's metallic, not colored. Some people also have some troubles with the multiplayer lobby, but they are able to play the game. And so many people are asking for AI lords in multiplayer! I hope Firefly will work on that too, but I don't hope for much. :( It would be so good if we were able to play against AI just like in Crusader. :( Stronghold 2 is awesome for playing against AI lords, especially with improved castle layouts, and it's so disappointing that we don't have that.

Here are some new maps that were added by Firefly. I hope they would work on version 1.4.1. :) I'd say they will most likely work on 1.4.1. Those are four kingmaker maps, and five castle builder maps. https://1drv.ms/u/s!AtpOTZgUTcPPhJx0TgIqgdsHgxHxPQ About these new kingmaker maps. Arena Kings is really well designed. This map is a perfectly balanced 8 player map. The downside of the map to many would be the fact that it has only eight small castle estates, and large neutral territory, though some would say this is a good thing for players not being able to build their castle structures too close to each other. Plus, if there are less than eight players, then those estates would be villages, and even if there are eight players... Well, then everybody is motivated to turn the neighbors castle into his village. :p This one is the most interesting to me, and it resembles to those from Stronghold Crusader such as Close Encounters. Strong and Stable. An interesting map, not a balanced one, with many small castle estates and village estates, and a lot of neutral territory. Two Pronged Crown. This one is an interesting map with six castle estates, and several village estates. Three castle estates are on one corner together, and the other three symmetrically in the other. Really good for 1v1 games, but also it might be very interesting for team matches, such as 2v2, 1v2, 1v3, you name it. In fact, it might be perfect for games when one player is much more skilled than the others, so here are those less skilled put close to each other, so they can face the storm together. :) White bear. Also an interesting map. This one resembles to Stronghold Crusader 2 style. Three castle estates and three village estates, divided by a river, which can be crossed by three bridges. I think they marked it as balanced, but it is not actually. Not balanced map for 1v1v1, but it could be an interesting map for 1v2 though. With Chris's approval I would submit those as a pack to our downloads section.

Yes, you are correct, for population differences it is most likely impossible to play a game with different versions. Regarding getting SH2 SE, I think it might be the best option to buy the Stronghold Collection for 20 bugs, or less on a discount. Oh, and by the way, the exact designation of the version is "1.5 Steam". Until I post few screenshots, here's a gameplay video with 4K resolution.

Stronghold 2 Steam Edition has been released today. Now I have seen that the population limit of a castle estate has been increased to 136. I was hoping for more. What Nigel and I also noticed is that the Steam Edition doesn't work with GameRanger anymore. It starts the game, but it doesn't open the new game room, nor it joins the game room in case somebody else is the host. Maybe that's going to change, but I don't lay my hopes into that. Graphics look nice, and now we can play it in higher resolutions. I can say it is very enjoyable to play it in 1920x1080. I haven't played it though, but I just tried it. I have a lot of work right now, so playing has to wait for at least one more week. But it is so uncool that Steam Edition players cannot play with CD version players. If that is going to be the case, I'll have to use have two installations of the same game on my PC. We'll see. I hope I'll be able to post few screenshots these days, or perhaps even a short gameplay video, that would be cool. EDIT: Few more words. The current game version of the Steam Edition is 1.5. What would be smart to check is whether the maps created with 1.5 work on 1.4.1. I hope they do. There is also a new icon. I'm submitting it to the downloads section, so those who don't have the Steam Edition could use it. :) Oh, and what bugs me now is that they changed moving units from left click to right click. Now you use right click to move them around.

What matters is that we understand each other. :D

Welcome to Stronghold Nation. That this has been bothering for a long time, and I was experimenting with many things, but I never managed to find out how to do it. If there is a way, I would like to hear it as well. But maybe that trick with saving the map, starting a skirmish game on it, saving, changing .sav extension to .map, and then loading again could do the trick? But in that case you wouldn't get a skirmish map, but a scenario, though maybe that could be changed as well by changing the map type. There is a shortcut for that. Here are those hotkeys. http://stronghold.heavengames.com/gameinfo/shortcuts Apparently the combination for changing the map type from scenario to skirmish, and vice versa, would be [Alt & ,]. Just a blind guess. If I wanted to experiment a little bit further in order to find out how to do it, this is what I would try. The issue here would be how to make the map forget the player who had started that skirmish game on that position, and hopefully this could work. But I don't lay my hopes into this. PS. The building you're talking about is called keep. ;) Some also call it donjon, but in the game they call it keep. :)

Good news, everyone! Stronghold 2 Steam Edition is going to be released on October 5th. They told us few things in this video regarding this topic. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PCV7rwnaWwY For me the best thing that is coming is larger population. I think that's something many of us will love, especially Chris. :D Besides that, they'll give us some new maps made by Firefly. I hope those of us who will get it will be able to share this maps with the rest of the community, and without breaking some community rules. By that I mean - I would be willing to share these maps with you guys, if that is going to be possible. Though I hardly believe they can be better than all those maps made by our legends or map making, such as Lord Vetka, and many others. Also, we Steam Achievements would be introduced, and Steam Multiplayer, which should be really cool stuff for many. Regarding our wish for AI lords multiplayer games, it appears not to be coming with the release in October. This is their reply in the comments. Hopefully they'll bring it us some day soon. I did write them a comment of my own, but I don't know if they are going to listen, or reply to that question. Well, just another begging to give us AI in multiplayer. Besides that, I also asked them to bring 600x600 maps to Stronghold Crusader, because now we have three versions of Crusader which are not compatible, so the community is even more diversified - into 1.1 and 1.2, and 1.3, and 1.4. So three separate groups of players who can't play with each other. If they want to change it, and I think they should, they should bring something really cool into the new SHC patch, so that everybody would just give up these older versions of the game. Back to Stronghold 2... I wish they added Doomsword's and mine castles. Mine for the two large Williams castles, and Doomsword's for the rest. The game would be much more interesting, as their economies would be way way better, and is also important - William wouldn't have an error in his castle's design allowing his enemies to simply run into the castle through two of his towers.

Now I remembered the latest patch still hasn't been approved... :)

Indeed. And even if it was overcomplicated to many, they could have simply removed these things such as crime, and made earning honor simpler - like in Stronghold 3, and kept all these cool things such as melee fights inside towers. Too bad that they simplified that even in Stronghold Legends. Stairways and towers in Stronghold 2 are the best, while in Stronghold Legends stairways are the worst. It would be much better of troops weren't able to climb up those stairs so quickly though.

I don't know, I just think that we are happy that none if us wanted to misuse them actually. Imagine the situation for example where you send your knights to deal with a group of swordsmen, and then suddenly the opponent makes few if those, and deal a significant damage to your knights which are no longer able to ride. I think this is simply another mistake by Firefly, just like with those portable shields in Crusader which they combine with horse archers making an unstoppable unit. Not even crossbowmen in your towers can defeat them. As you might remember, I did learn how to fight like that, but I see no fun in that. Among other reasons - it's not the way it was meant to be played. In my opinion horse archers + portable shields are simply a game exploit, and I don't want our games to turn into a battle "who knows more exploits". And the thing with burning carts is in my opinion an exploit as well. They just run and spread fire. On what? On green grass? On dirt? That's horses**t. :D I don't thing they had gasoline back than, or napalm, or something like that. :D

Oh, yeah, I didn't notice that on the screenshot at first, Mathew. :D Yes, obviously if you wanted to, you could have sent them in huge numbers, and there is no way I could save my village from that without sacrificing too much valuable troops. That would clearly be misusing them in my opinion, but not something that couldn't be countered actually. With light cavalry, horse archers, and archers. I mean, playing like that would force us to use not only knights, but to include less expensive troops as well. But like I said, it's open to discussion. But that is for another thread. We have a thread for Stronghold 2 multiplayer rules here in the Gaming Events subforum. https://forums.stronghold-nation.com/topic/224-stronghold-2-multiplayer-rules/ The burning carts trick is listed there as well. "No intentional, consistent use of burning carts" By this we meant no intentional use of burning carts for attacking enemy army, while their consistent use for burning enemy villages like Caliph would do is allowed. You see, maybe this is an issue which could be solved by Firefly actually. Burning carts can attack enemy troops. Maybe they shouldn't allow this, burning carts should only be able to attack buildings, and not troops. Troops should only be collateral damage here. :) What are your thought about this matter? Reply to me in this thread. :) https://forums.stronghold-nation.com/topic/224-stronghold-2-multiplayer-rules/

I don't get it what you mean by "naive :P ", Mathew? :) Nigel, it is easy now after the game to tell some observations. :P We can look at that game as a play-test for some future multiplayer scenarios. :) I'm here for any type of game, balanced, unbalanced, whatever. But both teams need to have something which goes into their favor. One team had something, the other had something else. Why not. :) Or it could be a completely unbalanced map on which one teams only advantage would be the number of players. :P

I totally agree! We're used to playing Stronghold 2 with huge castle estates, but trying to do our best on small castle estates could be something interesting. We would have to make a compromise, and I guess most of us would sacrifice castle production for having lords kitchen, church, jousting ground, stables, etc. But this is Stronghold Crusader subforum, so we should refrain from keeping our conversation about Stronghold 2 here, but rather open another thread in Stronghold 2 subforum. :)

Oh, but about the Saxon fort... I think that my suggestion still holds, but there's another one as well. :) First, now when we look at the map, and the way how we were positioned, there was actually not other way, but to attack the castle first. The castle is in between. So maybe it would be better if the castle and the two armies formed a triangle? The other things is that, not only the castle was weak, but wooden walls are so weak, that we could have actually destroyed it really easily. That is why I think stone walls would have been better. But in this case players would need to have one or few catapults in additions to laddermen. I would give one catapult to each player. Oh, and this thing - the game wasn't balanced like this. :) You can see that we were able to climb on the stone barracks more easily than you, and that gave us an advantage. But that is no big deal to fix - just move the barracks to be more between the armies. You could also add an engineers guild at the opposite side of the fort, as well. To make it more interesting. And in the middle I might try to put a square tower with a ballista. Yup, this is a cruel one. :D Regarding the castle walls, it would have no towers, or maybe few small lookout towers. ADDITION: Yup, I made a mistake. It weren't barracks, but courthouse. Looking forward to see the monastery. :)

I have another idea for a map like this. Almost the same, but with bandit camps in the middle, so that players would have to break through the outlaws in order to reach to each other. Maybe that could be done by editing this map. Just replace one river with two rivers between which would be bandits, and move the castle estates closer to the edge of the map to make more space for bandit camps. Another interesting thing for making the ambient more interesting might be to make marshes between the two rivers, so that bandits would be inside that marshy forests. I don't know what I would do with those bandits on the cliffs though. Maybe move them into the middle of the cliff. With a map like this we could make rules to start attacking each other after somebody breaks through the outlaws camps. Or in other words, we would have no peace time, but only time until we are able to start attacking. :P Or, we could simply play as we used to play. :P Oh, and Charles. You were using burning carts to attack our army. That is something that we were discussing before that we shouldn't use it, because it is unrealistic, and it can devastate slow troops such as swordsmen. I mean, I would definitely approve it if it was used to attack some buildings, and if I have some troops between those burned buildings, then it does make sense for my troops to burn. :D But I would leave to others to discuss it. I should note that burning charts are easily countered by archers, and by some fast melee units (in which case it would be smart not to send many soldiers to destroy the carts, but only few of them, because they will be caught by fire.)

I shall be the first one to write the battle report. :) But before that, I would like to remind you that Stronghold 3 actually has four types of multiplayer games. That is Deathmatch, which is a standard multiplayer game, King of the Hill, Capture the Flag, and Coronation. I'm not entirely sure how do the later three work, but we could try them some day if you want. Or maybe even Crusader 2 has these types of multiplayer games? Still, I do admit, even though Stronghold 3 seems a lot interesting, it is questionable how would it work in multiplayer game, it is possible that the game would lag to some of us, which would be an issue, Now back to the topic. When it comes to the first one - the field battle, it was quite enjoying, but we had that lag, and somehow I feel that my team won by pure luck, only because the other team wasn't able to control their units properly. We don't know how did we get that lag, but perhaps it simply happened... What would be more interesting would be to try to play a similar scenario, but with a stone castle. In this one the defender had little troops, and only wooden walls which didn't help him much. But don't take me wrong, it that was quite fun, I'm just giving some suggestions for future events! And now the regular game. I started the game as usually, but at the same moment when I became knight, and when I wanted to start bow production, outlaws attacked me in large numbers. I was trying to deal with the situation myself, and somehow I didn't ask Mathew to come to my aid. Somehow I assume that he didn't have any troops to help me, but when I saw his archers coming to help me I was so much revealed! Outlaws cripples my economy, and destroyed my granary, so I needed to start over with almost everything, but luckily I had enough wood, and of course - I was a knight already, so that was very helpful. I walled myself, and started over. For a long time I was much weaker than others, and I saw that my only chance was to use the other villages to boost my economy, so as soon as I was able to train about 25 swordsmen, I sent a unit these swordsmen and about 30 archers to deal with outlaws. Before that I had already taken the village close to me, so I could produce more food there, and more iron, but I saw that the outlaws were attacking these villagers from the cliffs. There was no time to wait with destroying their camps. The campaign was successful, although I needed to sent reinforcements consisting of another 30 archers. It was a tough mission for these swordsmen and archers! In the end they marched back into the village, wounded, but proud! After this mission, I decided not to disband the garrison in the south of the village, because somebody from the other team could use the path over the cliffs to deliver a surprise attack. Then I got my second village which was to the west of my castle, and there I started production of candles and cloths, while I decided to buy fancy food for the lords kitchen. After some time I became a duke, and I was able to train knights. Mathew and Chris became dukes before me, and I think Charles did as well (though he was using swordsmen some time later, but seemed to me that it was simply his decision - to mass-produce swordsmen instead of training knights), but later it turned out that my decision to buy these neighboring villages was good. Soon I caught up with Chris and Charles. I started some fights with Chris and Charles now, and at the moment they started to push me from the river Mathew decided to attack! He attacked in two directions - to north, where Nigel was, and to south, where I was pushed by Chris and Charles. I joined his troops in south, and that was hell of a bloodshed. In the end Mathews and my troops won the fight, and we wanted to look how to attack Chris. Now here comes my stupidity. :D I thought that I needed to kill Chris, and that taking his castle wasn't enough. Assuming his lord isn't in his castle I didn't decide to catapult the walls, and to enter his keep, but instead I decided to rush onto his walls, attack his economy with archers, and later to continue destroying it with knights. Then Nigel came as well, and by that time Chris' knights were already inside the keep. We made a hole in his castle walls, and then we rushed into his keep. I was surprised when I was Chris' castle collapse, I didn't expect to defeat him like that. Too much of Stronghold Crusader I guess. :P Then we continued to push Charles and Nigel. We were careful with Charles as we assumed that he most likely had traps inside his castle. At some moment I noticed that I can send my knight, who by this time had their horses (which they previously lost during the previously mentioned bloodshed), though Charles castle into Nigel's castle. They didn't make a wall between each other on the hill. When my knights came to Nigel's keep Mathews troops broke through his walls as well, and then we managed to kill his lord. Later we regrouped in front of Charles castle, and at some moment we just rushed into his keep. We had a lot of fight there, he was waiting for us with crossbowmen and axe throwers inside together with his knights. But we managed to brake through, and to get to his lord, and win the war. :) This was very interesting game! We could play it again on that same map, and I believe that it wouldn't be less fun. Now we would only be prepared better to deal with bandits. Damn, now when I think about it... I could have bought bows and trained archers myself, that would have worked as well. :D I just forgot about it. :D

Hey, guys. As you have noticed, Firefly has been a little more active on YouTube these days, so I decided to make this thread, as some of the videos are not related to any of their games in particular. So here we go with the newest one. FIREFLY STUDIOS COMMUNITY Q&A Too bad they didn't decide to answer these questions from YouTube comments, but they were only replying to some questions from Facebook. But they do answer some of our questions in the comments, that's something as well. :) In one of replies at YouTube I suggested them to update their AI castles with the ones made by Doomsword, and to update the two Williams castles with the two castles of mine. These changes would make the game a lot more fun!

By the way, I did submit the patch for Crusader yesterday, and it appears that everything went well. I think it only needs to be approved now. :)

Multiplayer games in Stronghold 1 are great too! For example, that's the only Stronghold game in which you can make allies in a multiplayer game. That's an awesome thing if you play the game with the right company, such as the one from here. ;)

I think most of us here would prefer missions, but is it possible to easily make both? By changing map types, or somehow like that? Oh, yeah, but you can make it a "free build" by giving some insane goal, and by removing all events... That could work as well. :)

Hmm, I don't know when did you try to play Stronghold 2, but if it was years and years ago, the version 1.4.1 is far better than the older ones. I used to play the version 1.0 for years because I didn't have internet, and I didn't even know that there were patches available to download from internet. :P If I knew, I would begged somebody who had internet to download it for me. :D The 1.0 version was bad for me, it had some bugs which which effected the gameplay a lot (such as having several criminals stuck in the court house, which I mentioned earlier), and some very much needed features were missing such as no easy way to separate mounted from unmounted knights. But even that didn't stop me from playing it. :P Later I came to enjoy Stronghold 2 much more, especially after playing it on some really beautiful and well designed custom maps, and some really great scenarios! Indeed, Firefly should have employed some of these people to make maps for them. It's so lame that they haven't. (As far as I know, they haven't.) But in general - Stronghold Crusader and Stronghold 1 are the best Stronghold games. Too bad Firefly never tried to revamp these two (with their warfare and castle defenses) in 3D, and with unit collision. That way we would have epic field battles, and you wouldn't be able to pass somebodies troops by clicking fast. :)

Sure, I'll do it later today, now I'm not home. :)

I think CET and BST are not the same. I'm posting this at 18:38, while I think it's 17:38 in Britain, and what I believe is that we're going to play in 22 minutes. :)

Actually, what you approved is Stronghold Crusader Extreme patch, and that's the one which worked smoothly, and Stronghold HD which I apparently uploaded the first time I tried, but I didn't know it because of the first error message. That's just my guess. The Extreme patch is 54 MB, the Stronghold patch is 108 MB, and the lastly the Crusader patch is 142 MB. That is why I cannot submit it then. It gave me no error message, it just returned me to the blank "Stronghold Crusader submit file" page. I could the zip archive though, and submit the two parts separately? But that may not be the perfect solution.

Did you get any notifications for the Crusader patch now? It again acted somewhat weird, it was submitting the file, and then it just returned me to the blank "Submit Stronghold Crusader File" page. :/ EDIT: Stronghold Crusader Extreme HD 1.3 patch has been successfully submitted. Now I'm trying again with Stronghold Crusader HD 1.3 patch, just in case.