Asophix

After some lull, a new version for the Crusader DE will be released on the 28th (as teased by Udwin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bPVD87qdGdI). Much like previous releases, it will be available for a limited time only. Above all, it will feature a preview of a Sands of Time mission that is played on a bigger map and with more opponents. There will also be a limited Custom Skirmish mode with a modest pool of two maps, a reduced selection of AI bots and the option to turn on the magic bar from Crusader Extreme. Bedouin troops will also be available for recruitment.

That much is true. In my experience, Merlin has a high risk, medium reward type of play that shines in very niche cases. His autoattack is kinda good at dismantling siege equipment concentrations, but struggles against sturdier engines and armor. His Dragon's Breath is very hard to set up, since it has a lengthy animation and it does not one-hit-kill the Ice Queen or the Sorcerer. Merlin is rather defensive due to this, as an enemy watching him move about would definitely deploy their own special units or rush Merlin down before his ability could connect. Galahad is also undoubtedly useful with his heals. Combo'd with Gawain's dome or just pulling back masses of units to heal and re-engage is perhaps the two use-cases I can think of for him. Due to his ability being a heal, serving no other purpose, he is good but not as a first or second Royal Table unit. I used Lancelot on a few occasions. When armies of equal size clash and there is little foreseeable ability play, Lancelot can straight up buff your army so much that your soldiers look absolutely ripped powerhouses. Lancelot helps you being cost-effective at a well-timed engagement, which can help you gain or keep up momentum on a given battlefront.

Okay, this is really interesting because I have never seen this in my all life, yet here we stand. 😄 Your discovery is something really amazing. I'm going into a little bit of detail: Legends has similar specialized unit groups. There are less categories, but it's also much more simple than a Crusader siege AI. All variables aren't known yet, but enough of them are that they could be altered (I can share details a bit later). There are the usual groups. Notable differences from Crusader: There is only one sortie group which goes to the last destroyed building's location. Most of the time these are almost non-existent due to small sizes and being comprised of small troops. Troop pools are reactive ranged defenders, who can take the place of fallen primary ranged defenders. They are more like a reserve ranged force. There are up to 8 raid groups that the AI can deterministically send to enemy estates. Catapults/stake hurlers/bats/dragons go explicitly to player home estates, while others may go take villages. There is a dedicated 9th raid group which can be considered a death wave targeting exclusively players. This seems to be created once the AI has lots of gold. Most AI recruit 50 archers for this. Siege attacks have three unit groups that behave slightly differently from each other. There are two wave groups and a ranged group, moreover almost each siege engine type and Royal Table knight has a count. The AI doesn't seem to cheat here, e.g. it recruits as many siege engines as it can, then it ceases once it runs out of gold. The AI controls the siege and the units by itself deterministically, the definition has no control over it. Legends AI has known sell limits only. Buy limits are not yet figured out (there must be something as Arthur buys one single iron, while other AI don't). For the granary, minimum stocks are bought (up 10 each as far as I'm concerned). The pantry is bought royal food only if the AI lacks honor (and only of the type it produces). Weapons are bought up to 5 per type, based on the barracks troops used by the AI. Once the need arises for it, the equipment is always bought. Dietrich recruits 2(!) swordsmen as a sortie group, independently of any faction. He also has a bug with his trading behaviour, as he is set to sell all armour and swords. This works against the buy engine, resulting in Dietrich constantly selling his bought armor and swords. Depending on the recruitment cycle, Dietrich may or may not recruit the swordsmen in any given game (50% chance).

Hi! We are glad you like our articles! Lancelot himself doesn't recruit macemen (he's limited to archers, men-at-arms and swordsmen, as well as knight summons), and I don't think he did back then either. It's more likely that he started with some of them due to starting settings. To be fair, I don't know at all how the AI handles their starting troops. Most of the time they are used to patrol the outlying buildings, nonetheless it's possible that some of them were grabbed to form a siege force. The Legends AI has simple definitions that define three dedicated teams for sieges - and many other purposes really -, composed of a single unit type each, as well as an ever increasing minimum troop limit for a siege force. Lancelot launches siege attacks with very small armies, so it is very likely he just swiftly grabbed a few of his starting macemen and sent them to attack. To verify the above assumption, try playing with little to no starting troops and random events off (just to eliminate the possibility of getting troops though events). Lancelot should never lay his hands on macemen, just the three mainline troops mentioned.

The Definitive Edition demo is again available for a limited time, until the 13th of April! 🙂 Version and functionalities are unchanged since the last open beta.

Hi All! As it's well known, Stronghold Legends allows you to play one out of three different factions, each of which comes with slightly altered building and troop availability. While ideally all factions' individual strengths and weaknesses balance each other out, there has been a skew towards Ice and Evil in most multiplayer matches, in terms of player picks. Why could it happen? As an experienced Arthur player, allow me to shed light on this phenomenon, while also providing some insights in how the faction is designed to work, and whether it works out in common scenarios, or not. Let's start with Arthur's design points: Full economic liberty. You can have all four granary and royal food types without restrictions, while Ice and Evil can get only 3 of either type. This is most significant early on, when a map has few estates to hold and statues are not abundant yet. It helps climb the first few ranks faster, but any extra honor is always welcome (potentially 4 extra honor from the granary and 1 from the pantry). Wider array of unit abilities. This is about being able to field up to 7 special units with abilities, bringing more potential and flexibility to the battlefield. Your Lord also boasts the strongest summons, a whopping four mounted knights, making for a really good makeshift response force. This comes at the cost of not being able to mass your special troops, unlike Ice and Evil, restricting you to mainly barracks and unwieldy siege engine play. While trebuchets are good at long-range bombardment, enchanted orbs don't usually get used. Evidence suggests that this point is more often a disadvantage than not. Abilities are mostly designed with large fights in mind, rather than for quick timing attacks or punishing weaknesses. The problem of ability-centered play: your power to dominate big battles comes at the cost of sacrificing your map control and utility. And in Legends there are not many big battles. Many times, as Arthur you are locked in on recruiting barracks troops, while carefully deciding on ranking up and bringing in the first and then the second Royal Knight. Since all of your special troops are insanely expensive (ranging from 100 to 200 honor and a bunch of gold at times), you need to be extra mindful, or you will end up with an underwhelming unit in shining armor. Abilities make or break Arthur. Without abilities, your knights are not any better than a regular knight. If your opponent baits out your Percival's blast, or Gawain's shield, more often than not you need to give up ground because the enemy just comes in with their own special troops ready to fight. What Ice and Evil get instead of heavy abilities, are increased flexibility and utility. This comes in three forms: Abundance of flying units. Mobility is key in any RTS game, and Legends is no exception. The ability to traverse terrain unhampered, while most of the ground units can't shoot back, is particularly valuable, forcing the enemy to divert precious time and resources to clean them up or tackle them. White Witches (Ice) are nimble ranged fliers that can effectively get through unguarded castle walls, and punish concentrations of troops without archers or crossbowmen. Demonic Bats (Evil) are unrivaled disruptors, easily evading anti-air fire, while also severely damaging lighter troops and knocking them off elevations. Structure breaker units (Ice). Most sturdier Ice troops - Polar Bear, Giant, Dwarf - can attack stone walls, gatehouses and towers. Sending a squad of such troops undetected can create breaches in a lightly fortified section of the enemy castle, running rampant in the enemy domain. This is most notably effective with Frost Giants, who have very large health and take a lot of time to kill. Climbing units (Evil). The Demon and the Vampiric Creeper can jump on top of walls and gatehouses. While less effective in a direct attack, a surprise maneuver can result in a successful intrusion. Demons are built to spread fire in their weak, while creepers can convert groups of ranged defenders on vulnerable locations. The first point particularly holds true on larger maps and with difficult terrain present, such as swamps or mountains. With Arthur, you get no choice but to attack on land only, and when forced to defend against swarms of Bats, there may not be enough room to spread all your troops or have Gawain's ability at the ready. Even if your Heavenly Shield is being active (it can stay like that until Gawain moves, and for a long time at that!), you effectively lock your army formation in place and provide ample time for your opponent to fight battles elsewhere. Last, but not least, let's see some tips I recommend for playing Arthur: Buy all foods in the beginning of low rank games. When starting a new game, you have the best option out of all factions to rank up quickly. All 4 food types provide you 12 honor / month, opposed to the 8 of Ice and Evil. Use this advantage to get ahead in the ranks and potentially field better troops against your opponents. Always use the Green Dragon. Drogon is your only flying unit and your main way of erasing chunks of the enemy economy, or defense. Even though his creation is announced way too early, its combat potential is unmatched. You can command him to attack a ground target, then quickly move him to a different point as soon as the fire animation plays. Forcing the enemy to build lines of towers, harpoons and wells is well worth it. Percival is the playmaker of your army. When facing large enemy formations, the danger of Holy Blast always looms on the horizon. Due to an oversight, Percival's ability works on elevated targets too when targeting the ground. The outward explosions can liberate an area of troops, be it a concentration of towers or a ground army. You should always enlist Percival first due to this very reason, unless situations dictate otherwise. Gawain's shield works against Bats. This may solidify Gawain as an S tier unit when playing against Evil. Gawain's ability protects against not only ranged attacks coming from outside, but also absorbs divebombing Bats without triggering their explosion. While this only works in a small area, in a well-chosen location it can mean the difference between life and death. Pair with Galahad to safely refill your troops' health. Hope you enjoyed this article and helped you understand the Good faction a little better!

Okay, so I checked the screenshots thoroughly and it seems like the majority of the problems comes from wrongly shifted buildings. I agree that editing is not the easiest, because buildings screenshots weren't done from the same angle & distance. My takeaways: Keep appears 1 tile above its real position (size is correct, you couldn't build the walls occupying its bottom row footprint) Gatehouse appears 1 tile below its real position Armoury is 1 tile narrower than in reality (also smaller by half a tile's size) The rally points should work properly. It looks like that rally points have a slight inaccuracy when the AI parses them in-game, so a point added on top of a basic or lookout tower may end up shifted, centering it on the ground instead of placing it on the tower. You could try ticking the 'elevated' property for the rally point in order to affect AI placement, when you want it to be placed on top of a structure. The keep rotation also seemed to not affect building placement. There may be certain cases when an AIC goes corrupt: please if you can reproduce such situations, don't hesitate to detail them here! I'll need some more time to test out a few scenarios and update the utility here on SHN.

@ EaglePrince It's your time to shine now, the Demo is re-enabled! Saving and loading is still not available though, so prepare accordingly.

To my knowledge, there are no community utilities like that. Secondly, your question is too generic. SH2 / Legends has active logic bundled in its .exe game binary and assorted .dll files. Input files (like gamerules.dat) have no active logic, they are consumed by the game during its lifetime. From the ground up you have no other choice, but to reverse engineer the game binaries and see for yourself. Ghidra can be used to conduct analysis and restore some of the C++ code in pseudo-format, if you are tech savvy. Cheat Engine may be useful for active memory monitoring.

Greetings! Lately, @ Lord_Chris and me @ Asophix of the Stronghold Nation staff has started testing our mettle in Stronghold Legends again. Be it a friendly spar, or a true test of weapons and skill against wanderers on the Internet, we gladly invite everyone to our hearth! We frequently play both in an organized manner on Steam, via the in-game lobby system. Generally we prefer 10min peace time matches with low starting rank, low resources and no building or troop restrictions. We also record some of our matches and upload them on SHN's humble YouTube Channel! If you would like to play with us, hit us up here anytime!

In previous Stronghold entries, weapon workshops are a cornerstone of a steady industry, sparing money in the long run. As it is well-known, workshops pay for themselves by using much cheaper resources from your stockpile. Legends is the first Stronghold game toying with the idea of expensive buildings. The game tried to promote a much slower development to slow down industrial output, therefore putting a dent into workshop accessibility. How has this affected overall trends? Workshops in SHL cost uniformly 50 wood - barely 4 woodcutter trips - and a variable amount of gold. Moreover, they also produce at different paces (fast is roughly 1.5x speed, slow is 0.5x - 0.66x compared to normal speed) and every one of them delivers one unit. The workshops have the following statistics: Poleturner (costs 150 gold, wood included): Spears: requiring 1 wood (2g), one spear (10g) brings +8g profit. Would cost 15g if bought. Fast production speed. Pays for itself after 11 cycles. Pikes: requiring 1 wood (2g), one pike (18g) brings +16g profit. Would cost 20g if bought. Average production speed. Pays for itself after 6 cycles. Fletcher (costs 250 gold, wood included): Bows + crossbows: requiring 1 wood (2g), one weapon (15g) brings +13g profit. Would cost 30g if bought. Pays for itself after 17 cycles. Bows are produced at average speed, while crossbows are made slowly. Blacksmith (costs 300 gold, wood included): Swords: requiring 1 iron (50g), one sword (42g) brings -8g profit. Would cost 48g if bought. Average production speed. Does not pay for itself! If iron is not bought, then pays for itself after 151 cycles (breaking even in 150). Maces: requiring 1 iron (50g), one mace (42g) brings -8g profit. Would cost 44g if bought. Slower production speed. Does not pay for itself! If iron is not bought, then pays for itself after 151 cycles (breaking even in 150). Armorer (costs 250 gold, wood included): Requiring 1 iron (50g), one plate armor (44g) brings -6g profit. Would cost 50g if bought. Slow production speed. Does not pay for itself! If iron is not bought, then pays for itself after 43 cycles. Tanner (costs 150 gold, wood included): Requiring nothing(!), one leather armor brings +12g profit. Would cost 15g if bought. Fast production speed. Pays for itself after 11 cycles (breaking even in 10). Without factoring in distance from the stockpile and armoury each, we can clearly see that tanners and poleturners give the biggest return of investment over time, if their required material is supplied from the market. Tanners are the best choice for pure profit, since they don't require anything. The key takeaway is that refining iron into equipment yields very negligible profit. Iron sells for 40g apiece, therefore the blacksmith/armorer must operate for an excruciatingly long period in order to pay for itself. The final nail in the coffin for ironmakers is the vast selling price of iron. Selling for 40g apiece, the loss on buying up metal equipment ranges from 4g to 10g. These marginal differences eliminate the large need for our smithies. While tanners are far from the most ideal income generators, it is most wise to build them if all deposits are saturated and space is limited, as food production vastly outclasses them. TL;DR: if you are forced into workshops, build tanners and maybe poleturners creating spears, otherwise ignore workshops if you can't place iron mines! 😄

I also gave a go for the 'Hard' skirmish mission and finished it in one sitting. Firefly designed the map in a really clever way: you get a naturally defensible position, but horrible economic prospects and the tech limitation also forces you to play the slow game, unless you are creative 😄 The enemies can also get on your nerves pretty fast with the sheer number of shock troops sent at you. There is only one mission available for the trail so don't fret if you missed anything! You can build an almost foolproof defense if you manage to build the iron and weapons industry. Some tips for the boring strategy: Spoiler You only need to seal off your side of the ford with a lookout tower, a small gate and minimal walling. The starting troops can finish their work just in time before the first attack waves. Feed your peasants ale, not food. One hops farm on the oasis can supply two inns and four, maybe five breweries, eventually maxing out at 58 population. Ignore Fuzzy Wuzzy's advice and remove the forest asap to afford buildings. Wood is affordable once you have stable income from the iron mines. Build three fletchers making crossbows and buy the leather necessary. While crossbowmen won't get the first hit in, skirmishers take two bolts, much like Arabian archers. A line of towers packed with xbows, overlooking the river will slow down quarry operations. Add a few archers mainly to snipe quarrymen and ox hitchers as the Nomads drench you in skirmishers. Build swordsmen as your main force. They steamroll the Nomads and with luck, the Sentinel too, when supported by a tower. Also, some information about the two enemies you face: Spoiler The Nomad Introductory-level enemy who likes his Bedouin troops. He is a mixture of the Snake and the Sultan, being more annoying than menacing. His castle is more like a camp. Only walls with gaps in them, no moat, no towers, no gates. His encampment really looks deserted apart from the keep area, but has plentiful lego blocks. Nomad's economy is comprised of selling stone and iron. He only ever gathers apples for food, which isn't much. He is also weirdly prone to survive on little food. This guy LOVES Skirmishers. They are sent in droves much like monks from the Abbot, they always get in hits from enormous range, and in general they will piss you off. For attacks, I have seen Demolishers accompanying skirmishers. There are also Camel Lancers for harassment, but they are generally stopped when your castle can't be broken into. The Sentinel The guy from the main menu screen, who is not very easy to take. He is very defensive and takes some time to get running. He builds a dense Templar cross-shaped castle with dense moat. One gatehouse on two sides each, and a square tower with tower equipment on the other two each. Economy is the same as Nomad, plus dairy farms. Also ample weapons production. Sentinel loves his leather armor. Crossbowmen are his choice of ranged troop, supported by macemen and pikemen. There aren't many attack waves from Sentinel. Beyond his standard troops, I've seen Demolishers, as well as he builds catapults. He is fairly bad at digging up moat.

Glad you like the demo! 🙂 It is really shaping up to be a serviceable game after all those 'missteps' Firefly didn't get just right enough. The alpha is also looking advanced enough that there are no apparent bugs. Surely there are annoyances like not being able to access the trade panel right away (it must be done by clicking on the scale, then on the good type), or children being in the way of placement, but these can be easily fixed if need be. Coop is coming up, as well as there are additional skirmish missions beyond the first one. Maybe the coop trail doesn't deserve the type of bells and whistles, granted you can set up a custom skirmish room with the same presets. However, if we get some coop missions like the scripted Crusader States' missions (e.g. Mission 2 Snake getting a huge bunch of Arabs attacking very early on), I may even salute the devs. 😄 It definitely looks to pack more replayability than full titles as of late.

I wouldn't bet my life on it, but it seems to behave well enough. I played a few 1.2 skirmish maps in multiplayer and those worked out just fine. I got these transferred from another player, who originally downloaded them from Heavengames. The best way to check though is to test out a few specimen by yourself. As of this post, all Legends maps submissions are pre-2013 on HG so you can't go wrong (https://stronghold2.heavengames.com/downloads/lister.php?category=shl_walkthrough).

For what it's worth, I played the demo a little bit and so far it resembles SH1: DE. It's early to tell anything but I could see myself buying it on release. There is the weirdly fluid movement coupled with low animation frame rates and the graphics may take quite a bit to get used to due to the contrast, otherwise the game plays well. It feels much easier to see where a building's footprint goes and projectiles are more pronounced too. The Skirmisher has a weirdly long range with its spears (the same as an archer!) and the demo enemies love to spam them, so it could feel hard to defend against them. Portable shields can't go on towers in the new game either! 😄