Repelling invaders, hosting jousting tournaments, and keeping your peasants cheerful (or in line through fear of punishment) now gives your lord “honor points†that can be used to purchase equally powerful and expensive knights, or to “tech†to more advanced buildings like cathedrals. Fires mysteriously ignite, wolves show up and eat your farmers, and your people steadily, and quietly begin to loathe you. This lack of control and notification is endemic to Stronghold 2. Making it worse, it can happen during the middle of a large, distracting battle, before you’re even aware there’s a catastrophic chain reaction of shortfalls in progress. You can shut down certain buildings, but since you’re strangely unable to shut down any structure without also deactivating every other building of the same type (a problem passed over from Stronghold 1), such iffy measures can throw your entire economy out of order. And since you’re not notified or expecting it, critical industries like falconry posts (which reduces your city’s rat levels) or gong pits wind up going untended, which leads to people suddenly abandoning your castle in droves, all at once. Even long-trusted clergymen and blacksmiths will turn abruptly to crime and begin raiding your storehouse, regardless of your popularity at that moment. Where before peasants could be kept content with different food types, churches, and taverns to keep their minds dulled, they now turn against you in a heartbeat, often for no visible reason. Returning to the conventional setting of lush green English pastures, you reprise the role of a faceless British baron who rules over a steadily increasing population of peasants, expanding your power and lands by adjusting taxes and rations, and much more often by placing configurations of buildings that will keep your citizens well fed, well defended, usefully employed, and happy. Stronghold 2 mostly sticks to the winning formula established by its predecessors. No other game before or since has so gracefully integrated maintaining apple orchards with setting hundreds of screaming knights on fire. The original Stronghold and its miraculously topical expansion Crusader had their share of warts — an interesting but ultimately easy to master economic model and endearingly crude AI — but were so wedded to the uniquely laidback and charming gameplay that they too came off as laidback and charming, spicy kernels in keeping with the authentically scruffy atmosphere.
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