Popularity can be influenced in a number of ways. Tax rates and food supplies are two of them. However, building churches, gardens, and maypoles are other ways - each with their own perils. For example, build a garden and the lazy imbeciles will lounge round in the sun shirking their wood-cutting duties. On the other hand you could build some nasty things like gallows and stocks just to remind them who's boss: they'll certainly work harder, but your popularity will take a dive.

Touches like this, combined with good sound and in-game music, help to give the game a bit of character and appeal. But while the city management side is reasonably interesting and fun, it's not as complicated or challenging as it might first appear. The economic model boils down to a series of simple resource dependencies. You quickly get the hang of building the right buildings in the right order, in roughly the right proportions to each other to keep things ticking along. For example: one mill seems to be able to take wheat from about three wheat farms, and support about five or six bakers making bread - making this the most efficient but most elaborate way of feeding your populace.

Further simplifying matters is the fact that the machinery of war requires no maintenance whatsoever. Walls and towers go up instantly as long as you have enough stone. Soldiers don't require food and will never desert no matter how unpopular you get. What this means is that as soon as you can comfortably turn out 10 or 15 troops every couple of minutes you have no need to keep developing your economy or keep a reasonable lid on the size of your army. Given the amount of thought that has gone into the popularity system for the civilian side of things, the simplicity of the military aspects can't help feeling just a little bit hollow. A supply system like that used in Fate of the Dragon probably wouldn't have been necessary; but maybe a basic food requirement or a reaction to low popularity would add more of a challenge.

In short, despite the 'sim' claim, there is nothing particularly revolutionary going on here.

One excellent game feature however, that should become standard for all RTS games, is flatten. The flatten command flattens the map - making all buildings, walls, hills, and trees zero height, simply displaying their footprint. What this means is that when you hit space bar to toggle the command, you can instantly locate the troops sitting behind the wall or in the forest. The game continues as normal and you can access all the usual commands in this mode. Select your hidden troops, give them orders and hit space bar to return to normal view. Magic. No more scrolling, panning, tilting and zooming a camera to check the other side of your keep, then trying to figure out which way is north again.

Experienced RTS gamers will quickly notice that the enemy military artificial intelligence is not up to much chop. Its only trick is to overwhelm you with shear numbers. This may ultimately make the miltary campaign an unsatisfying outing.

Stronghold does however offer a variety of other game types. These other game types include single missions based on historical scenarios, and an 'economic' campaign. This is a short series of linked missions which require you to stockpile a certain amount of various resources in a limited time. This mode, along with 'free build' mode really suffers from the inescapable fact that you can't help feeling you are just playing half the game. With the military side cut out, the whole exercise just seems a little pointless, since the economic management is not complex enough to provide any sort of challenge by itself.

Multiplayer options overcome the problem of the decidedly-average AI. There is also a map editor, and one interesting feature is the ability to design impregnable fortresses and post them on the 'net for other Stronghold fans to try to take down. There are certainly plenty of options here to give the game a reasonable life-span.

In summary, and since Age of Empires 2 is the unofficial benchmark for RTS games in the historical genre, we figure it's fair game for a quick and dirty comparison. Verdict: Stronghold squeaks ahead, despite the far more limited and limiting premise. It's more interesting, the economic considerations add a little depth, it's better produced, it's got more character, and it's better looking overall (though on this count AOE2's age will be against it). But the rest of the winning points are simply better design decisions - apart from anything else, it's just nice to see a catapult that actually has a crew for once. A little nod to realism once in a while goes a long way!

On the technical front, the system requirements aren't too demanding, which means this game should be accessible to the majority of gamers. At 750 MB it's not going to devastate your hard drive, and asking for 64 MB of RAM is remarkably modest in this day and age.

Stronghold also seems to be pretty stable, apart from a bug in mission 13 of the military campaign which causes the game to crash to desktop repeatedly if you build to the edge of the screen. To their credit Firefly have already shipped the version 1.1 patch to fix this problem.