Some tweaking to the castle building has been done as well, with the gate houses losing their crenulations (no longer can you use them as an early cheap tower). There is a new look out tower (similar to a middle eastern minaret) that can give you a real height advantage for your missile troops (although it's a long way to fall when it collapses). A welcome addition is the mercenary post where, if you have the spare dosh, you can hire troops. This is particularly useful early on in a mission where you can gamble on a quick attack to disrupt your enemy and gain an early build advantage.

Some of the existing buildings functionality has been tweaked by making the bonuses from the taverns and chapels more effective for your all important popularity rating. You still need to carefully manage your gold, taxes and popularity, although your start up cash seems to be more generous this time around.

Overall the game play is excellent, with the additional units making for some interesting battles and some cunning sneak attacks. The missions seem to be fast and furious with the AI attacking early causing you to build quickly and early. The missions themselves are well designed with resources now being placed so you have to make some tactical choices on what you claim and defend. There maybe only one place you can mine stone and one place to mine iron. So you take the route of claiming the stone and building a big castle or mining the iron and building an army. With the ability to sell either and purchase what you lack you are then presented some interesting balancing issues. With the only arable land around the oasis and these generally in the centre of the map, contact with the enemy typically happens early and often.

Some neat additions have been the inclusion of more voice messages so now you know when your redoubt is enclosed, and the enemy taunts you more often than in the previous game. Back this with an atmospheric and varied musical score and the game presents itself as being well polished and complete.

Multiplayer support includes both LAN and Internet play. So often forgotten in multiplayer games today is the inclusion of the ability to play co-operatively and the easy interface allows you to determine teams and alliances prior to the game commencing.

All of this is backed up by a comprehensive map editor that allows you to create your own scenarios. In the earlier game this proved quite popular with some of the better player created scenarios being released in a deluxe package of the game - there is a very real chance that something similar will happen again with this game. The game also ships with a comprehensive manual, which by today's standards is quite unusual.