In Stonghold 2 the player doesn't control the peasants/workers as in some more conventional RTS'. Rather, the game rotates around the construction of a complete medieval estate, with enough food, entertainment and work to go around. After placing down an apple orchard, for example, one of the out-of-work peasants around the castle campfire will run off and become an apple farmer. A guard post requires a guard, a torturer's guild requires three torturers and so forth. If the economy and medieval lifecycle is kept strong then the peasants' loyalty to the player will stay high and peasants will keep coming to the castle, to the limit of how many hovels the player has placed. Idle peasants are also the resource for your armies, for if you have the equipment in your armory (bows for archers, plate and swords for knights) they can be turned with a bit of gold for training into soldiers which are under your direct control. Placing down buildings is instant, there is no time spent building them. While this is rare these days it does allow a bit more emphasis on careful planning and building efficiency, and of course buildings can be erased with a small return in resources. Coming packaged with the new engine your castle is a lot more animated as well, with children, women carrying babies, farm animals and the like all strolling around the various structures in your estate. This serves to make your town actually feel like a town, rather than a simple power base for your war machine.

In addition to happiness it is also a good idea to place buildings and equipment to increase the honour of your castles resident lord. For example, a jousting pit generates regular honour, and a Royal Kitchen will keep your peasants busy collecting specialist food like pork and wine for royal feasts held in the castle. With this honour estates can be bought from the king which, while not under your direct control, will deliver regular shipments of goods to your holdings if equipped with a Carters Post. Some units in the game also require honour to build, like knights (the most powerful ground unit) and so honour is almost instrumental to an effective campaign.

Fortification design is this game's forte and begins with effective wall placement. Walls come in wood and stone varieties, with stone walls only destroyable by siege equipment. Once a tower or a stairway is built on the wall troops and man its entire length, although for truly effective defences only melee infantry should be stationed there to push off ladders, with the archers and crossbowmen placed on the far stronger and higher towers. Towers come in a wide range, from lookouts to great bastions, and can even have ballistas or mangonels stationed atop. After the walls, all the various implements of interestingly painful death can be used to further fortify from your position, from covered spiked pits in the path of ladder bearers to burning logs released to roll down through the advancing army (combined with hidden pitch this can turn the field into an inferno).

From the other perspective, assaulting a castle can be grim task or a satisfyingly easy one, depending on your resources and the defender's cunning. The various stone-throwing devices have a devastating effect on wall with great explosions of rubble (and defenders) going in all directions, but rely on getting close enough to use them. With trebuchets this is no problem but they are widely inaccurate and slow and so are only really effective in large numbers. Catapults are highly susceptible to archers (especially fire archers) and ballistas and so are only good against poor defences. A horde of ladder-bearing peasants can be used to go over walls (and uncover traps without losing any real soldiers) and for the rich attacker assassins can be used to silently scale the walls and take out towers. With engineers walls and towers can be undermined in tunnels although this is a time consuming process. Once the walls are breached you can roll your troops in and fight your way to the lord in his keep. If any towers are still standing then clearing them of defenders can allow you to use them for your own ranged units against the enemy, an effective tactic that helps to clear the remaining resistance, but generally once inside the game is over for the defending lord.

The game comes with two campaigns, the path of peace and the path of war. Both are story-based but the focus is shifted between economic development and warcraft. The plot is simple yet mildly engaging, and does serve as an excellent way to learn the ropes of the game. As an additional twist in the Path to War campaign the player can choose to finish either serving the king or taking the crown himself, which alters the way the final missions are played. You play as Matthew Steele, a servant of Sir William who is given a title and lands as the kingdom begins to fracture apart.

The ability to deviate from the 'goody goody path' is satisfying because Sir William, for all his roguish good looks and classic pure hearted good guy attitude, is incompetent and foolish in his decisions, only alive because you're their to keep him that way. The king is weak and possibly senile, and the only people with the strength needed to drive the country are the supposed bad guys (so called cause one is bald and the other always wears a dark hood; this couple with a tendency to sneer are surely evil and must be destroyed for the good of the kingdom). Abandoning Sir William and taking the throne for himself was this reviewer's first choice.

Don't expect too much out of these campaigns in terms of a challenge, which are made hard by putting you in difficult positions rather than clever AI. Tactics which would have got soldiers in my castle and ravishing my mistresses by teatime go unused by the comp player, and an angle of attack can often be dissuaded by simply blocking it off with a wall, allowing a player to direct an attack to where he/she wants it.

Multiplayer-wise this game is great, as would be expected due to its style. The maps aren't too big and the estate dynamics stop it from becoming a war of attrition, as fortification-centric games can become if players are allowed to build anywhere. All the extra details and twists on conventional RTS keep the game interesting rather than being another Starcraft/Warcraft/Age of /Empire Earth/ Command and Conquer clone. A game with good players who know what they're doing can last hours without being tedious, and final victory is even more satisfying than most games due to all the work that led to it. In short, only an incompetent will get 'rolled', and defending can be as much fun as attacking. It is important to note that if a player's experience comes from the single-player campaigns then he must be ready to be a lot more thorough in his defences, covering every angle of attack. Human players tend to be a lot more innovative.

There is a number of flaws with Stronghold 2 that will dampen enthusiasm for the game. Chief among these are the frequent crashes, especially in multiplayer games. These crashes make online play virtually impossible, as on average around 1 in 4 games will last to their conclusion before quitting to the menu. These crashes are less common in single-player mode, but they do distract from what would otherwise be a great deathmatch game. The time the game takes to load up is also astronomical. The reviewe machine has a gig of DDR and a two-gigahertz, 64-bit processor, yet Stronghold 2 still takes a good 3-5 minutes to get to the menu. Also once a game gets going after about ten minutes the game slows to a crawl, making the speed slider in the options rather pointless. With any luck these issues will be resolved in patch 1.2.

Stronghold 2 is not for the faint hearted. It requires strategy and patience as well as a substantial time spent learning how everything works and what's effective (and what will get you killed). However, for those that have a keen grasp of strategy (and feel all warm and fuzzy when they say 'boiling pitch'), this game is for you.