Sim Campaign: Mission 8 - The Royal Champion

By Lord_Chris

Mission Objectives:

• Win: Acquire 300 Honour
• Lose: Your Lord Dies
• Lose: Time until Defeat: 72 Months

This mission sees us start in a completely different position- controlling Sir William's castle. You will return back to your original estate in the next chapter, but for now, special build rules apply throughout the duration of this mission which can be quite important. Firstly, you can no longer build in your old castle estate. You can however still build in all of your neutral estates (the ones with flagpoles). You can build in Sir William's estate, but you cannot build in Sir William's neutral estate (where you killed the wolves in chapter 4).

This mission is all about honour and the quicker you acquire honour the better. There are many ways to acquire honour in Stronghold 2, but the most productive are dancing, feasting, jousting and of course the travelling fair. See our complete Honour guide for all the ways to generate Honour in Stronghold 2. As when you always start a new mission, you should begin by immediately examining the estate to see what can be optimised and rebuilt. Considering this is a Civilian mission, it is very clear you do not need the Barracks or Armoury, or Poleturner's Workshop. These can be immediately deleted to conserve space. Next, looking at Sir William's food production it doesn't take an expert to see that this industry is also in a mess- so delete the Apple Farms and place them outside of your castle walls.

Next, place a market, sell all of your Apples from the Granary, delete your Granary and then place it outside of your castle walls near your new Apple Farms. Purchase some of your Apples back. Now focus your attention on the scattered hovels. Between the lookout tower and trees is a good spot to group all of your hovels to conserve space, so make sure there are about 5 or 6 Hovels built there and delete all the remaining others. Now that this re-organisation is done, we can actually begin. Since the most effective means of generating Honour in the whole game is through dancing, this is what we should focus on first. Place two Weavers Workshops next to your stockpile, the Bedchamber built into your castle wall, and two Sheep Farms. You'll likely find you don't have enough Stone to build the Bedchamber, so just buy it instead. Give this industry a starting boost by also purchasing 20 Cloth.

Don't forget to place a Gong Pit and a Falconers Post to take care of any rats and Gong that may appear in your estate. This will negatively effect your popularity which makes it much harder to get any Honour, so it's vital you deal with these issues as quickly as possible. Now time to get things setup for a feast: place two vegetable gardens, an eel pond, three pig farms, two vineyards and two vintner's workshops. This will help to setup your basic feasting industry. By now your castle should be looking something like this:



Next, place a Church, several Chandler Workshops and Beehives nearby the Chandler Workshops. Again, if you don't have enough Stone, simply buy it. If your Lord attends a Church service, you will receive a massive 150 Honour boost, so this would be a massive step towards your target of 300. Note that you will have to start masses yourself in the Church- so left click on the Church and increase the number to whatever number you can manage. You can also buy more candles if you're short, and there are no adverse effects if you run out of candles as masses just stop for a while.

Now it's time to look back at your food production. Head over to all your neutral estates and gte them to each send 20 Apples to your estate. You can sell these later and buy other food with them, that will increase your variety of food. In the meantime, place one Hunter Post and two dairy farms outside of your castle walls next to your Granary. Finally, place the Travelling Fair. If you don't have enough wood, again just purchase some. The only downside to placing a Travelling Fair is that it will draw in some of your workers, which means that throughout the period where the Fair is running nothing will be produced by those buildings.



Tip: If at this point you are struggling with your popularity due to the large amount of gong and rats, then perhaps consider placing a Treasury and temporarily introducing a small or large bribe. This will temporarily keep your population happy while you can invest in more gong pits. However, this should only ever really be a temporary measure. As an additional tip, keep an eye on distance when placing Gong Pits. Gong Farmers will only travel so far, as you can see in my screenshot above where the Gong Farmer near my Stockpile has not moved to clear the Gong next to the Travelling Fair.

At this point, you can sit back and relax for a few moments, your Honour should be starting to come in nicely now. If you're still struggling with popularity, try placing some Hop Farms and a Brewery- but make sure you also place an Inn. A word of caution however, that by placing more buildings you will need more peasants and therefore more food to feed your increased population. Only do this if absolutely necessary.



Once you've built your Lords Kitchen earlier in the game, the pages will transfer some of the Cloth to the Bedchamber. The Lady will turn that Cloth into dresses, which are used for dances held in the Keep. Once there are four dresses, a dance will be held in the Keep raising 200 Hnour. With any luck this is all you will need by this point to exceed your target of 300 Honour. You can left click on the Keep at any time to see how many dresses are needed before a Dance will take place.

At this point, you should have a very swift victory, and well before the time limit runs out. Make sure you save your game at the end of this mission, and then we can proceed onto Chapter 9. You can download a saved game of this mission from here in our downloads section.