Mathew Steel

Just a quick suggestion. Changing some colours. For example Lord Vetka's username is a dark blue. The colour itself is difficult to see with the colour theme of the website, maybe do some colour testing to find suitable and easy to see colours. Thank you :)

That's right. Although back then I didn't really need it for anything else. So much has changed with technology in little years. Luckily I'm managing to stay on top of it and understand. Just simple things like kicking people off my internet through going into my router configurator :D

True true, we'll just see what everyone fancies doing tomorrow. I'm happy playing either :)

I just dislike cheaters (not the animal, I love animals :P ). They ruin gaming communities, and after him thinking he was chocolate abusing other players, I can't say I didn't enjoy going on his profile and seeing he had a VAC Ban :angel:

Stronghold 3 has been out for a decent amount of time now, and this review is possibly quite late. If you are still actually pending on whether to buy the game. Then read on. Or if you're sitting at home feeling blank cause you have done nothing productive all day. Then read this to keep your brain happy :D First Impression: My first impression of SH3 was quite good. I played the War Campaign first. The first mission was exciting (although similar to SH2). The missions were great in my opinion. Each one lasted a fair amount of time and there was quite a lot of missions with varying objectives. I liked the graphics as they were a lot more advanced than any other Stronghold game. Of course this made the game lag slightly. Something I did notice was the game was slightly poorly optimised. My specs were fairly over the recommended requirements, but even after fiddling with game graphic options, when moving the camera over a building crowded area, FPS dropped quite a bit. This was easy to look over as it wasn't too much effecting my gameplay. Troops: A lot of old troops from SH2 and Crusader were back in this new sequel. The troops had new voices and were actually quite well designed, scripting and graphics. I recall a numerous amount of times where I would just stop, zoom in on swordsmen, and just admire the graphical details on their armour and weapons. Same could be said for all the troops. I did notice some bugs with troops and barracks. Sometimes a rally post would be placed, if the player selected a separate rally post then when placing a new building another rally post would be created in the same place. This wasn't awful, but it did make me follow crossbowmen (one of the slowest troops) walk for 2 minutes to find the rest of the little buggers. Buildings: Buildings again, like most of the things in the game, were well designed. The new option to be able to rotate the buildings in over 16 directions was really useful when plotting out different parts of the castle. It also brought the ambience of the game to life, by allowing the player to be able to create a street of hovels. Speaking of hovels, the new hovels were designed to look like Tudor time houses. This was a nice little feature I felt, as this again adds the ambience of living in those times, to the game. Buildings were more categorised in separate icons and were now easier to find what you needed in a much shorter amount of time, even if you are new to the game. Castle Walls/Defences: These again were well designed, with the walls looking even more realistic and new towers, it made the game a lot more fun to play. Stone curtain walls were brought back into the game and were now useful for blocking small parts of the castle off. Again being able to place the walls and towers in a numerous amount of different directions made it a lot easier to design a great castle. New defences were added such as the wooden stakes, which although didn't do any real damage, were quite useful for distracting the enemy or holding them back. A downside to the walls. They were a big pain in the ... toe ... to place. Sometimes if 2 towers were placed too close to each other, it would be almost impossible to add a wall between them to connect them up. This was really frustrating and really limited the castle defences. UI (User Interface): In all fairness this is something they did well. There was a small scroll down box on the top right of the screen which told you the important stuff. This includes, food rations, food units, ale rations, ale units, church mass, candle units, gold, taxes, triggered events, random events, popularity effect. All in a neat small box that could be kept down or minimized until needed. The game itself would talk you through everything you needed in the different campaigns, so this helped with using the UI itself. Tutorial: The tutorial, was, let's face it a waste of space. It taught you nothing but how to keep popularity up. Nothing too great about buildings, defences etc. The best way to learn how to play, was from diving straight into the campaign. Map Editor: This...where do I start...map editor. I wouldn't say it's useless, people have managed to create "decent" maps using it. But compared to how easy scripting and designing was in SH2, it's not great. The map editor is a separate application and when opened you are given no tutorial of how to use it. For players with no internet, you better hope you have a good amount of knowledge with computers, cause the editor is useless for that. Downsides: -Although the graphics were great, the game was poorly optimized -Again with the great graphics, this means a building cap had to be implemented to stop client and server lag -Troops cap was far too low -Lots of missing features on launch -No kingmaker (although some custom made maps have attempted some sort of kingmaker) -Broken promises Overall: The game itself isn't bad at all really. It is a fun game, but unlike SH2 or Crusader, you really need to be in the mood to play it. And even then, it's not a game that you will want to play for 2 hours straight, since it just gets boring with the lack of features. I think the main problem with the game, is bugs and disappointment. The creators promised so much more than we as customers were actually give. The Decision: Would I recommend it: If you are a fan of the Stronghold series, yes. If not, possibly. Do I like it: As I already said, it isn't a bad game, but it is quite disappointing to me, from what the trailers showed. Overall Rating: 7/10

I won't judge I had a Nokia 2680 up until the age of 12. I had it for 5 years until I decided it wasn't very cool taking a small brick to school everyday :rolleyes: now I'm a proud owner of a very fragile iPhone 5 :D

Ahh so quite simple really, thanks Chris.

What is your favourite music. So genre, favourite artist, album even favourite song. Myself I'm not that into newer music, like Eminem or Calvin Harris (if you do not know their music, youtube it :)). I've always been more into music from 2000-2008. Preferred Genre: Acoustic/Alternative Favourite Artist: James Blunt Favourite Album: Snow Patrol- Up to Now/James Blunt- Some Kind of Trouble Favourite Song: (Although not made by James Blunt, the song has a lot of meaning to me for personal reasons) Snow Patrol- Chasing Cars Post yours in a reply :)

That is a cool feature, that's great actually, clever idea.

Today I have been making a map for SH2 (not yet finished). Also been playtesting my other map. Went out on my own for a few hours just to wander about and get some fresh air. Oh and also got a cheater banned from Steam, so that was fun :D

Thought you guys would have thought of that. It was just me being lazy, okay no problem :)

That sounds great too! We'll have a vote (if anyone knows how to make a vote, please let me know). Of course this also depends on the players available. I'll add your name to the list for tomorrow Lord Vetka. If you can't make it just let me know :) Edit- Not to sure if this will work, my vote Lord Vetka is- A Four Way Mix Edits by @Lord Vetka

Yes that looks like a good map. We'll play that if you like. Also I have time for a game now (though it isn't an official match) if anyone would like to join I'll be hosting for the next 30 minutes (9:02 GMT) The GameRanger host will be the same as stated in the first post.

IMPORTANT: Due to unexpected personal reasons. I won't be able to make tonight. The game tomorrow will continue as normal, sorry for any disappointment and inconvenience caused.

The idea is simple and you may already have it but I haven't looked very well. Make a new forum, called Campaigns, then a sub forum for each Stronghold game. All members may contribute by sending ideas to moderators of the forum. Then the moderators can choose the best walkthrough and create a new topic. For example: Campaigns - Stronghold 2 - Mission 6 (Olaf Grimtooth Your Time Has Come) Then in that topic the moderator can paste the walkthrough or multiple walthroughs. For example: Walkthrough 1: Defence Walkthrough 2: Attack Walkthrough 3: Estates Hope you like the idea, I know it isn't needed as there is a forum to post anything about separate games, but I feel it would be of use when categorising certain topics.

True, I love the map editor in SH2, the one in SH3 has ruined my map building experience and I haven't created 1 map on SH3. Never have I played Legends as the mystical magic theme doesn't appeal to me. While talking about maps, I'm working on a side map to the war scenario. It's just a kingmaker map but it's a bit of fun, so when I get stressed with scripting and shouting at my laptop, I have a break and do that :D

That's no problem :) hopefully get some more members this time.

That's not a problem, I'll add you to the list for both dates? If you can't make it let me know, otherwise I'll wait :)

Will be hosting a game today and tomorrow, same times. I'm aware it is short notice, but I know I won't be doing anything on these days. If you can't make it, not a problem as it is short notice. For those who can, I'll see you in the game. ?Game: Stronghold 2 ?Version: 1.4.1 ?Maximum Participants: 8 ?Current Participants (31st August): -Mathew Steel -Lord_Chris -Lord Vetka ?Other Information: 1.GameRanger Room Name: StrongholdNationMS 2.GameRanger Password: shnms 3.Map: Unknown 4.Start Rank: Freeman 5.Starting Villages Per Player: None 6.Teams: 2 Players Per Team 7.Please Read: SH2 Multiplayer Rules Global Start Times: 1.18:30 (6:30 PM) GMT +1 - London, United Kingdom 2.13:30 (1:30 PM) EST - North America 3.10:30 (10:30 AM) PDT - Vancouver, Canada 4.19:30 (7:30 PM) CEST - Belgrade, Serbia NOTE- Room is now open! If you can join then please do now, thank you!

Yes I'm glad I moved my troops away, otherwise we would still be playing right now.

Lol yes, I couldn't do much about your ballistas.

That is true :D

Yay stickied :) thanks Chris. It can be a struggle when sieging. That's why I had so little Knights, but I did manage to hold off by doing so.

Is this competition still active? I'll take part if so :)

Another quick question. What are online bots? I looked at the bottom of the website and saw these online bots. Googlebot [bot], PHP [bot], Baiduspider [bot]