Nigel

Well, I too verfied the files as Charles of Tours suggested. That found and fixed some broken/missinng files, but unfortunately that was not the solution. I got another crash of the Crusader.exe some days later. :S Also, I am not sure if it is related to graphics settings. I never had any problems with freezes or FPS drops. The game runs shust fine on my machine in that respect. It is just the CTDs that I am gettig occasionally - both in Singleplayer and Multiplayer. Now it is not such a big problem for players like us, who are organized on a forum and all connected via Steam friends list. We could just set autosave to 5 minutes and if someone dropps we could just get all back in, reload the game have lost 5-10 minutes at worst. But it must be a real problem for FireFly. I am guessing that more than 90% of their players are not organized on a forum. They just want to play a casual game against a random opponent and thus have no chance to get back in after a crash. That is really frustrating and FireFly are at danger of loosing a lot of players that way. Lets keep trying to help figure out where the problem is coming from and hopefully FireFly will eventually be able to get on top of it.

Take a look again. I think the old Stronghold Crusader HD and Stronghold Crusader Extreme both came with buying Stronghold Crusader 2 :) Or maybe it was only a bonus because I bought the boxed version of the game.

That looks great. :) I like what you did and making the city oblong is really good. I had not thought of that. Check your mailbox. I played around with this map and sent you an experimental version with some things I tried out.

Just to update this. StevenThrasher posted a nice pice of advice on how to get past the first bottleneck on this mission post-patch. I shall surely revisit that page, when I get to that mission myself.

That should be ok. After all it is "your city". So your troops won't fire at the city while it is under your control, but if the enemy takes it over, it is quite ok that you can shoot at his troops from your caslte towers. Also, I would not mind if the cities are within trebuchet range of each other (just the outer wall, not the city centre). Only having them within bowshot would be too close.

Micha, I have been wondering. Could this map be played as a 2v1? With the defending 2 players using the new co-operative feature of 2 Lord in 1 castle? Would be fun if it did.

Indeed, when I performed the integrety check that way, it reported one file missing (or damaged, I dont remember the exact text). It also started to download 1 file for Crusader 2. Hopefully that will have fixed it :cool:

I had a go and put in some city walls. I am not saying that they should be like that, but it is just to get a feeling for the size. If we put them as shown in this draft, the main towers of the cities are probably within bowshot of each other. I don't know if this is a good or a bad idea, but if we do not want this, we will have to shift the cities sideways and have one more the the East and the other more to the West. That in turn means, that there is not an equal distance for the Lords on the same hill to reach their city. One will always have an advantage. But that is probably a minor drawback - most of the time these two Lords would be allies (but I am happy to hear your and other people's thought on this). EDIT: On further thinking, I guess we have to make the cities so, that you cannot shoot into the enemy city from the towers of your own. Otherwise, whoever manages to bring his archers onto his towers first, is guaranteed to win the game.... The landscape itself is great. The only thing you could adjut if you want is to move the elevation in the centre a little back to make more room for the cities.

This sounds good. I like it. Looking forward to some screenshots. Oh, and I just had a go at Abnar River Valley. Very nice map. I love how you have to make do without iron. Quite a change. :)

I like this, too. I think this would work well - not only for SH2 but also SHC2, where you can build a siege camp real close to enemy units. Regarding the idea of a Code of Honour: I used to play a lot of the Total War series and and we had a Code of Honour there. For me, the main thing of a CoH is, that players commit to not using exploits of the game weaknesses and are putting fun before winning. That sounds very general, but I think if players stick to that, they will have good games most of the time. Details of what is fair and what not are, of course, debatable and to some extend a matter of preference. But if you respect if someone says: I hate this, please dont use this. That's the essence of honourable play.

A very nice map, Micha! You got a really nice comment on the FireFly Twitter page for it some days ago: "Huge praise in the office this morning for Micha in the forums, who created Minas Tirith in the Crusader 2 Map Editor" And I see that they are also now also featuring a video you made with Sergiu. Great stuff :D

I played around with the map a bit and, as promised, here my thoughts and comments. I like the touching or interlocking castle estates idea. That woud go nicely. Also, you are asking me, which basic layout of the estates I perfer. I think I like the one of Estate 4 best (top left in your picture). It has the keep on the highest point and the resources at equal level or below it. I could imagine that players will want to place the hovels close to the keep. As for the size, each castle should be able to support a polulation of perhaps max. 80 on its own. That can be done with 6-8 bakeries (+ 2 mills and 2 farms). If players want to go beyond that, they have to rely on the village for more food. I agree that there is too much iron and stone available to the castles as it is now. But that is no problem, if you want to keep the looks of the iron/stone deposits, it can be done by placing pathing points into the area to allow only a few mines to be build there. I think perhaps 2 stone mines and 1 iron mine inside the castle should be enough. Again players need to take a city to expand beyond that. As for map size, I look forward to seeing your experiments with the medium size map. But like you, I have the feeling that large will be better (extra large will probably be too much). Putting the caslte estates in a valley at the top and bottom of the map may be one way to do it. Another thought I had was to turn the map by 45?, have the river run diagonally and the castle estates in the corners. This allows for more space between the cities and the castles, but the downside is, that gates can only be placed at right angles, and that would make city design more difficult with this layout. Either way, we could also have some additional iron/stone deposits on neutral land left and right to the cities - just to give players something to fight over outside of the cities, if they want to do that. It is just a thought - we dont want to overload the map and we can see if we want to add that later when we do the finishing touches. Have a think about the orientation of the river and castle estates and choose the one that you feel is best. About the cities, I am perfectly happy to build them myself (or Mathew, if you want to have a go at that, that's fine, too). I am very glad that you are doing the landscape, for that's what I am not very good at. If I get a nice landscape to work with, that is just great. :)

Ok, I seem to have a situation where I can reproduce a crash of the Crusader.exe, which I guess is the good part of the bad news. I changed the config.xml as you suggested above, Chris, but I too cannot find the dump. Any idea what the name of the file would be? I did get an error dialog, though. Here is a screenshot of it:

Sure - I understand that. Well, if you do try it, every hint could be useful.

fine - I was going to vote for EaglePrince - so I guess I am going with the flow and he rightly deserves to win this contest :cool:

errm - so how do you vote in this contest? Simply reply to this thread - or is there a vote button somewhere?

Hi guys, there is a thread over at the offficial forum, where someone is stuck in the Skirmish Trial and asking for help. The tricky bit is, that all the guides he finds were from before the last patch and that patch made some of the missions more difficult. http://forum.strongholdcrusader2.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=871 Unfortunately I have not got so far yet, but I know that some of you have made good progress along the Trail. @xiiMaRcLeoN, you have even completed it. Perhaps you want to take the challange to go back to that mission (Desert Heat:Isolation) and do it again after the patch. It would be great if we could help him out in some way.

Thanks Lord Vetka, I got your mail with the map and comments and was able to load it in the map editor. Understood that this is only a test map and that you want to present different options of the castle site layout. I will lake a closer look and provide feedback over the next couple of days. But what I can say from the first look: the landscape looks great! Just what I had hoped for :)

Thanks for your nice words, everyone. My Lady and I went hiking in the Dolomites - a really good area for it, even in autumn. Now I am back now and catching up on all the new posts and mails. Oh, and Lord Vetka, Holidays are the times when you are not studying or working to earn money or not playing Stronghold or not making new maps. I understand that this concept must be very new to you, but you could try it out at least once and see how you like it. ;)

Hi guys, I just want to let you know that I will be on vacation for 1 week and probably not, or only occasionally, have access to the internet. So if I am not replying or responding here on the forum, it is not because I am rude or so (well, I might be rude, but that is not the reason for not responding :P ). Look forward to meet up with you again in the following week. Nigel

Hi there, denn1s33, I see that you are online just now. Have you been able to convert your file into a zip? If not and you need more help, let us know.

It looks like others are having similar problems with scripting invasions :S http://forum.strongholdcrusader2.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=846 Maybe if you guys all put your heads together it can be solved.

Slowly, but steadily I am continuing my long march on the Trail... (somewhat held up by some good multiplayer battles) I have started the second mission of the Breath Of The Infidel chapter, the "Iron Hills", but now the Sultana has left me for the Rat (the Rat !! Why him? What does he have that I dont??). Well, at least the Shah is on my side and backing me up.

Just out of interest, are the Extreme maps and the "normal" SHC maps interchangable? Or can they only be played by their respective games?

Whow, Chris. For not having the game, you know a lot about it. :impressed: I too have crashes with SHC2 sometimes - very annoying in MP. My hope it that patches will improve the situation.