Nigel

I guess today's battle deserves to get a place here. I met Mathew on Steam by chance today and we decided to turn it indo a spontaneous event. xiiMaRcLeoN picked up the call to arms and joined us for a 3 player co-op game against 5 AI Lords: The Rat, the Slave King, the Sultana, the Wolf and Saladin. While the two of them got their castles up pretty quickly, I was struggling a bit in the beginning, but with some reinforcements after the first attack on my caslte (many thanks for that - really saved my bacon), I managed to hold my own pretty well against the attacks. After the Rat and the Sultana were beaten, the Wolf decided to be a regular guest at my doorstep. I had to keep re-buildinng my walls, but fially I learned to appreciate the use of pitch and that put an end to his trebucet threat. :) Eventually we joined forces to move forward and started our assault on their castels. They were falling one after the other until we finally assaulted Saladin. Attached is a picture showing us move in after the wall was breached (xiiMaRcLeoN in green, Mathew in red and myself in blue).

Whow, the new patch is out. :O Thanks for sharing - must go and give it a try. Edit: I did not see this on the SHC2 forum announcement. What does this actually do?

Were you able to resolve this? I am just asking, because I have gotten curious to see this map :) Edit: ... oh, and I see more players are advertising their map at the official forum and saying that they are waiting for the Steam Workshop to go live. I could recommend them to come here, but want to be sure they are not facing technical problems when they upload their maps. (sorry, looks like our mails crossed)

Thanks Lord Vekta. I am gald you like the idea and will give it a go. Map size: I was thinking Extra Large, but you might want to make a first draft and see how it pans out. Maybe Large is even enough. For the player estates there are 2 possibilities: have allied estates touch each other so that players could build a single joined castle (if that is possible), or have them somewhat apart. Me may have to try this out a bit, before we decide. In any case both allied players should have the same distance / chance to capture their city. About cities not producing enough - again we need to find out if this is a problem or not. But if it is, I think the castles should produce the stone and iron and the cities the food and weapons. One thing we need to watch out for is not to make cities so big (population wise) that they cause lag in MP. Mathew: good point about assassins early in the game. Maybe it is indeed better not to have them. Or only have 1 to get that gate open (until we get ladders :) ).

No problem, Chris. Thanks for keeping this thread open. And thanks, Mathew, for your offer of help. I may come back to it in the future. I still have some more ideas up my sleeve :cool: Also, keep watching this thread here and feel free to comment. Never a bad idea to have an additional pair of eyes look over it. Now this is what I have in mind: The name and theme of the map is "A Tale of Two Cities". There are 2 village estates in the centre, which are actually well developed cities with city walls, towers and such. They will also have some guard posts, who will provide a (weak) defence of the free cities. The castles of the Lords are to the North / South of the cities - perhaps located on a hilltop. They are fairly small - big enough to build an interesting castle, but not so big, that the lords can set up a huge economy in them. They will have to depend on taking control of their city to get large amounts of supplies. The cities should have several gates in their city wall. The one close to "their" lord should be weakly defended and easily captured (and perhaps each player could get a few free assassins with their starting troops). The gate towards the rival city should be well fortified. There is also the possibility to walk around the cities. So players dont have to attack the oppsing city head on. They can also choose to attack from one side or try to go aound the city completely and attack the opposing castle right away. For a 1v1 it should be quite straight forward. For a 2v2 game, of course only one of the allies can control the city. The other one will have a supporting role and will depend on shipments of goods via the diplomacy menue from his ally. The map gets an evil twist if it is played as a 4 player ffa game without teams xD. In that case, the two players on the same side of the river will be immediate enemies and race for control of their city. Finally the two survivers will battle it out between them. I hope this gives you a good idea of what I have in mind. Let me know what you think and if you would like to have a go at making it, Vekta, I'd be very glad. There is no rush to get it completed - but I like your idea of using this thread to keep discussing and updating. Even the making of it could be good fun. :)

Congratulations, xiiMRcLeoN. If you found this one not very difficult - maybe you have just become very good as SHC2, or maybe you just hit upon the correct strategy for this mission :P In any case, you are the first of us to complete the Trial. I think that deserves a mention in the OP.

Hi Lord Vetka, like the title says: would you like to do a joined map projecct with me? I have an idea in my head for a Crusader 2 multiplayer map, which should be quite interesting. Unfortunately, I am not a very good artist and making maps which look beautiful is not really my strenght. From what I gather, you have quite some experience and you like map making. So a joined project could be the thing to do. Let me know if you are interested in principle, and I will tell you more about what I have in mind. Nigel

Whow - you got them all against you. Only the Shah and the Rat have gone on vacation :lol: GOOD LUCK

Hi Chris, you or some other admin may want to take a look at Denroth's uploaded map. The mini map picture is gone - at least for my browser. It also seem that he edited or tried to edit the upload. It is a very nice map, btw. I played it on multiplayer a few days ago - was a really fun match.

what :O That is a surprise. I would love to pay a SHC2 game in a night setting. What time did you play the missions? And also, what timezone do you live in?

One new feature that I have quite come to like is the charge ability, that macemen now have. When they are close enough to an enemy and you click on the enemy to attack, the macemen will run into a charging attack with a battle cry and loud bohey. On impact they will do a lot of damage, much more than in normal hand-to-hand fighting. That will be over in a few seconds and they need to rest to regain their strength after it, but it makes for some really nice battlefield taktics. Really good is to hold the enemy swordsmen with some pikemen or other defence strong units and run your macemen around to charge into their flanks or rear. I hav eliminated a lot of enemy swodsmen that way xD

I hope I am not stepping out of line by posting this, Chris. But this is a communication I saw from FireFly, posted on Steam : I thought is was worth sharing with you, guys. Chris, feel free to move this wherever you see fit.

That is odd. All my games have been played in the day. I have not seen a night with Crusader 2, yet (well, inside the game I mean :cool: ). I had thought, night was disabled for the time beeing. Perhaps it is a very odd bug at your end. Can you post a screenshot?

Yes, I made it and both the Sultana and I jointly stormed the castle of the last remaining Rat. :) I have to confess that I was not entirely unselfish, when I vowed to protect the Sultana in this mission. There is a Steam achievement, the Loyal Companion, attached to this mission, which you get if your ally survives the match with you. But to be honest, I was struggling at the beginning of this mission and in fact it was the Sultana, who came to my rescue. She saved my neck more than once in this battle and really it should be her who gets this achievement :D

This week I am starting on the second part of the Trail, the Breath Of The Infidel. In the first mission, I will be teamed up with the Sultana against the Slave King and two Rats. Having been brought up to behave like a gentleman, I shall to my best to protect the Sultana and make sure that we both survive this mission. We shall see, if I will be able to achieve that.

I just looked at the ones I have. They seem to range from 2 to 9 MB. Most of them are between 4 and 7 MB.

Talking of downloads, it may be worth adding another category: save games. Some players may want to share their save games a) for the purpose of bug hunting or for getting help because they are stuck in a certain mission. b) because they have reached an intersting situation in one of their games and it could be interesting/challenging for others to try this as well. Just a thought.

As far as I know, the new keys for camara rotation are now ALT-A and ALT-D I am not sure, though - apparantly it is in the new online manual of the game. (I am just forum posting today, won't have a chance to play the game until next Monday to try this out myself)

Nice picture :) A very interesting image, too. Is that a fog-of-war, that I see on the mini-map? Or am I interpreting this wrongly?

The pitty is, that the appearance of a virus like this can really hurt a small company like FireFly financially. I mean, they have launched the game, have made all their advertising campaigns and now they are really depending on as many people to buy the game as possibly. The appearance of a new virus that puts people off purchases must be the one thing they dont want just now. :what: Sure, the old fans will still by the game later (if it is good), but they will loose a lot of business from casual gamers, who would be interested now, but not in a few months time.

hehe, this sounds like they have arranged it so that the max of troops on the map is always 1000 if all lords max out their armies. By the way, I renamed the thread title from bragging to show your success. That sounds a bit more decent and civilized for our chivalreous community. All the same, we can show proudly here what we achieve :P Good going, xiiMaRcLeoN ! You might be the first of us to make it to the end.

Well, I suppose we should have one of these. A thread where we can brag - and of course compliment each other - about our progress along the Skirmish Trail. I will start this off by reporting that I have "Survived the Baptism" today - the first of 6 consecutive Skirmish Trails. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- And today, 12th October 2014, 19 days after launch of the game, xiiMaRcLeon completed the Trial as the first member of StrongholdNation to do so.

Thanks guys, for all the well meant comments. I may be a bit naive but not to the point where I would use my credit card carelessly on the internet. Perhaps I am even over-cauceous about that. If I can talk to someone on the phone or buy something in a shop, I will always do that before considering an online purchase. But thanks, Chris, this was exactly the sort of information I was looking for. And for once I am happy to be a Windows user. :) I will also make sure I stay away from downloading maps other than from this site or SHH. And yes, I think splitting the threads will be a good idea :P Thank you, Chris.

What I remember is, that there used to be a lot of talk about meat factories: i.e. meat production beeing highly over-powered and players feeding their whole population with hunter's huts and making a fortune by selling excess meat on top of that. It got to the point where mp games were beeing played as : no meat games. I dont know if it was adjusted in a later patch, though.

This is cute :lol: What actually is it? A carter horse?