Nigel

Good idea - I may actually pick them up and do something with them sometime.

This was a really good game. I enjoyed it a lot. Also, big credits for Chris for going solo against us. Although I do not feel too bad about that. For while this story is told from my perspective - and I make a big show about my macemen scaling the walls - the truth is, that my own contribution was rather small and Eagle Prince carried the real weight of the attacks. Maybe indeed Chris made a mistake in the building phase. I wouldn't be able to tell. But Eagle Prince is the true champion of that day. Here is his castle on the day of his victory. :D Gah, this post ended up on a new page. Make sure to read page 1 for the full story.

After a short bombardment, Eagle Prince managed to bring his ladders against the walls. My macemen were the first to scale to the top. But although we crossed over the first ring of his defences and even captured the gatehouse, we were beaten back again. We tried to form up again in front of his our gate. But that whole army you see there, was completely eliminated by his knights. Unfortunately, I have no picture of that fight. My men were too busy bleeding to death to make me a battle painting. :o We re-grouped and went into a second wave of attack. This time Eagle's knights were able to break through the inner wall. Finally, this was the last push. Under fire from Lord Chris' crossbowmen, the princely knights managed to storm the keep.

This was a really nice game. I enjoyed it a lot. I managed to take a few screenshots and will happily share them with you here in a small battle report. We decided to play a 1v2 and as Chris (red) was the strongest fighter of us all, he kindly agreed to be the solo player. Eagle Prince (green) teamed up with me (orange) and we made the rule not to attack until we had all reached the rank of Duke. That was convenient for me, because I am usually a slow starter. This is my castle in 1076, a time when both Lord Chris and Eagle Prince had reached popuations of over 100 peasants. And yes, Chris and I both learned that the secret for taking screenshots in SH2 is ALT+q :) We took our time leasurely. After 2 hours of building I was quite happy with my pretty castle. I even build a water cistern near the granary. I must have spent too much time in the desert. But now it was time to attack. Lord Chris had - by error or by cheeky design - obtained an estate right in front of my doorstep. That had to be my first target. When I looked over to Lord Chris' castle, I saw how much more structured and organized it was than mine. Still, he mentioned that he had "messed up" during the building phase. I wonder what it would have looked like, if all had gone to plan. Eagle Prince lost no time. Here you see him take over the estate next to Lord Chris' castle.

This looks like a fantastic castle, Strife. I look forward to laying siege to it. By the way, can it be easily converted into a multiplayer map to play the siege against a human opponent? It looks like it could :)

Ok, the game is up. Tokamaps, we are waiting for you to join us on Gameranger. [sNH]Lord_Chris is hosting.

Congratulations, Floki. I look forward to seeing that map :D And yes, zip is so much more convenient. The Windows Explorer opens it directly without the need for any other program. I, too, would be glad if you could switch over to that archiving format.

Hi guys, starting as Freeman sounds good to me. I am not sure I have Forest Realm yet, but I am going to download it right now. See you on the battlefield in less than 1 hour :D

Glad to see you back again, Matthew. And yes, there is not excuse needed for spending time with your friends and family. :) Hope you will enjoy the site again.

It so happens that I have some time on Sunday afternoon, but it has to be earlier than the evening. How about 15:00 CET (=14:00 London time)? That would give me 3 hours to play.

Hehe, Strife, I experienced the same - lots of time spent on looking for more pictures of this castle. But it was fun looking up that castle and finding out more about it. I learned that this was the place in Normandy where William the Conqueror was born. He, the illegitimate son of the Duke of Normandy and the beautiful daughter of a simple tanner, would go on an invade England in 1066 to end the line of Anglo Saxon kings and establish a Norman dynasty. The map of the castle is only a draft. The walls are there and I have put some farms and buildings in just to show where the viallage could be and the farming area. Knowing the story about William's birth, I could not resist and place a tannery directly into the caslte. I shall leave the rest to your imagination :) Castle_Falaise_Nigel.zip

This is an interesting challange, which I would love to take part. Unfortunately, like Strife, I will not be able to complete the map by the deadline. I will be travelling from tomorrow evening onwards and essentially return on Saturday. So I have this evening and a few hours on Saturday to work on it. Strife, why don't we go agead and both submit our draft maps as far as we have them by the deadline? Then we can finish them later for uploading to the download section. :)

Good that you explain a few more details, Eagle Prince. That helps to know the situation and give better advice. Like Chris said, "to whom it may concern" would not be the best approach for an application letter. It is very formal, but also very impersonal. Good for sending a complaint letter or if you only want to record some information for the files but don't want to address anyone in particular. I sometimes write those "to whom it may concern" letters which then continue like "It is hereby confirmed that the following experiments were done in compliance with the following ISO standard ...blablabla... and that all required data checks according to our Quality Control System have been conducted." Signed, dated and hopefullly no more questions asked. I know that in some languages "Dear" would only be used for friends or people you know very well. But in English it is actually also a formal address. "Dear Prof. Dr. Soandso" would be perfectly acceptable. Even if you know that the letter will first be opened by his assistant.

This sounds very interesting. If you are willing to host, EaglePrince, I would quite like to try it out sometime.

I know I am late to the party, but finally managed to see at the maps now. All of them look really great and I can see that Lord Chris had a hard time to make a judgement all. :) But congratulations, Floki. I think this was really deserved. I look forward to seeing what we may do with those beautiful maps in the future :D

This is really good news. Well, it may or may not happen, but at least it is not a clear "No, we are done with it". There are 2 things which come to my mind immediately (one is more and one less realistic). 1. Saving game in multiplayer. That would be really great to allow long and epic battles and should not be too hard to implement. 2. Making scripted events from singleplayer also possible in multiplayer. This may (or may not) be more difficult to implement. But it would finally allow us to make multiplayer scenarios, like we can do in Crusader 2. And it would be even better, since the scripting of SH2 works much better than in Crusader 2. But it would open up a new way of gaming for us.

This tournament was played last weekend. Lo and behold, it was one of the lone champions - Skur - who carried the day and won it. I was not able to watch it live, but going by the final scores there must have been some really interesing fights. 1v2 sound unfair? But some champions out there are amazingly good. And the maps were chosen to give the solo player a reasonable chance with a slight resource advantage and a V shape position (i.e. avoiding a sandwich situation). But the players in the teams were no beginners either. Skur was able to win 3 out of 4 matches against the 2-opponent teams and he was actually also the only one, to defeat the teams. Going by the scores, Igi_tanas must have managed to at least kill one opponent and survive another match until the time was up. Sergiu is going to put the matches up on YouTube. The first one can be seen already. Others will follow over the coming days.

Amazed - and pleased - that I managed to win this one. After weeks of running head to head with Tokamaps, it takes me again into the lead, but only 20 seconds :) That was a good race. I look forward to the new challanges.

Well, like Micha! says, I don't think there will be much more work done on Crusaser 2. I know they have started working on "Stronghold Next", so Crusader 2 may still see an occasional patch to iron out some issues or add some fine tuning, but I would not expect any major content changes at this stage. The best we can do is make sure we know what is important for SH:Next and let them know.

Well, I do not not the answer for you, but I would also be interested in hearing it :)

Since I will be traveling over the weekend, leaving tomorrow morning, I am submitting my entry already today. This is a really nice challange and, even though I completed the map already 1 year ago when it first came out, I enjoyed doing it again. I remember that on my initial try back then I only just succeeded by bringing in the last apple a few seconds before the deadline. Now I managed to improve over it. This time it was the flour that was last to come in. The days had just turned from 18 to 19 and the time showed 2:00 minutes left, when the final sack reached the stockpile :) In the attachment I have zipped 2 savegames. One immediately prior to the end and the other one a little bit earlier, so that you, Chris, get a chance to see bit more of the game. Will be interesting to see if you guys can beat it. :D the-contract_savegames.zip

It was a good game, Eagle Prince. My rusty army certainly was no match for your knights, but I am quite proud of myself, that I managed to beat off your first assault. Tokamaps, you sent us some really interesting maps. We should play them sometime - especially the scenario one. Now I will be really busy until after Easter, but if you guys want to go ahead with a game, please do. I should get back into the saddle towards end of March, early April. :)

Or limit yourself to, say, max. 12 knights at a time. It is not unusal for players to play with such "house rules" to make their game more interesing. I have seen this beeing discussed for other games, too. A quite good one for certain games is this one: "only keep 1 save game file". With that you can only ever go forward and are not able to go back to an earlier save, if you find yourself in a difficult situation. You cannot just wipe out your mistakes from the past, you have to accept them and deal with them. Quite realisitc. XD

I am open to start either at 20:00 or 21:00 CET (= 19:00 or 20:00 UK time). I will just make sure I will be on Steam and Gameranger from 20:00 CET onward and see what happens :)

Tokamaps, this video is fantastic. I only managed to watch the first 2 hours so far - and I skipped the building phase. But it is great. Especially Eagle Prince's great attack at between 1:11 and 1:20. I was glued to the screen and could not take my eyes off it. Amazing how you managed to survive it. Also, it is very good, that you found out how you can jump to certain key moments in the video. That is a very helpful feature. You have a real talent for video making :)