Anyone here pick up Stronghold Crusader 2 yet? If so, what’s your opinion?
I was addicted to Stronghold 2, but avoided Stronghold 3 like the plague due to poor reviews.
I haven't tried Crusader no, but I'll certainly put in my $0.02 on 2 vs 3. Stronghold 2 was a fantastic game. I loved it to death. But I just couldn't get into 3. The interface was more clunky in feel, the difficulty ramped up way too quickly at the beginning, and some of the things you took for granted in the earlier games didn't work well anymore.
Example: Buildings like the Barracks and Armory, that had stone structure and could be used as part of your wall, had placement problems. The collision-box around them was large enough that they couldn't touch each other at all, and had a minimum gap that was large enough to march troops through. However, it would allow you to make that gap small enough that you could
no longer put a connecting wall between them. Wall placement had a minimum distance between connection points.
Issues like that simply made it infuriating to play.
Supposedly they patched a lot of that later, but I don't know how much of an improvement it was. I should take another look at it one of these days. But I was so discouraged that I just never returned to it.