100 Hours of: Stronghold Crusader
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One of my favorite stories to tell people is how I once spent eight hours playing a videogame on my PC, and I love this story because it almost always makes my listeners audibly gasp.
Here’s what happened.
Way back, eons ago in the mythic age known as 2002, I bought computer games at a retail establishment called Sam’s Club. For clarification the store was one of a number of “giant-box” stores like WallMart, Target, or KMart and within it people could buy food, clothes, office supplies, pet food, furniture, and most importantly computer games. This last section was my favorite part of the store. While my Dad looked at tires and my Mom bought our groceries for the week I would gaze at the shrink-wrapped cardboard boxes decorated with titles like Diablo II, Rise of Nations, and whatever Putt-Putt game they had on sale. One day I discovered a box decorated with a bearded man holding an ax, while in the background soldiers laid siege to a stone castle. This man wore a crowned helmet and a plain red cross on his chest. The words on the front of the box read, Stronghold: Crusader and it had a flip-open cover where inside was a small diorama of a castle being sieged with explanations for how players could create similar moments in their own games. I closed the box and stared in awe at the man on the cover who I would later learn was King Richard I, a.k.a. The Lionheart. Matching my gaze he stared at me unimpressed and clutching his ax until at some point I lifted the box, placed it in my parent’s shopping cart, tried talking them into letting me buy it, returned it to the shelf when they said no (or at least not today), and then successfully bought it a few weeks later.
Stronghold Crusader quickly consumed the hours of my day that weren’t dedicated to school, sleep, watching Lord of the Rings, or thinking about girls who would never date me. I was obsessed with this videogame, so much so that, getting back to the introductory point, I once spent eight hours straight playing the game. In a marathon session I still cannot process to this day, I sat in front of my computer building a castle, steadily growing an army of knights and pikemen, and fought alongside three allies against four Caliph’s. The fight claimed somewhere around 100,000 digital soldiers’ lives, but by the end of it there was an incredible perception of victory.
I also had a feeling that I needed to pee…desperately.
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Standing up, I popped my back and looked outside where the sun was setting, and for whatever reason I looked back down to my PC space and observed a small organism. My father is an exterminator, so I was familiar with the various species of arthropods that lived and thrived in east Texas. This specific little organism was a Latrodectus mactans, which is the scientific name for the Southern Black Widow spider.
And its web was literally less than an inch away from where my foot had been for the last eight hours of the day.
Putting aside the serendipity of one of the most venomous species of spider in the Northern American continent setting up shop next to me while I played the longest and deadliest match of Stronghold Crusader I ever played, this story is fun to tell because it reminds me how much joy and dedication I derived from simply playing the game in the first place. I’ve mentioned Stronghold Crusader in several of the essays I’ve written for this website, and with each name drop there’s been a steadily growing frustration that manifests in a thought: Why haven’t I written anything about this game I spent literal days worth of time playing? The worst part of this question is the answer: I don’t know.
I think I know now, or at least I think that I think that I know.
Or maybe I don’t know, and just think that I think that I know.
You know?
Moving on.
When I wrote my 100 Hours of: Fallout 4 essay, I suspect on some level I was using it as a beta test to see if I could write something meaningful about spending 100 hours with a specific videogame. I’ll be honest, I don’t think the essay came out as great as I wanted it to be, but I did like the structure of just asking questions and trying to provide answers. When I consider Stronghold Crusader as a work of software, I’m left with a great number of questions, most of them being the same ones I asked myself when I was writing about Fallout 4.
So if my reader will indulge me (more so than they usually do) I’d like to try and ask a few questions about Stronghold Crusader.
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Question #1 What is Stronghold Crusader?
Stronghold Crusader is an isometric, real-time strategy(RTS), city building and business management simulator with a point and click interface. Taking place in unspecified, and almost entirely fictional regions of the Middle East, Stronghold Crusader is historical fiction about the European Crusades and includes non-playable characters(npcs) based on actual historical figures, and then several from the previous game in the series. Developed by Firefly Studios Ltd. and released on 27 September 2002, the game is also a sequel to Firefly’s previous game Stronghold which had been released the previous year. Stronghold game was historical fiction set entirely in Europe and had more narrative focus. It also had bears instead of lions and I thought that was pretty flipping rad (bears are cool(m’kay)). Both games are about establishing an economy to generate enough capital to build a castle, recruit an army, and lay siege to an opponent's castle to defeat them.
I note that I played Stronghold after Stronghold Crusader and while I did enjoy that game, there was something about the latter that appealed to me more.
I’ll be completely honest, the appeal were the films The Lord of the Rings, and then later Kingdom of Heaven, but I’ll discuss that motivation more in-depth when I get to Question #5 though.
Stronghold Crusader is a war videogame which means that while there is a building and business management simulator as a structure, all of those choices are ultimately to serve the bottom line that players are trying to raise armies to fight. The key to victory then is optimizing resources like wood, stone, and iron while also making sure peasants have access to food. Every decision players will make is either ensuring the defense of their keep (so in that sense I believe it could be argued Stronghold Crusader is also a Tower-defense videogame), or making offensive movements against other players.
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Stronghold Crusader does have non-conflict missions where players are given a piece of land and from there are encouraged to just build an economy and then a castle. These portions are purely building simulators and honestly pretty fun in terms of just making something. Likewise the game also offers a sandbox setting where players can, in effect, create their own levels for actual fights. This sandbox allows players to determine the size of maps, the number of players within said maps, and then can adjust the environment however they see fit including placing trees, water, swamps, wild animals, ruined fortresses, etc. In this way players can build not only castles, but the spaces and world where their castles exist.
This latter section was a major appeal to me when I was playing Stronghold Crusader, and I believe now is the perfect time to ask the next question.
Question #2 What can you do in Stronghold Crusader?
The simple answer is build. The complex answer is to build whatever I want.
Like I observed in my 100 Hours of: Fallout 4 essay, I really love bullet points but I don’t get a lot of opportunities to use them in my personal and professional writing. Since this is my website, I’ll indulge and provide a list of all the wonderful structures and elements Stronghold Crusader allows me to build.
I can build castles.
I can build an army of nothing but archers.
I can build farms for harvesting apples, hops, wheat, or cheese from dairy cows.
I can build stone towers and fill them with crossbowmen and ballistas.
I can build iron mines to harvest metal for armor and weapons.
I can build quarries to gather stones for castles or for catapults.
I can build an army of nothing but monks.
I can build woodcutter posts to hire lumberjacks to cut down trees .
I can build weapon manufacturing shops like blacksmiths, woodworkers, and leather tanners to make arms which allow me to recruit troops.
I can build a Mercenary post and hire native arab troops to fight for me
I can build elaborate castle walls along with battlements to provide cover for archers along the wall.
I can build churches, chapels, and even a monastery to give my citizens access to religious services (though I can’t build mosques which is more than a little frustrating(and a tad problematic in hindsight)).
I can build an army of nothing but fire-throwers.
I can build an engineer’s guide to hire men who can in turn build siege devices such as ballistas, catapults, trebuchets, battering rams, siege towers, or even just shields made of wood to distract enemy archers.
I can build moats around castle walls, or even just around the keep itself and have soldiers, engineers, or slaves dig the moat.
I can build gardens, statues, maypoles, and shrines to increase the happiness of my citizens so that I can increase taxes.
I can build gallows, gibbets, torture chambers, and stocks to increase fear in my citizens and thus increase productivity.
I can build an army of nothing but knights on horse-back.
This list is admittedly deceptive because while building is the core mechanic of the game, Stronghold Crusader is as much about strategy as it is building. I could build a castle entirely of tall towers, but if I don’t generate income I won’t be able to afford archers to station in those towers and thus protect me against the seven enemy opponents (and yes, I made all of my opponents Duc de Puce, a.k.a. The Rat(I want to feel like a flipping unstoppable boss sometimes, okay?)). Determining which structures to build, when to build them, where to build them, and then how to use the resources collected all coalesce together to create a series of interesting choices (*adds a penny to the Sid Meier reference jar*). Stronghold Crusader, like any good real time strategy game, is about watching choices stack over time, because even if I choose not to even build a castle (as my childhood friend Kevin did when I got him hooked on the game) that choice will have consequences that will determine later choices from how best to defend my keep from enemy npcs to whether or not it was a boring decision to build an army of nothing but archers on horseback.
It was by the way, but only after the 10th battle.
Speaking of choices, I have a perfect segway to my next question.
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Question #3 What does Stronghold Crusader offer the Player?
Simply put, Stronghold Crusader offers me a toolbox, and from there just provides them incalculable numbers of choices.
Let me explain.
From a structural perspective Stronghold Crusader was, much like the first Stronghold, all about navigating a menu interface. Players had, along the bottom of the screen, a small menu that took up about one eighth of the screen, and contained within a rectangle in the middle was a series of structures that would be prompted by pressing an icon along the base of the screen. Just like the toolbar options in the PC game Pharaoh, Stronghold Crusader’s toolbox was divided by building function. One option would provide players with structures that were focused on military action, while another was focused on food production, and another was centered on religious structures. Depending on the situation I would have to navigate this toolbox to determine what was the best course of action.
For example if I was playing a non-combat mission I would prioritize food production and build my granaries and then begin determining whether I wanted to focus on growing apples, bread, cheese, or establishing hunting posts for the production of meat. By contrast if I was fighting seven enemy npcs I would establish my granaries immediately, but then I would select the military options and begin recruiting soldiers and building towers and walls to defend my keep. Within that last choice there are sub-choices because players are given multiple tower structures to choose from. To wit: there’s tall cylindrical towers that give archers more options for observing enemy npcs from greater distances. However that tower can only accommodate five archers, and its structural integrity is pretty weak making it easy to knock down with a catapult. Another tower, which is also cylindrical can accommodate almost 30-40 archers, along with a massive ballista and has a high hit-point value meaning it will take multiple strikes from a catapult before it implodes or is totally destroyed. These choices are important, but likewise is the reality of resource management because the small tower requires 10 units of stones while the larger tower requires 40. This is another instance where I have to manage choices carefully because I will receive a small unit of stones at the start of the game, and if I have not used my wood stores to build a quarry then I will be unable to build the rest of my castle.
And to point the most obvious part out to my reader: I'm a huge flipping nerd.
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After that obvious point however is the important observation which is that I’ve only described the first few opening choices of a single game. And all of these choices will be further compounded by the realities of the landscape that I’m fighting in, the npcs I'll be fighting, the availability of certain resources, and whether or not I even want to build a castle at all. And, finally, all of these choices will revolve around that central toolbox.
Toolboxes are common structures in building simulator games, and if I had more time I would be happy to explain how they operate in traditional console games as well. Focusing on my 100 hours playing Stronghold Crusader I recognise in hindsight how much wonderful agency that toolbox gave me. There was a confidence as a player that anything and everything I was or could build would be contained within that toolbox, and as I assembled armies of 1000 or more soldiers that confidence was only further instilled. Even in games that I lost I recognised that that the loss was not because of the game being flawed (though try explaining that to a hormone-addled teenager who just lost to The Wolf(again)) it was my fault for not making the right choices with the tools I had access to.
It’s no small wonder then that when I tried playing the Sequel, and discovered the toolbox had been buried beneath a mountain of superficial aesthetic changes, it didn’t take long for me to abandon that game.
Which, on that note…
Question #4 Why did I play it more than Stronghold Crusader 2?
The answer is rather obvious, Stronghold Crusader 2 just wasn’t good. And that sucks because I desperately wanted it to be good. Like its predecessor, Stronghold Crusader 2 was a building and business management simulator where players would be given a keep, access to resources, and told to build an economy to eventually assemble an army and defeat some enemy npc.
I’ll be real, when I originally spotted advertisements for Stronghold Crusader 2 I was impressed because the game had abandoned the isometric perspective, and was now a 3D rendered videogame. I could get a 3-dimensional perspective of my castle, buildings, soldiers, etc, and this meant that the world of Stronghold Crusader 2 had a depth to it, not just in the castle but in its atmosphere and settings. Rather than playing what amounts to a flat game board with the illusion of 3D space, Stronghold Crusader 2 felt like it was a real world that I was building and fighting in.
Graphics, or more more accurately “better” graphics, has consistently driven the videogame market and developers have recognised this. In one of the most perfect examples I can summon there was a controversy when Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker was released for the Nintendo Gamecube because its cartoony and quasi-chibi perspective disappointed players who were expecting updated, a.k.a. “better” graphical quality. PC Gamers especially have demonstrated concerns for graphical quality over the course of videogame history, and the sheer existence of the subreddit r/pcmasterrace is a testament to that sentiment. The point is, Stronghold Crusader 2 was following a trend of developers recognising what had come before and drastically adjusting the visual interface in the hopes of keeping a fan-base while also attracting new players.
The only problem is, the game just wasn’t as good.
You can pretty a game up all you want, but if it ain’t fun no amount of graphics is going to change that.
I don’t have too much more to offer as an answer to Question #4, but I wanted to consider the sequel to Stronghold Crusader because, again, I’ve spent well over 100 hours playing the first game. That amount of time should be proof enough that there was a quality to the interface that surpassed the superficial “improvements,” and just adding 3D visuals did little to nothing to pull me away from the original game. This is one of the reasons why, when I listen to read conversations about “better” graphics I typically will either stay out of the conversation, or I will sigh and move on because, it’s worth repeating: “better” visual quality cannot, and does not make a better game.
Stronghold Crusader 2 missed the mark of capturing the same energy of the previous games because it focused too much on creating a new and largely superficial exterior.
With that said, it seems the perfect time to ask the next and (mostly) final question.
Image Provided by Moby Games.
Question #5 Why did I give Stronghold Crusader 100 hours?
I said it earlier already so I’ll say it again: Lord of the Rings and Kingdom of Heaven.
The early 2000s were a great time for movies about dudes (and a few lady-dudes(but no gender-neutral dudes unfortunately)) fighting with swords. The silver screen flickered magnificently with Viggo Mortensen stabbing orcs through the chest and Orland Bloom shooting arrows into the throats of Uruk-Hai, and then later fighting muslim and Christian soldiers in the desert. The latter film still holds a place in my heart because I remember my Dad picking me up from school early one Friday afternoon and driving straight to the movie theater to watch Kingdom of Heaven. Whether it was the epic battle sequences, the gorgeous cinematography, the sword fights, the philosophical musings about morality vs. religion, or Edward Norton straight killing it in that metal mask playing King Baldwin IV I left the movie theater obsessed.
I also, and this is a core memory, couldn’t help but notice that an audio-file of the Muslim army charging into Jerusalem was the exact same audio file that played when I would right click in Stronghold Crusader and send my own armies into battle.
I was, once upon a December, a teenage boy with little to no agency, no sex appeal, mountains of insecurity, and owned a computer with little to no internet connection. Today, I am still all of things…okay, that isn’t true. I have a much better internet connection now.
The aesthetic of these films arrived in my life at a time when I wanted some kind of control over life, or at least some sense that in the midst of all the darkness that was puberty, as well as the early post-9/11 world, there could be a way to overcome and emerge stronger than what I currently was and would likely remain for the foreseeable future. I couldn’t actually sword-fight orcs and cave trolls, nor could I lay siege to the city of Jerusalem (The United Nations was particular clear about that last one), but playing Stronghold Crusader gave a chance to create my own battles as well as learn more about the history and engineering of warfare. I started reading about the crusades and leaders such as Richard the Lionheart and Saladin, and this in turn laid the foundation for a love of history. And as I watched Lord of the Rings and Kingdom of Heaven over and over again I wanted to recreate the battles I watched on screen.
It was an obsession, there’s no other accurate word in the English language for it.
I played over 100 hours of Stronghold Crusader because, even if it lacked the cinematic quality of these films, it gave me an interactive control over a comparable aesthetic that I was able to effectively live in. I had my “sword era” to use the common parlance, and Stronghold Crusader let me explore it until I was satisfied and moved onto my outlaw/gangster era with Red Dead Redemption and Martin Scorsese movies.
Question(?) #6 What else is there to say?
Nothing really. I’d just be repeating myself if I tried to formulate any further thoughts or analyses.
I can’t stand content for its own sake, so I'll try to keep this last part short.
All I had, and have, and will have in this life is time and choice. Stronghold Crusader occupied my life and a great chunk of my time for well over 100 hours, and to be honest, I’d speculate at this point in my life it would be closer to 200 hours. The energy of youth, the lack of necessity for full-time employment, and a TON of Coca-Cola kept me fixed on my computer screen building castles, assembling armies, and experimenting with strategies to see how I would best establish an economy before any of my opponents. It was a foundational game in my formative years, and despite the overwhelming nostalgia, I feel confident arguing that the enduring appeal of the game was in its design.
Stronghold Crusader rules, and remains a wonderful example of real-time strategy and building simulation.
I built hundreds of simulated castles, sent thousands of simulated dudes to fight and die, and taxed thousands of simulated citizens who complained that they didn’t have enough money to clothe their children all while oblivious to the fact that a black widow rested an inch away from my exposed pinky toe.
It was a choice to play this game over and over again, like it was a choice to struggle through writing this essay (and seriously if you’re still here and still reading thank you I had no intention of making this essay so dang long), and it was a choice to write something that wasn’t just a list of nostalgia-driven pithy anecdotes.
I’ll end with one last thought: there is nothing so satisfying as watching my troops flood into a ruined castle that, all but a moment ago, was teaming with archers and knights ready to defeat mine. The sounds of fallen lords begging for mercy could only ever be outmatched by the sound of the flute in the lobby music, because it meant it was time to start building all over again.
Image Provided by Moby Games.
Joshua “Jammer” Smith
6.30.2025
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