But even in the heat of battle, you must keep an eye on resources, as running out of food is a sure-fire recipe for losing a siege. The more exotic the workshops you build, the flashier the troops you can create. The crux of the game lies in your battle-tactics – positioning your archers so that they have the best sight-lines, making sure you have crossbowmen at hand to counter incoming Whirling Dervishes (who damage all surrounding Crusaders) and so on. Sometimes you start a mission with a fully realised stronghold, but must prepare it for a protracted siege, and that’s where the real fun of Stronghold Crusader II kicks in. Increase the diversity of the food on offer (and build things like bakeries and ale-houses), and the masses will become happier providing the opiate of religion (via churches or mosques, depending which side you’re playing as) makes them happier still, so you can then crank up taxation and create more exotic fighting units with the extra gold you make. Farms can only be set up on fertile land, which makes them vulnerable to enemy raids. The game takes a satisfyingly first-principles approach: wood is the key resource, as it lets you construct buildings, and you must mine stone for your castle-building and iron to make weapons for your troops. In the Crusader campaign, you’re preparing the ground for Richard The Lionheart’s arrival in the Holy Land, so at first you concentrate on resource-gathering, before being gently introduced to all the other gameplay aspects. There are two single-player tutorial-storylines, one casting you as the invading Crusader force, and the other as Saladin and his men. Like its predecessors, Stronghold Crusader II chronicles the Crusades. So when you launch giant boulders at a castle wall, say, you dislodge individual stones in an authentically real-life manner.

The gameplay, and the isometric view, may be reassuringly familiar to those who played RTS games back in the day, but other aspects of the game feel polished and modern: it’s properly 3D-modelled, and constructed around a rigorous physics engine. Developer Firefly Studios, a tiny British concern, even funded Stronghold Crusader II independently. The original Stronghold Crusader (itself a sequel to 2001’s Stronghold) came out in 2008, so there’s a sense that this latest iteration is something of a labour of love. Yet the RTS genre has somehow fallen out of favour – perhaps because it is always better when played with keyboard and mouse rather than console gamepad – and it is a rare pleasure to find a new one. Nowadays, playing a real-time strategy game feels like taking a step back in time – it seems incredible to recall that the likes of Age of Empires and Command & Conquer used to sell millions of copies and top games charts around the world.

Game crusader 2