Another vignette showed a catapult smashing down a separate castle wall, tearing it away brick by brick. Our sword-wielding soldiers wisely dropped their weapons and instead tackled the wall with pickaxes. (We say the game does the real thing justice.) Then he commanded a chunk of our army to siege a castle wall. 'We've got full rotations and zooming, and that means we can do some graphical touches.' To show off the team's latest effects wizardry, Harris inflicted a locust storm on the peasants in our demo, all while joking he didn't know what a real locust storm would be like. 'The original Stronghold: Crusader was 2-D, and now we're in a year of 3-D engines,' Harris explained. will also impress old-school Stronghold fans, as will the 3-D engine, which ensures player architects can build castle walls in eight different directions rather than be restricted to Crusader's previous tile-based foundation system. Massive advancements in graphics and simulation A.I. Stronghold: Crusader is its sequel it alone sold over two million copies since 2002.' Three more sequels have joined the roster in the ensuing years, and now, Firefly has freed itself from publisher restrictions with plans to develop Stronghold: Crusader 2 with some help from the crowdfunding platform Gambitious.%Gallery-192690% Crusader 2 is title based on the historical Crusades that swept across the Old World in the first half of the second millennium AD, and the developers have focused much more heavily on the setting's authenticity and polish. It was a surprise hit for publisher Take-Two, and it's gone on to sell six million copies around the world. 'There weren't many castle-building games around then – or any, as far as we really knew. The idea was to create a mix of RTS plus sim plus castle-builder,' Harris told us.

During the demo, Firefly Senior Producer Paul Harris would not shy away from what sets it apart from other games in a similar genre and his company's direction going forward. Recently, the team at Firefly demoed the PC game in its pre-alpha state for Joystiq, showcasing improvements made to the mechanics from previous iterations in the series, both in the warfare aspect and on the castle sim side. After a slough of mixed reviews for its sequels, developer Firefly Studios says its pulling out all the stops to ensure they can deliver quality with its upcoming RTS-sim Stronghold: Crusader 2.

Stronghold crusader 2 gameplay