which are delieverd to the armory, then used for your troops after you hire a peasant for a certain amount of gold. Blacksmith for swords and maces, leather tanner for leather armor, etc. To make soldiers you need to make a barracks, armory, and weapon smiths. You're basically managing taxation with unhappiness to try to milk your peasants for as much money as you can.
Stronghold crusader ii series#
To combat this, you can build gardens and nice things (which makes people less work efficient), build inns and provide ale (which take a series of building to set up and maintain), etc. Taxation and other mean activites pisses people off, and if they get too pissed they leave your castle. For the most part, your economy is getting production buildings set up for food, weapons, and building to help your popularity so you can tax people. You take advantage of these resources and spend most of the game fighting over them as they're needed to manage your castle's economy. Stone for the wall and several building ingredients, wood for 90% of the buildings you'll make and to make different types of weapons, farm land for farms (there are several types of farms, each with their positive and negative traits), etc.
The basic formula for Stronghold is dumping you into a big map with several different types of resources (iron, stone, farm land, pitch, etc.) and having you build a castle with it.
The series is similar to Age of Empires and is nothing like Crusader Kings II. Currently Steam and GOG both have Stronghold HD and Stronghold Crusader HD available, and Steam has Stronghold 2, so if you're really interested you can get them from there. Stronghold 3 was pretty awful, so if you want to look into the series avoid that at all costs. The Stronghold series has been a childhood favorite of mine, so I like to think I know a decent amount of them.