Recommended difficulty: Easy or Normal(For the first time at least!). If you want an even more interesting challenge, try hard and/or very hard!
You find yourself stuck in a hilly terrain and you build a base in a large island in a river. Rumors of bandits and wolves closing in on the camp scares people away, making the population tough to deal with at first. And if that doesn't make things bad enough, the Snake wants to kill you!
This map poses a different type of challenge. Keeping the Snake's forces from killing you, and keeping wolves and bandits from terrorizing your people! The only weapons you can use are bows and spears, much like the missions in the early military campaign for Stronghold.
This is my first map uploaded to Stronghold Heaven, so I'd appreciate it if everyone tried it out and tell me if it was fun!
This is a fun motte-and-bailey map, but don't let your guard down. You have to deal with quite a lot of wolves, then it settles down for a while, then the Snake starts turning up the heat. Although the map layout and the lack of stone makes for a pretty obvious castle layout, it is still fun. The hills are well done, but with a few sharp edges that could be smoothed out. Still with all the trees it looks good, like rolling hill country, and you can have some nice skirmishes out in the open before the invasions get big.
A few tips from an old mapmaker:
Don't have bandits at the same time as an invasion. They fight each other, and then you get the victory music while columns of spearmen are marching on your gates. If you want people to be unhappy because there are enemy troops in their gardens, you could set a plague to come a couple of months after the invasion, an effect which is hardly ever used by mapmakers, and I don't know why.
I would have had the lake in the mountains flowing down into the valley. It looks a little weird as you have mountains and hills all around a big marsh. You could put the lake on med. height surrounded by higher terrain and cap it off with a dam which would look very cool. A technique to make good-looking marshes is to place random strips of land, especially around the edges which gives a more gradual transition from dry land to waist-high wetlands.