Map Designed by Merle Hofmann aka: Lord Hofmann @ Stronghold Heaven,
aka: Merle the Conqueror. Map Tester and Administrator of the former Stronghold-Knights fan website.
Description/Storyline:
Despite the fact that this land has 2 rivers flowing in opposite directions and the banks of those rivers looking very lush, there is very little farmland available. There certainly isn't enough farmland to feed 4 castles. Hence the tension and hostility of your neighbors.
The greed of your neighbors has become quite evident by the brazen attacks upon your farms. Access is denied to these farmlands quite often by your opponents. You have had enough and have vowed to destroy all of your neighbors castles. Who will reign supreme?
Map Terrain Features Include:
1.) "Caves" (Which in reality are merely opening between the rock walls).
2.) "Himalayan heights" (which will not accommodate any troop placement on this map).
Map Designer Notes:
This Stronghold Crusader Extreme Multiplayer map has been extensively re-edited from my original "Two Towers" Stronghold Crusader Multiplayer map using the Stronghold Crusader Extreme Map Editor. Important warning this new Stronghold Crusader Extreme version will cause an Stronghold Crusader game crash if you load it into and attempt to play it from within the Stronghold Crusader game title.
Play options for up to 4 players, human or AI, are fairly open ended.
Originally designed as a 1 human vs. 1 human game with 2 AIs united against the human opponents, or as a 4 human player game. **The map can support many custom made AI castles, provided that they are not overly large or use moats.** This map can lend itself to many other interesting scenarios. Try "Deathmatch" settings, advantage to the AIs (ie; 40k gold computer).
This map will also function as a "single" player map. Simply choose the button for "Crusader Extreme" within the main menu, then select the "Custom Game" icon on the subsequent menu page in order to select and load the map for "single" player mode.
Reported Play Tester Problems:
Extreme ability to drop in troops - A play tester reported that if you try to use the "drop in troops" ability to place troops into a cave that the majority of the troops will disappear.
This really isn't a problem with the map, it is merely a situation of not being able to drop troops onto rocks. The troops landing on the rocks will simply disappear and this is due to the games parameters. Simple solution don't drop troops onto rocky areas.
They also reported that their game crashed shortly afterwards. However, to this date I have been unable to recreate or replicate the situation that supposedly caused the game to crash. So basically this crashing problem is unconfirmed.
AI Castle Building Problems:
None of the original 'out of the box' AI castles experienced any building problems. I did use the map to test a numerous custom made AI castles and many of those custom castles did build correctly on this "4 Keep" version of the map. Those custom castles with moats did not dig the moats because the terrain is too high to allow the digging of moats.
Comments:
One word of warning that everyone should know is that all maps created or re-edited with the Stronghold Crusader Extreme Editor are not backwards compatible with the Stronghold Crusader game title. So if you load an Stronghold Crusader Extreme map into an Stronghold Crusader game the Stronghold Crusader game will crash. The mad scientist in me just had to run this theory in a test to satisfy my own curiousity.
Over the years I have played many of the custom maps from this site's library. Many are very good and I need to make more of an effort to rate and comment on them. By the same token, if you would like to rate/comment on my maps please do.
Enjoy!
Merle Hofmann aka: Merle the Conqueror, aka: Lord Hofmann @ Stronghold Heaven
merlehofmann@yahoo.com