Friday, February 23, 2018

Stronghold Crusader Extreme HD - 10/20 hours

I was feeling a little down about playing my fifth Stronghold game when I had a brilliant idea - I could cheat shamelessly. That way, I don't have to improve my RTS skills, I just have to keep pushing buttons until it's all over.

I've settled on two methods of cheating. The first is to just use a code I found online that gives me 1000 gold every time I enter it. This serves to make the outcome of missions an almost entirely foregone conclusion (sometimes I fail to pay adequate attention and get slammed by a larger attack than I can handle), but still requires me to fight through the brutal slog of the enemy's massive forces.

The second method is to build an extremely unbalanced map where the enemy stronghold has no access to my much larger and richer territory. Then I can treat it as a defacto free build map. It's been a fascinating journey so far, because there's no point to it besides increasing your population, but I've actually been finding it a fair challenge to get a population in the high hundreds. I set up one map to have realistic desert terrain and I capped out at about 350 citizens before I ran out of fertile land.

My current goal is to reach 500 citizens, which is harder than it sounds because you can have a maximum of 24 unemployed citizens at a time before your population stops growing.  Of course, there's no opposition and no time limit, so I'm bound to get there eventually, but it's something to pass the time.

My plan for the second half of the game is to keep cheating, because I don't care enough about military tactics to stress myself out trying to get better at them. I'll probably focus on clearing the campaign missions with my bottomless purse once I finally fill up my makeshift solo map. It's not a proud or a wise way to handle the game, but I'm 90 hours in now and I'm not sure I have any pride or wisdom left.

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