Woo boy, this is going to be a tough one. Stronghold Crusader Extreme takes everything I like about the Stronghold series, and just sort of sets it aside, saying, "wouldn't you rather fight battles, instead?" There is no peaceful/economic campaign, but unlike Stronghold Legends, it also doesn't have a free-build mode. It's pretty much all skirmish matches, all the time.
I guess, to give the game its due, those skirmish matches are EXTREME!!! but all that turns out to mean is that army sizes are much larger and you now have a menu of special powers that you can use to shift the odds in your favor. These include summoning extra units, partially healing your army, or calling a rockslide out of nowhere. Each of these abilities costs a certain amount of energy, which gradually recharges throughout the battle.
It's a little early to say whether these EXTREME!!! changes will have a significant effect on the feel of the game, but the matches I've played so far have thrown me for a loop. In the first campaign mission, I was confused and dismayed by the sheer number of units the enemy was able to dispatch, mere minutes after the start. After I was torn apart by the AI hordes from nowhere, I played a random skirmish match, and that time I was the player with troops just appearing out of thin air. It felt kind of good to command hundreds of troops, in comparison to the dozens allowed by other versions of the game, but it won't be a satisfying strategy experience until I figure out where they came from and how to get more.
Honestly, though, this should be an optional mode in Stronghold Crusader. The strategy is fundamentally different, but the rest of the game - the art, the available units, the economy (when it is not being rendered obsolete by a generous stipend of phantom troops) - is identical to the older game. But, for some reason, it isn't, and so I have to go back and try and squeeze a military career out of a Stronghold game after all.
(Although, I have experimented with the map editor, and it occurs to me that if I strand the NPC noble on a tiny island with no access to the rest of the map, I could get a kind of defacto Free-Build out of the ensuing skirmish match . . .)
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