Stronghold Legends - 20/20 hours

I discovered the hard way that the forum post that told me I could bypass the population cap by making a custom map was, in fact, referring to Stronghold 2. I first found out about this problem by playing free-build for a couple of hours on a special "archipelago" map I made especially for the purpose. That dispirited me, so I went and played the campaign mode for another couple of hours. Then I had a brainstorm - maybe they meant you could bypass the hovel cap by making a custom map with a bunch of hovels already in place.

So I fired up the map editor once more, and discovered that even on a custom map that was not currently part of a game, I could only place 15 hovels. Except . . . if I used the estate marking tool to divide my map into two different estates, I could place 15 hovels in each estate. Then, if I used the tool a second time to merge the two estates back into one, I could have a total of 30 hovels in a single estate. And if I repeated the process, I could increase my hovels arbitrarily.

My next move was to go into map editor mode and just create my perfect castle. It was huge and symmetrical and had living space for hundreds of residents, as well as a massive industrial output. Its only flaw was that it was empty, devoid of life and activity. But I could solve that by importing it into free-build mode, which I did. Only to discover that my dozens of hovels did not change the total population cap. 128 was my maximum number of citizens, and that's just the way it was always going to be.

After that, I just dithered about with my "dark forest" map for the remaining three hours. I can't say I won a decisive victory over the trees, though. I think I just put too many of them in there. Even after hours of clearing, my town was still too confined to build all of the advanced structures.

Overall, I'd say that if you were going to get just one Stronghold game, Stronghold Legends is a decent contender, but I was unable to manhandle it into a city-builder, so I'm going to have to pretend to hate it for awhile.