great great great great great great great great great great great great great

Stronghold HD is almost entirely the same as the original Stronghold but with better graphics. I wish they would do that more often and there are loads more deserving games they could have done it to. With Stronghold HD, I only realised I had played the entirety of the single-player campaign once before (10+ years ago) once I was on around the 10th mission. Which I think says the game experience itself is pretty forgettable. Stronghold is addictive, because it is a lot like Castles (20+ years ago). But unlike that excellent game, it lets you build each wall section or tower instantaneously, removing all of the tension and most of the strategy. If you have a castle, you can kill a virtually infinite number of attackers. When you are besieging a castle (in two of the 21 missions), you will only be able to progress by exploiting the fact that some archers' arrows in a volley randomly exceed their normal range when they miss (but the AI's archers only find targets using the normal range, so you can VERY gradually pick them off this way in the 2 siege missions). What this shows is that nothing in the game is balanced properly. Battering rams, armoured knights, and virtually everything else can be polished off within seconds by massed archers and/or fire. A 1x1 spike pit trap costs 5 wood. A 10x10 apple orchard costs 5 wood and you can set it on fire, so it's 100x as deadly. There is no option to block off all incoming food supplies and starve the castle's occupants into submission, which is how they normally did it IRL. The further you compare with real life, the less favourable it all becomes: castles were normally places where large numbers of soldiers were kept, as distinct from your walled cities, which might have had little blacksmiths and suchlike inside them. Onager-style catapults (c.1200) being fielded alongside knights with barding (c.1500) and crossbows (c.1300 to 1500) and boiling oil (c.never!). Boiling oil wasn't used in medieval sieges at all - due to the stuff being an extremely expensive fuel source, all the historical accounts are about boiling water.