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With release of a remake, this game has no purpose. It will not receive much needed technical updates. There is a superior version of this game out there. However, if you just happen to own copy of this, it is still the same base game which is just as fun.

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This game is amazing in its smallest of details. Everything in this game is animated. If you want to make bread, you have to grow it. To reap it. To carry it to storage. Then wheat into flour. Then transport floor into bakeries. Cook the bread and transport it back. Every step of this is animated. It is a joy just to watch your castle run. From apple trees blooming to your king wandering your kingdom. It feels that game is alive and it is a real world. It even talks to you. It tells you when it is midnight. Asks if you are not tired. How long it is left until Christmas. All this breaking of fourth wall is done professionally and in character.

It adds so much charm to this game and to think that this was done decades ago and very few since had bothered to show so much care and love for their own games. This is why strategy games fail.

The main way to play this game is through the campaign. It has two long campaigns. One military one and another economical one. I played military one and it was amazing experience overall. One of those good, old games with which you used to fall in love with it, because passion and hard work is on full display here.

Awesome Story Telling
• In this game you go through long journey of taking back country which is on a verge of defeat from the rebels. Their inner infighting allows you to regain ground. Their lack of unity and discord allow to take them out one by one. This eventually culminates taking out the greatest of them all. Each character gets their own spotlight before their final siege. You hear their dialogue, plotting and scheming in pre-battle menus. You see this story being translated and in mission dialogues. It is just like old Starcraft games with its mission designs.
  
  Characters
  
• There are four main villains in this story. The Wolf, The Pig, The Rat and The Snake. They are "The", because their names fully captures their over the top personality. Everything they do reasembles their names. The Rat taunts you, trembles in fear, he is quick to give up or to jump to an opportunity. His castle is shoddily built. Snake goes down by scheming and plotting. He makes bargains with you and betrays you as you expect. The Pig is glutonous of course. He is ugly, overweight and greedy. He is one with the most gold, food and attacks with massive waves of troops. In sharp contrast, when you encounter wolf's troops, he sends a single knight. A well armored beast with whom you cannot deal effectively at that point. He is the one which howls at night and hunts you through the campaign. It is also the one which built his castle the best and it is a nightmare to besiege, utilizing game's principles to the fullest. This Quartet together with other minor supporting characters like sir Longarm accompany you through this long and difficult campaign and make you care about the story and what you are doing. They carry this game.
  
  Awesome Ending
  
• Campaign properly builds up main antagonist. You have myriad of missions with him. However, what had impressed me most is that at the very end, you are not facing Mr.Skeleton in his mountain doom fortress like so many games like to do. They just spam whatever they can to make over the top mission with too many defenses and units to try to make it feel epic. Stronghold actually has working gameplay and thus it doesn't need to just throw more crap at the wall in hopes something sticks. Instead what we get is a decent assaulting army and Wolf's fortress which seems modest by comparison to what you faced before. However, it is superbly designed. Each layer of fortification saps your strength. Each obstacle has to be approached expertly with everything you had learned through your journey. Wolf is also not holding back, every trick used will be used against you. That mission is just a perfect example of how missions and games should be designed. I had breached Wolf's final defenses with just my last ounce of strength. It was an experience which all RTS games which they could emulate.
  
  Difficulty Spikes
  
• However, not all is nice and rosy in the campaign. Campaign tends to jump and down in difficulty. That is most apparent at the start where you have to raise a bribe for Snake while defending against the Rat who throws such a force at you that you must know what you are doing and optimize everything in order to effectively defend against him. Then there is another when first time assaulting Pig's castle. Difficulty in the campaign tends to jump from mission to mission and the hardest missions in this game are spread randomly through the entire campaign.

Despite being good game at its core, especially for its time, it still have technical and design issues. Those tend to be just annoying and luckily doesn't take away too much from the core experience of a game.

Castle building
• The major issue with this game that it is not a 3D game. It is sprite based and thus it is very difficult to build a perfectly symetrical castles. All those castles which you see in screenshots are a lie. You will not make such perfect castles in this game as you will be limited by the terrain. These people get a sanbox, make a perfect map and then place their castle. Even then, it is very hard to judge how everything will connect. Gates for example only have 2 directions which limits how they can be placed. It requires a perfectly vertical surfaces which in real gameplay scenarios rarely occurs. In reality, your castles are often crooked, imperfect.
  
  Pathing
  
• The single hardest thing in this game is units walking through your walls. This is an extension of a first problem. Since game is sprite based, you cannot judge distance or depth. Very often you design a fortification, await the enemy only for their entire army just to walk through your wall. It is then you discover that there is a small, hardly visible gap which you need to awkwardly change camera angles and do long inspections if your castle is truly without any gaps. This is an ever present issue in this game and it is one of the hardest things in this game to do it right. It will constantly plague you through the campaign.
  
  API is invisible
  
• The last thing might be fixed with the newer version of a game and this point might not apply to it. However, modern programs do not detect this game running. It also blocks screen capture. Making screenshots or recording footage is as difficult as doing anything on Linux. Or in other words, a simple step will require a lot of effort and workarounds to get working. This game doesn't play nice with other software and remains an outdated to its current day. Play this version if you just happen to own it and want to save few euros, but otherwise hop in the new one and avoid needless frustration.

This is one of those games which was ahead of its time. Complex economical system? Large scale military action? Elaborate defensive fortification? Very long campaigns? Game filled with charm and personality? This is dream game which I wish that I had played back then. It would had been far more impressive and engaging. It is one of the classical games which spawned an entire genre on its own. Unfortunately, this genre was never really ever expanded on as the best sequel was Stronghold 2 or Stronghold 1 expansion - Crusaders. Direct sequel was unfinished and contraversial and from that point onwards series only went downhill.

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