Spotlight: maps & scenarios

Hey there, I thought this might be an interesting thread to have.

I shall start with the latest scenario Jacob's Ford submitted by Korsfarer Mogens. Jacob's Ford was supposed to be a stronghold near Jordan river. However, it was short-lived, because Crusaders there were defeated by Saladin. Korsfarer Mogens wrote much more about the history. In this scenario you are supposed to try to finish Jacob's Ford and to defend it against Saladin.

This is an interesting scenario. I tried it two times, but I failed. If you would like to give it a try, keep in mind: don't make population larger than 116. Or you can try, but then you would need to manage fire and plague. Not that it's not doable I suppose. Another thing to have in mind: you won't have any serous attack until the end. Try to focus on building your defenses for the final attack, while your four knights will be more than enough to eliminate any treat which comes before it. I apologize to Korsfarer Mogens if he thinks these are spoilers, but I hope these are more like a description of a scenario. This is not a war scenario where you fight all the time, in this scenario you prepare for one final epic battle.

I tried this one two times. First time I didn't know what to expect at all, I didn't even read the intructions by Korsfarer Mogens at all. Second time I did, and I was sure I would prevail, but I didn't. Maybe I need much more troops, or maybe it would be enough to fight smarter, and at least not lose my archers and crossbowmen before the final blow.

Korsfarer Mogens, has somebody managed to win this scenario? :D By the way, in my second attempt, I was defending until 1189. I managed to repel the attacks for 10 years. :)

Anybody else would like to try? I didn't tell how much troops I had before the attack, but if somebody is interested to know, I would tell.

UPDATE:

I made it, I won! :D This time I used the stronghold from my second attempt, so it's the same number of troops.

I noticed in my second attempt that Saladin was sending huge amounts of slingers together with horse archers and Arabian bowmen. In such huge numbers they were able to take down many of my defenders. Fortunately, their range is short, so I was putting pitch close to my walls, and there I was setting them to fire.

This was hard to do too, because the attacks were frequent and long-lasting, so I needed to choose the right time to set it to fire. Both because it was expensive for me, and even if I had it more in the stockpile, rarely I was able to place it, almost always some enemy unit would be around. That is why I was sending about 25 swordsmen from the gate to kill those slingers and archers to relief the archers and crossbowmen.

This scenario wouldn't have been as interesting if that was enough. It wasn't. Once I lost more than half of my crossbowmen and archers, I was not able to defend the stronghold from all directions properly. At this moment I moved all to the stone keep. Many more swordsmen died due to plague while fight like this, but I did it. After long fighting, Saladin lost almost all of his range units. Then came Arabian swordsmen and assassins in huge waves. This is when all of my swordsmen and pikemen fell defending their lord, but the enemy was stopped!

This wasn't the end. My castle was ruined, and I still needed to complete my castle. This was yet another challenge - with frequent plagues and popularity at 0. Still, even that is no challenge compared to surviving these massive attacks by Saladin.

This is a very fun scenario to play!

Glad you finally succeded, EaglePrince! It is indeed not easy to win this scenario, and I don't think I've given anybody that impression, if they have read the accompanying text.

And yes, players before you have succeded, but most have failed, and some even been upset by the huge force of Salah ad-Din. But I did warn them. I have won the scenario myself, even by losing less than 200 troops, and still having my castle intact (well, at least nearly intact). But I've also failed a lot of times! LOL

I think the scenario pretty much nails the real battle of Jacobs Ford, and if you're not prepared, you'll feel the desperation that the knights templars felt, when they realized just how big Salah ad-Dins army was.

Hope someone will be bold and courageous enough to make a YouTube video of him/her taking on this scenario. Would be nice to see how others approach the challenge, and it could possibly be a motivator for others to try, and hopefully beat, the scenario.

Good luck, all you SC die hard fans!!!

PS: There's a faulty link in the scenario description?, because this site decides to garble it for no apparent reason. I can't even give you the link here, as it is also getting garbled. If you search google for "vadum iacob research project", it comes up as the first result.

And yes, players before you have succeded, but most have failed, and some even been upset by the huge force of Salah ad-Din.

To say the truth, I was also a little bit upset first time I tried it. Though after beating it I had no doubts others had managed it too. First I didn't read your introduction text, so I didn't know what would happen if my population goes too high, and all that had happened, with me thinking that was just supposed to happen anyway. But I was satisfied with my castle and my economy, that didn't slow me too much, and with more planning it would have slowed me even less. Then I faced Saladin with the confidence of Zapp Brannigan. :D (A Futurama reference.) He wiped the floor with me. This is my castle from the first attempt, I think it's from nine years before Saladin's attack.

I think the scenario pretty much nails the real battle of Jacobs Ford, and if you're not prepared, you'll feel the desperation that the knights templars felt, when they realized just how big Salah ad-Dins army was.

You succeeded in this! :D

And this is the castle from my second attemp.

Here I made significantly larger weapon production, while taking care not to have to many people. With these troops I fought for 10 years against Saladin. I was expecting my crossbowmen to wipe Saladin's Arabian troops (which have weaker armor) easily, but not. Then I was thinking "this is ridiculous", God knows how many troops I have to defeat here. :D

Then I decided to load the game some time before Saladin's attack. Now I moved my swordsmen and pikemen on the walls, and I stockpiled some pitch. Strangely to me, slingers were pretty nasty here! So I was mostly putting them to fire when possible. If that wasn't possible, I would be sending swordsmen to go out, and eliminate them. They were doing it much more easily than crossbowmen in all that crowd, and it was giving them some relief. Still, this wasn't enough. At some moment Saladin wiped all my archers and crossbowmen from the eastern part of the fort. Then I moved everybody back to the keep. Swordsmen were getting weaker because they were on the ground with frequent plague, but they were strong enough to stop the first waves of Saladin's troops storming into the castle. In the end, I survived with 100 crosbowmen and some archers. I lost about 200 crossbowmen and more than 60 swordsmen and 30 pikemen, maybe more.

This was my castle after repelling all of the attacks.

I hope somebody else will give it a shot too, and share their impressions with us. :)

Also, I like the fact that you disabled portable shields here, I like how you wanted the player to play and fight "the way it was supposed to be played and fought".

I will have a look at these links tomorrow, I hope I will be able to fix it.

PS: There's a faulty link in the scenario description , because this site decides to garble it for no apparent reason. I can't even give you the link here, as it is also getting garbled. If you search google for "vadum iacob research project", it comes up as the first result.

Noted. This is a most peculiar error and one I can only attribute to the regex when parsing posts. I'll have a look into this and see what's gone wrong. Rest assured that nothing like this has ever happened before, so it is a new error.

By the way, if somebody would like to try the siege, but doesn't have the time to build economy, I could share my save file with others here. If somebody would like that, just tell.

Although building the defenses and the economy is fun here too! Oasis is far away, iron and stone are downhill, and you have two dairy farms on the hill which may not be rebuilt if destroyed. Also, you start with 2000 gold, but very few other resources.

PS: There's a faulty link in the scenario description , because this site decides to garble it for no apparent reason. I can't even give you the link here, as it is also getting garbled. If you search google for "vadum iacob research project", it comes up as the first result.

 

Noted. This is a most peculiar error and one I can only attribute to the regex when parsing posts. I'll have a look into this and see what's gone wrong. Rest assured that nothing like this has ever happened before, so it is a new error.

Issue fixed. It was a censoring issue.

@Lord Chris: Thanks for fixing the link in the scenario description.

@EaglePrince: Like you mentioned, the economic part of it is also meant to be entertaining, and it's the base that can secure a win in this scenario. But if players want to skip the build-up phase and use your castle, then good luck with that! :-)

Strangely to me, slingers were pretty nasty here!

Well, I'm a bit surprised by that. It's deliberate that there's a lot of slingers in the scenario, and that they appear with other (higher ranking) units as well. In Stronghold Crusader, the enemy units are ranked, and your units will try to eliminate the highest ranking units first, if they have the chance. So if one of your archers have the option of shooting at either an enemy archer or an enemy slinger (one of the lowest ranked units in SC), he will choose the higher ranking unit, which in this instance is the archer. That's why the slingers are so "nasty" in this scenario. They get up close where they are very effective, because your ranged defenders concentrate on other more "valuable" units instead. If you want your units to choose another target, you'll manually have to do that,? and it's practically impossible in this scenario. So it's kind of a in-built "flaw"* of SC that I have utilized/exploited in this scenario.

*The AI is too primitive to deal with such situations.

I didn't know that archers pick harder targets first, that's quite interesting. However, this does mean I could have eliminated them more easily than by placing pitch. I could have ordered my crossbowmen to fire upon the area where those slingers were. This way slingers would have been obliterated very quickly.

One idea which was crossing my mind were knights, but it is questionable how many of them I would be able to train, they are expensive.

And also, moving more troops into the castle would help too, or making an outer layer of the wall which would prevent slingers from approaching close enough to my archers. But, if only small walls were enabled... :D High walls can, on the other hand, be used by enemy troops as a shelter.

But that's just what I was thinking about, although, with what you pointed out, ordering one hundred of crossbowmen would annihilate these singers at once. Awesome! :D

I could have ordered my crossbowmen to fire upon the area where those slingers were. This way slingers would have been obliterated very quickly.

Well, I'm not so sure about that. It would be nice and easy, but I think something else will happen. If you tell all your xbowmen to shoot at one unit, then that's probably what they'll do. They'll all shoot at that one single unit, and once it is killed (will be very quickly) your xbowmen will revert to picking their own targets as they did before your intervention. That's what I meant by manually picking targets in this scenario will be practically impossible.

But I don't know for sure. It will be nice if you have a save from your previous play-throughs that will let you investigate the matter easily. I will love to know for sure, and I suspect you will too?

No, I didn't mean to order them to shoot one unit. That wouldn't work for sure. :) I meant to order them to shoot the area where those slingers stand. Them they would be shooting many slingers at once. Sure, some bolts would miss, but most of them would hit them.

I will share the same file here when I get to the computer. I would certainly like to know how much effective that would be.

Hi, sorry for a late reply. I'm sharing the save file with you. It's the castle in year 1179. Here's the file.

https://1drv.ms/u/s!AtpOTZgUTcPPhcZE2wEDTXZstv_Zgg

Unfortunately, in this save I had already wasted some money on pitch - I put it on a place where is was useless. One can definitely burn some troops at these areas, but that's not an efficient way to use the pitch. Why I wasted that much pitch... Well, I had no idea that "the night is dark and full of terrors". :D Still, that's just one downside, but on the other hand, there are plenty of weapons in the castle, and a lot of troops. Is that going to be enough... That depends. :D

By the way, it is likely that one could actually win this by retreating all 300 crossbowmen to the keep just before the large attack. That might be a simple way to win. What could go wrong with this tactic are only some archers that could hide behind my own walls, and shoot down the crossbowmen.

Hi EaglePrince!

Downloaded your save file, but have a HUGE problem: I'm on Linux, and I can't find the folder for the save files in Stronghold Crusader. I've found save folder for other steamgames I've got, but simply can't find it for Stronghold Crusader. So unless someone can tell me where it's stored, I'm gonna give up on it.

The usual thing I've been suggesting to people in this situation was to make a save from the game with a strange name. And then to search for this file by the name, and see its location.

However, does this help?

https://github.com/Evrey/StrongholdMaps

For Linux users with Steam Play:

 

The path to the corresponding My Documents directory is unique per game installation and depends on the Steam game ID. You'll find the My Documents directory in steamapps/compatdata//pfx/drive_c/users/steamuser/My Documents/.

 

The game IDs are:

 

40950 for Stronghold 1.

40970 for Stronghold Crusader.

16700 for Stronghold Crusader Extreme.

PS. There are some fine maps on that page, I'm gonna grab them fast. :D

Hi EaglePrince!

Sorry, but I've just seen your reply just now. I did a search for filenames (before your post), and I did find the directory. I also attempted to load the scenario, and then experienced something odd: I could not scroll right and down. It's a flaw described in the protondb (list of alle games and their playability using proton - on linux), and what is odd is, that in late '19, I did a full play-through of the SC trail, and didn't experience a problem. I'm not gonna fight that too, so I'm gonna wait a while, and then install a SC 1.1 version on my late wifes laptop with win7.

Thanks for your patience!

Pretty strange. Also, maybe the issue is that I played your scenario with version 1.41. With that version my save file was created.