Stronghold patched

Take 2 and developers Firefly have released a patch for their medieval castle building game Stronghold, fixing a few of the flaws which afflicted the game on its initial release last month. For starters the bug in mission 13 of the military campaign which causes the game to crash to the desktop without warning if you build your walls too close to the edge of the map (in other words, build a proper castle) has now been fixed. Those of you trying to enjoy the game in multiplayer can also rejoice as various connection issues have apparently been solved, teamplay should now work properly and several of the maps have been rebalanced to make them fairer. In the original version of the game, if you built too close to the point at which enemy armies enter a map those parts of your castle wall would collapse without warning when a large enough force arrived. Now you are prevented from building anything within this area in the first place, which makes a lot more sense than allowing you to construct defences and then arbitrarily demolishing them for no apparent good reason. Other problems which have been dealt with include a crash caused by too many engineers spoiling the smelter, and issues with peasants and catapults getting stuck. Sadly though the suicidal peasant AI, which sends your workers running into burning buildings and marching through packs of wolves with gay abandon, is not amongst the list of fixes. There is, however, a new animation which will pop up whenever something catches fire in your castle. Along with two more new animations and fixes for unspecified "various other bugs", the patch comes in at just shy of 7Mb. You can only download it from FilePlanet at the moment, although more mirrors will no doubt be available soon. Related Feature - Stronghold review