Stronghold Crusader Extreme

In order to facilitate the production of such huge armies, the game also adds a large number of outposts to each map. Rather than just managing your main castle and surrounding town, you'll now need to keep an eye on the production of those outposts - they provide another source of troops for the battlefield, and defending your own while capturing the enemy's will be a major tactical element in each engagement. Moreover, you'll now have up to 16 AI players on each map - the maximum in the original game being eight - so the war will have many more fronts for you to consider.

The final really big change that fans of the original Stronghold games will notice is the overhaul of tactical powers. A bar down the right side of the screen gradually fills up as you play, and you can use a certain amount of this bar to unleash various tactical powers on your enemy. The simplest power, using only a small chunk of the bar, is a volley of arrows - but spend more of your bar and you could summon reinforcements instantly to a besieged area, or bombard an enemy building with catapulted rocks. It's not exactly a nod to realism, but these powers live up to their billing by providing you with brand new tactical options in tight situations.

Stronghold Crusader Extreme also deserves its "Extreme" name not only due to the huge number of units unleashed, but also because it's extremely hard. Rock hard, in fact. Although by no means a green recruit to PC strategy gaming, your humble correspondent got his arse kicked quite thoroughly by the very first battle in the campaign in the space of about two minutes. A few attempts later, with my head around some of the basic concepts - and the insane pace of initial base-building - I managed to hold out for almost ten minutes before watching my buildings burned, my peasants murdered and my fields ploughed with salt. Probably.

The sheer pace of battles - and the intelligence and aggression of your AI foes - is absolutely mind-boggling, and it's clear that the new missions and functionality created for Crusader Extreme are designed purely for veterans. Leaping straight into this content as a new recruit will simply result in humiliation and despair - trust me on this.

However, Firefly does still have newcomers in mind, and Stronghold Crusader Extreme will actually ship with a full version of Stronghold Crusader in the box. In addition, you'll also get all of the add-on content that's been created for Crusader since its launch, including the content from the "Warchest" pack, which was previously available only in North America. As such, it's certainly the definitive edition of Stronghold Crusader - and there's something here for new players intrigued by the combination of castle management and strategy, as well as for the hardened veterans of many siege campaigns.