7 QUICK Tips to get BETTER at STRONGHOLD CRUSADER

What tips do you have for beating Skirmish Trail? Say it in the comments!

[Noobtato_Channel]

0:00 Intro
0:11 Tip 1 Woodcutters FTW
0:29 Tip 2 Drown your peasants with ale
0:45 Tip 3 Crossbowmen FTW
1:01 Tip 4 Hotkeys for lazybones
1:18 Tip 5 The power of Jesus compels you
1:40 Tip 6 Trust me I'm an engineer
1:58 Tip 7 UCP the MVP

[DezZzO_YT]

Some cheesy tips:
1. Put siege shields on your towers, this makes your ranged units borderline immortal
2. Not finishing your castle and leaving a single hole forces the AI to send it's army to this exact hole ignoring your walls. On some maps digging a moat and placing few towers in this moat hole tends to be the perfect defence, because as long as there's an entrance into your castle - they won't dig up the moat
3. Rushing is not only a viable strat, but also makes some hard missions way easier. Fastest way to rush is to place mercenary camp, place rally point for assassins near the keep of enemy lord you want to rush and just spam hire assassins. For some reason assassins walk way faster towards rally point compared to their normal movement speed and you only need to tell them to attack when they get to enemy keep

Though, these make the game way easier, but at least they're not as exploitative of the game as other stuff (like multiple workers for 1 building, fast workers, instant resource delivery, blocking AI's castle, blocking your big tower with watch towers so arrows almost never hit your units etc.)

[foxboi]

1:00 Extra tips on the hotkeys:
Pressing the L key for "Lord" the camera will instantly get you to where your Lord is, which, unless you move your lord elsewhere, it's always the Keep, so that way you avoid having to scroll too much.

A way of doing fast scrolling is by using the minimap next to the scribe, if you want to see a certain part of the map that is very far away, just click several times on the direction you want to go, it's a swift way to explore the whole map in just seconds.

If you're on a mission where you and your ally are very close (example Mission 68: "We're Surrounded!") you can send your lord into your ally's keep, and use the ally's towers as your primary defense, don't leave your own keep unguarded though, the AI will still try to target your production buildings nearby!

[Thaumogenesis]

Step 1: Make impenetrable tunnel entry wall.
Step 2: Make 500 horse archers.

[everythinggamingnow]

pro tip for people just starting out, its a bit cheaty, but it is 100% part of the game and isnt exactly an external cheat or anything....In the settings, change game speed down to the lowest, get your basic town set up, granary, market, stockpile spots and lumber yards, mines etc and once thats all set up, put the speed back up. Because if you have it on the highest speed, and spend a few minutes looking at what you can build and trying to decide what to build and where to put it, you'll look over at the ai and they'll have remodelled london within 3 minutes, unless its the rat, who likes to remodell modern day margate.

[jemoedermeteensnor]

I feel like except for the monks and shields, these tips mainly apply for the first few missions where you start with a great map and many resources.
For the harder missions I would recommened some of the following things:
1 If possible always dig a moat. Preferably on the furthest place possible.
The advantages are that these can be placed farther away than walls so you can secured more land to work with. Furthermore if you dont fully close of your base they will never dig them up, where walls can be hit by an random catapult shot. It is also cheaper than having to buy stone.
2 It is almost never a good idea to fully close of your base. The AI always goes through that entrance so it helps you to direct the attack to a favourable spot for you. And only needing 1 fortified position if there are multiple opponents
3 Know if your opponents team make catapults if they do you gonna need atleast 1 square tower for ballista or mangonel. If not the high cheap tower is the best option. You can get as many troops on to there as you want if you place a piece of wall next to it and place multiple units on that one piece. The people in these towers are very hard to hit.
4 Often you have no acces to stone and iron, but you can make farms. Taxes with Inn's food and churces is a much faster way too build up your economie than with crossbow production. ( dont use the monuments for happiness since this slowers production)
5 A fast way to increase total population if you rely on taxes is to build the big wells. They are the cheapest ( woodcutters can work but they often go for that tree near the enemy base later on).
6 If starting with low gold, many enemies and not great access to stone. Buy bows out of the barracks it is so much more cost efficient against non arabiac sword man (not population efficient ofcourse) . If the opponent is a mix, 10-15 bowman, 5 crossbow man and 5 shields is a quite effective.
7 If you have descided to not fully close of your base, you can often make a zigzag path with the moat and 1-3 safe against archer fire throwers can make a huge diffrence against large groups of melee units.
8 If you have an ally consider building some towers with mangonels for them at better places, since even AI's like the wolf build bad castles

Some more quistionable tips:
1 The larger arabic economies and sometimes the wolf will burn on forever once you get them on fire. Which really speeds up the game if they have like 20k+ gold.
2 slaves are really weak to arrow fire so just before them let a few macemen walk continiously moving them left to right forward. This will focus all arrows on them while also them not getting hit.
3 If you block of there gates so that the cant leave the base with ox card or woodcutter. They will delete all production buildings they dont have access too
4 If their base is on a hill with cliffs around it you can often place a trebuchet directly to the cliff that is almost impossible to hit by ranged units.
5 If a tower with mangonel on top of it is in ruins instead of destroyed they wont rebuild it so it is much better to keep it that way.
6 If you let catapult focus fire on an area instead of an object. The stone can fly further. This means theoreticly you can destroy a tower out of mangonel range, but only ~5% is gonna hit.

[nbss]

Easiest way to beat opponent AI in the campaign missions - start mission, see where the opponent place his barracks or mercenary post. Restart mission, put speed to lowest, place a building (any building except woodcutter or ox tether) on that spot. Do it fast as you only have 5-10 seconds before getting the "too close to enemy to build" message. Now when the barracks building spot is blocked, the AI Lord for some reason won't bother build it on another spot or use his starting troops to destroy the blocking building, which leave him with no ability to produce troops throughout the game and thus very easy to defeat.

[CasualGamerNoob]

When i first got this game 15+ years ago I couldn't even beat 1 pig. I just beat 3 at once. Thanks, man, you're amazing 👏

[darkgrip]

I wish they remaster this game and have a new Crusader trails with 100+ levels, have some with a good strategic defense against 8+ other AIs, and remove the unit cap entirely .
Love yo videos .

[lazy_ducky]

hey man i love your vids keep up the good work btw i love stronghold crusader xd

[definitelynot]

if you're really stuck in a map on the trail...
1. IMO you can win every map with european archers and arab swordsmen. just make a few big square towers around your buildings and fill them up with archers. there's really no unit that can beat 400 archers. and archers are the cheapest units to train. and you can sell your extra arrows for gold. if you wanna finish off your enemies quickly you can use ballistas and mangonels break down their castle and then move in with the archers and swordsmen to finish.
2. use mangonels to destroy enemy granaries. if you do it a couple of times the enemy will lose population and try to destroy his walls and towers to pay for food.

[Noobtato_Channel]

One of my favourite: Send your lord to your ally’s castle.

[NostaleFreak]

You forgot macemen. You can rush most of all missions with macemen.
Thes got almost the highest walking speed, same attack as swordsmen, can dig moat and can tank a few arrows and crossbow bolts. The MVP of Crusader, since they run all the time instead of only the last few steps like in Stronghold Deluxe. Huge Buff.

[TheLoneMan-fkiu]

How to create a stock of people for army porpuses:
1. spam large pot water
2. each pot water holds 3 recruits
3. cost 100 gold
4. if you have 10 of them basically you have 30 people reserves
5. the use? if your tired of waiting people waiting to buffer, select one of the large pots and press the "Z" icon to "not available" now you have an army of reserves

[vertujoe]

thank you for your insights.
Could you please make a video about sell food or double ration with higher tax comparison when want to relocate granaries? I'm regularly facing this situation when transforming to bread production. If it's possible? Thank you 😊

[danielwest]

I don't use portable shields or more than five catapults cause I don't like feeling like I'm cheating

[Khrazilkree]

At first i thought you killed Richard with catapults in the last part of the video :D

[jainevil]

Any UCP user here? I'm really want to play the trail again but I don't know what to do with the UCP in terms of Castles and AI aggression. What do you guys use?

[jemo]

#9 Make as many horse archers as you can.

[eyrcodex]

Installing UCP is best but for those who didn't know what to check. Here it is:

AIC: Xander10
AIV: Tatha
Increase Maximum Armies: (Alternative 3) or (Vanilla 60)

Of course don't forget to fix all the bugs. I Hope This is Helpful.