Well, I went and bought it. Hopefully there'll be some more patches soon, as there's some problems with it. Still darn fun though.
I run it on two machines at home, neither of which will be useful in determining why it's running slow on most machines though. One's a P4 3.0Ghz, 1 gig of dual channel DDR ram, SATA drives and a Radeon 9250 with 128 megs on it. The other is an AMD Athlon 3000, 1 gig of ram, SATA drives and Radeon 9200 with 128 megs on it. On both machines the graphics are messed up, the Lord's armor isn't displayed correctly, and apparently there's some memory leaks in the game as the longer it runs (over a couple of hours) it becomes very choppy and jerky.
Minimum requirements for the game are:
1.4Ghz CPU
256 megs RAM
32 meg graphics card
Recommended:
2.0Ghz CPU
512 megs RAM
64 meg graphics
So both my machines blow the min specs away, but it still runs pretty rough. It could just be that maybe my video settings aren't optimal for Stronghold 2, but I haven't tweaked them extensively to find out.
All in all though, the game is very fun. At this point I wouldn't say it's better than the first Stronghold, because it's going to have to be a helluva game in order to do that, but it's good. Lots of new buildings, new military units, new equipment to use (gotta love burning logs, in the right place they'll roll forever and demolish anything they hit), and the 3D world is pretty cool as well. Persistent campaign scenarios are nice as well-what you build in the first scenario in the campaign stays with you into the second scenario, and so on. I haven't exactly figured out the estate thing yet-basically you only own so much territory that you can build on, but you can take over other areas and have them ship goods to you or you to them via a horse and cart. It's very necessary to ship goods from one place to the next, though, I've got that much figured out.
Zooming in and watching castle life is fun. I recently watched my Lord visit his Lady's bedchamber, give her a hug and then toss her on the bed. The curtains closed around them, and a few minutes later he wanders out <img src="http://www.piratesahoy.com/forum/style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/smile.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid="
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It's quite obvious that they have left room to add things in future patches. The jousting arena, for instance, you can watch the jousts but that's about all at this point. There's plenty of room there to increase the options available, such as betting on knights or entering your own knights into the joust. Lots of other buildings and activities could be upgraded this way as well, hopefully they'll add to it in the future.
One really nice touch was when I first started the game, it asked for my name. I entered Sir Charles, as Charles is my first name, and at the main menu the game says out loud 'Greetings, Lord Charles'. I looked through the game's files, there's around 340 specific names that have greetings. Some of the better ones are Brave Sir Robin, Mojo JoJo, Cornholio, Sir Barkalot and my personal favorite, Vader. You really have to try Vader <img src="http://www.piratesahoy.com/forum/style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/wink.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid="
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" border="0" alt="no.gif" /> <img src="http://www.piratesahoy.com/forum/style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/sailr.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid="
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" border="0" alt="whistling.gif" /> ..Fred Bob <img src="http://www.piratesahoy.com/forum/style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/whistling.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid="
" border="0" alt="whippa.gif" /> .....what are the minimum requirements for this game!?! <img src="http://www.piratesahoy.com/forum/style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/whippa.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid="
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