Stronghold Crusader is a classic RTS game that lets you ignore build order requirements so you can build whatever you want. For a beginner, it can be a little overwhelming to decide which buildings to build first.
Here’s a simple guide that aims to provide a generally good build order to get started, regardless of the resources available in your area.
Starter Build Order for Beginners in Stronghold Crusader Definitive Edition
Since you can build whatever you want, you’ll naturally want to build everything. But you can only do that if you have good starting resources. Generally, you want to focus on a few mandatory things.
- Hovels for your population.
- Consistent food supply.
- Military forces.
Hovels act like houses for your people, so if you don’t have them, your population will decrease or stay stagnant, even if you have all the resources. Food supply keeps your people well-fed, and it also contributes to increasing your population as well as making the people happy.
A military force is mandatory just because of how fast the AI players can attack you. There are many ways to get your army going, and a proper defensive plan could also work if you want to cheap out on an army during the start of a playthrough.
Starting Build Orders
Now that you know the basic necessities, here are some typical build orders you can follow and play around to your needs for each situation:
- Food Supply (choose 1)
- When there’s farmland nearby, you can add 2-3 Wheat Farms, 2 Mills, 2 Bakeries, and 1 Granary as your opening.
- 3-4 Hunter’s Posts would also suffice if the current map has that resource (Meat) available.
- Some of the other farms could also work like, but bread would be the best to feed your population. Hop farms would be your next goal, so you can turn them into beer and create an inn to keep your population happy.
- Create a Marketplace and expand your stockpile (maybe x3 at the start).
- Use the Marketplace and use Coins to buy Wood and/or Stone for the next buildings.
- 2-3 Woodcutters, 2-3 Quarries, and 3+ Iron Mines. (Depending on what’s available for you)
- Build a Barracks and a Mercenary Post/Bedouin Stockade.
- Build a tower and station archers on it. Buy some temporary archers and station them on top of the tower.
Since you are building your food supply in bulk, you’ll be lacking Wood to create all these buildings quickly. This is why you should always buy a Marketplace quickly and start buying Wood with coins.
Food production may take some time to ramp up, as you still need to wait until your population grows and you have more workers available to work on these buildings, including your Woodcutters, Quarries, and Iron Mines.
Next, you’ll focus on acquiring resources available to your location, prioritizing Iron > Wood > Stone. The reason you want more Iron Mines is that you don’t need an Ox to transfer Iron Ores to your stockpile, and Steel is much more useful and more expensive to sell in the marketplace compared to Stones.
The priority order isn’t a rule, since getting Stone is also good, since you’ll need them to build your walls and create towers. Wood is always mandatory as long as there are nearby trees available in your starting area.
If you choose to go for the Hunter’s Hut as your primary food source, pay attention to where your hunters go to hunt. If they hunt near the middle of the map and the enemies get to them, you’ll notice that your village is not even getting meat. Those hunters need to stalk and kill prey and physically bring the meat back to the Granary. Protect them or focus on a different food source.
After getting that done quickly, start building a tower where you need defending the most (Buy Stones if you don’t have them). Put your starting archers on top of the tower. Maybe recruit a few archers using coins to bolster your defenses a bit more. Make sure to put a fire pit on top of the tower so the archers can shoot fire arrows.
Getting all these down is almost mandatory, and there are only a few tweaks you can do to this starting build order.
Midgame Strategy
Once you are stockpiling resources, growing your population, and amassing wealth, all while successfully defending your base, you should focus on a way to build an army and a plan to destroy the enemy’s base.
When building an army, you want to surveil the enemy’s territory and see what they have. The enemy should have massive walls, ballistas, and towers as their primary defensive tools. Usually, I build more towers near the middle, train engineers, build catapults on top of the towers, let the engineers control the catapults, and slowly bring down their walls.
Once one section of the wall is cracked open, I rush in with an army and solely aim for the leader to end the match quickly.
It all boils down to how well you can survive while building up for this and how well you can run your Stronghold while amassing a massive army. Remember, training your own units in the Barracks is way more cost-efficient than recruiting units from the Bedouin Stockade or Mercenary Post using coins.