Overview
Explore building ratios, placement, and production speed. Learn how to earn vast sums of money and quickly build a self-sustaining estate, allowing you to focus on your military endeavors.
Introduction
This is an in-depth guide for managing your estate in Stronghold Crusaders 2. I will be discussing money and popularity management rather than military strategy (that’s a guide for another day). Hopefully, with this guide you will be able to focus on your heroic military conquests rather than worrying about how many apples you may or may not have. I assume you have a basic knowledge of the game (placing buildings, using menus, etc). If not, check out the in-game tutorial. Thanks for checking out my guide, I hope you learn something useful and please let me know if something is incorrect or you found a better approach to something. I appreciate your feedback.
Don’t forget that in single player games, you can pause the game by pressing “P” and speed up (or decrease) game time by using the “+” and “-“ keys.
Making Money
Money is one of the most important things to know how to manage in Stronghold Crusaders 2. It’s required for building any military assets, several buildings, and is useful for acquiring resources that aren’t easily obtainable on your map.
The best way to make money is through taxing your peasants. The more peasants you have, the more money you make. It’s important to keep your popularity up so you can crank up your taxes and prevent peasants from leaving your estate.
Selling excess resources is another viable way of making money. Wood, stone, iron, weapons, and armor are highly profitable. Make sure you periodically sell your extra resources, but make sure you keep a decent supply of the resources you need. Don’t be afraid to purchase resources you are having trouble acquiring through normal means. You can build a market to auto buy / sell resources if you want, but it isn’t strictly necessary and that 500 gold might be better spent elsewhere.
It’s possible to create a 100% economy based estate. Check out the end of the guide for more information.
Placing Your Initial Buildings
When you begin a game, try to place your stockpile close to farmland and trees to reduce travel time for woodcutters, hops, and wheat farms. Don’t worry about being too close to iron and stone because a steady stream of ox carts will continuously carry resources to your stockpile. Just make sure you add enough ox carts. (Thanks TRG//Arne for pointing this out!)
Place your granary on the edge of a large patch of farmland. Don’t use up valuable farm land with buildings that don’t need it. Also, try not to leave a lot extra space between buildings that are next to each other, but be mindful of the fact that peasants cannot walk through buildings and must travel around them to reach their destination. Leave strategic “gaps” or “paths” between structures to reduce peasant travel time.
Farms and Food
Apple farms, meat farms, and dairy farms have roughly the same food output. Build one food building for every 8 peasants in your estate at x1 food distribution. Make sure to build all three types to get the bonus popularity for having multiple food sources. Check your granary every once in a while to make sure your not running out of any types of food and sell any excess (keep around 30 units of each food type as a buffer).
The rate of bread production is considerably higher than apple, meat, and dairy farms, but requires more buildings. Place two bakeries and two wheat farms for every windmill. The building ratio might need to be changed depending on how far away your buildings are. Production will be faster if your stockpile, granary, bakeries, windmill, and wheat farms are in close proximity to each other.
Keeping Your Peasants Happy
Keep your peasants happy with ale and religion so you can tax the crap out of them.
One candle maker will satisfy the religion of 32 peasants at x1 religion. The same goes for ale. Place one hops farm for every brewery (per 32 peasants) and try to keep both close to the stockpile if you can. If you go over 32 population, you will need to add additional candle makers, brewers, and hops. Make sure you have an inn and a church for distribution.
Keep an eye out for random events that decrease your popularity. Your scribe will warn you when they appear. Be ready to decrease your taxes or temporarily bump up distribution.
Acquiring Wood
Wood is perhaps the most important resource in the game. Almost every structure requires it and running out early in the game can stagnate your production. Buying additional wood early on is definitely worth considering. It means getting your economy and resource production up and running much quicker than if you stopped to wait for your wood cutters to hobble along.
You should keep a healthy stockpile of wood on hand at all times. Don’t start selling too much of it until you have the vast majority of your buildings placed. Even then you should keep enough stored up to replace any buildings the enemy manages to destroy.
I like to place eight wood cutters fairly early in the game. Place them near patches of trees that are close to your stockpile.
Acquiring Stone and Iron
Be sure to place stone and iron mines as needed. Place enough ox carts to keep up a steady stream of materials.
Stone is required for castle walls and many structures. Once you’ve built a successful castle, you will only need the small amount of stone necessary for occasionally fixing damaged castle walls. At this point, stone becomes very profitable. Keep selling extra stone, but keep enough on hand to make repairs (about 200 units or so).
Iron can also be profitable and is worth more money than stone, but it’s typically harder to acquire and your weapon manufacturers will keep pulling it from your stockpile for production.. Keep enough on hand to satisfy the demands of your weapon production and sell the excess.
Step-By-Step Strategy
Here is my step-by-step guide for getting an estate up and running. Keep in mind that every map is different and this strategy will need to be tweaked slightly for each game. Keep increasing your taxes as possible. Don’t neglect your military while building your economy.
The guide is broken up into stages based on your peasant population.
Begin the game by placing your stockpile and granary. Throw in an apple farm and two wood cutters. You might want to consider buying additional wood so you don’t have to wait for your wood cutters to do their thing.
Add a hovel near your keep to increase your population to 16. Add a dairy farm and a meat farm as well as two more woodcutters. Place a stone quarry, an iron mine, and any necessary ox carts.
Place another hovel to get your population up to 24. Add another two wood cutters for a total of six. Place another iron and stone mine along with their ox carts. Add an additional food farm.
Place a hovel for 32 population. Place your last two wood cutters. You should have a total of eight which should last you the rest of the game. Build a church and a candle maker. Add a hops farm, a brewery, and an inn. Build more mines and ox carts as needed.
Place a hovel to increase your population again. place another hops farm and brewery. Add another candle makers. Place a windmill, two wheat farms, and two bakeries to start bread production.
You should have a pretty steady, self sustaining economy now. Build more mines if you need them. A market might be handy for auto selling some of your excess resources. If you increase your population more, you might need to increase your food supply, candle production, and ale production.
Building Ratios
- Apple, meat, and dairy farms have roughly the same production rate. I refer to these three simply as “farms” since they are interchangeable.
- These numbers are based on my “vanilla” strategy. They will need to be tweaked for each game and are partially just personal preference. Take these numbers with a grain of salt.
- 1 farm for every 8 peasants
- 1 windmill, 2 wheat farms, and 2 bakeries for every 32 peasants or so.
- 2 woodcutters for every 8 peasants (until you have 8 woodcutters).
- 1.5 stone mines for every 16 peasants (until you run out of land)
- 1.5 iron mines for every 16 peasants (until you run out of land)
- 1 ox cart for every mine (assuming mines are right beside your stockpile)
- 1 candle makers for every 32 peasants (need church for distribution)
- 1 hops farm and 1 brewery for every 32 peasants (need inn for distribution)
Economy Based Estate
It’s entirely possible to run an economy based estate estate by producing one or two different items, constantly selling them, and buying everything else you need.
In this scenario, it’s a good idea to turn off taxes, religion, and ale consumption and keep your food at 1x or 1/2x distribution. You don’t need to keep your peasants particularly happy, because you won’t be taxing them. The amount of money you get from taxation does not make up for the price of purchasing 4 types of food, ale, and candles.
A market is extremely useful as it automatizes everything. Simply set apples to auto-buy at around 20 units. If you need certain raw materials for production, set those to auto-buy at around 20 units as well. Set whatever you are selling to auto-sell at 1 unit.
Try to wait until you have a fairly high rate of production before placing a market. That 500 gold is much more useful invested in more buildings early in the game.
From my testing (which is incomplete at the moment) I found that candle production is the one of the best options. Place as many chandeliers as you have peasants and set candles to autosell. Chandeliers are awesome because they don’t require any raw materials to make candles. Your only investment is the wood needed to place the building.
Production Value Chart
This is a list of the amount of money each building type produces per day assuming you are selling everything they produce. This list takes into account the price of the raw materials needed for production. It DOES NOT take into account the cost of constructing the buildings. This list is, obviously, incomplete. I’m still testing.
- chandeliers: 7.1 gold per day
- fletcher’s: 7.2 gold per day
- poleturner’s: 8.9 gold per day
- armourer’s: 8.2 gold per day
- blacksmith’s: 7.7 gold per day
- dairy farms: 7.5 gold per day
- breweries: 6.3 gold per day
Conclusion
Thanks for taking the time to read my guide. I hope you found something useful somewhere along the way. If you found anything that was incorrect, have any questions, or have any suggestions / requests for improvements please let me know in the comments.