I admit, I'm a Stronghold fan

I've played my share of economic simulation games for the PC back in 90s and early 2000s and the Stronghold series stands out as some of my all time favorites.  The reason I'm making this post is because Stronghold 3 was recently released on October 25, 2011.  Why is this a big deal? The first Stronghold came out way back in 2001! Over a decade ago.  Then there was the Stronghold Crusader a year later (just as awesome) and eventually the 2nd era - Stronghold 2 in 2005 (not so awesome - extremely buggy).    So I have yet to play Stronghold 3, but I'm very curious to see what's new in the game.  It seems the reviews are already similar to the low reviews for the 2nd game, but the 2nd was pretty decent once the developers fixed it back up with patches.  The same will happen with the 3rd as well and the ratings will surely go back up.

The first games of this series were intense with often ridiculous levels of difficulty - especially in the Stronghold Crusader: Extreme.  It's one of those games I enjoyed for many reasons from fine intricate graphical mechanics to sheer difficulty that required tons of planning ahead. Unlike other popular economic simulations such as Age of Empires - Stronghold requires players to manage painfully realistic medieval economies for castles with a great depth of resource development into goods.  These included details like actually having to set up a full set of production facilities just to produce food, weapons, armor, etc. And not only that, your food supply was constantly consumed at various rates as well - determined by the size of your population and daily ration limits.  Making bread for instance requires a wheat farm, mill to produce flour, and a baker.

The supply and demand factor is also significant based on your population size. However one thing that bugged me was how trading rates with the resource/goods market never changed over time like they should have.  This could be a random factor or perhaps it could relate to the current circumstances in the game, but it would be nice if Stronghold 3 featured a resource/goods trading market with constantly changing prices for goods. While the first era of Stronghold games features unrealistic instant trading of goods for currency, Stronghold 2 took the difficulty up a notch and requiring real traders at trading posts physically transport goods which took time based on the distance between trading destinations.  Stronghold 2 essentially beefed up the castle management difficulty further with crime, waste management, and royal dinners - which got some mixed reactions from fans of the previous era.  From what I've heard and read so far, the 3rd era has cut back a bit some of the annoyances from Stronghold 2 and enhanced the most favorable aspects the Stronghold 1 era further.