Lucky Mac owners don't have the range of options for video cards and hardware, so it's rare to have any problems displaying graphics. Installing Stronghold and launching without any tweaks to graphics resulted in a very playable setup, and I could no doubt improve performance through tweaking some of the video options. But, like many Real Time Strategy (RTS) games out there, Stronghold isn't built around cutting-edge graphics as much as excellent depth in gameplay. The music and sound, on the other hand, is a big piece of what makes this game fun to play. Not that it is ugly or anything, because it's not. The character models and the levels are creative and one interesting thing is the historicity of the castles featured in the game. The sound is just a gas, because you'll get to hear all the environmental sound effects along with activity-based sounds like the blacksmith working or the woodcutter chopping down trees. And, you get funny comments from your aide in the game about the wisdom or folly of your actions, comments from the populace on taxes, food, etc.

One nice thing that marks this as a step up from the RTS games of old is the addition of some visual navigation tools. By clicking on screen, you can pull up a menu that rotates the view, zooms in on an area and drops the walls to let you see the action inside a building (remember this is a game about storming and defending castles, so this feature is nice). Finally, you can drop parts of the interface to improve screen real estate. It's a nice package of viewing tools that helps make the rather static presentation afforded most RTS games feel more 'real.'

Stronghold gives us a chance to be part of history. And not that boring stuff you studied in school. This is the stuff of text and silver screen, the time of battling armies and walled empires, in short a castle simulator. We could say that being the lord of a castle is something like running any small community, except most small communities don't have thousands of angry peasants armed with sharp swords and heavy armor. Likewise, your home defense unit today probably doesn't include pots of boiling oil, even though it probably should. From a simple township to a mighty citadel, there are multiple ways to enjoy Stronghold, so listen up.

One of the quickest and easiest things to do is go through the Tutorial. This will show you the basics of starting a community that will develop into a strong castle, right down to stacking the blocks and designing the layout. From the Tutorial, you have a chance to choose 3 broad areas. If combat is your thing, start either a single mission, a campaign of multiple missions (21 to be exact!) or a multiplayer game using the included GameRanger. Within the single mission you choose to attack or defend, with the defense posture being called a siege because you're stuck inside a castle while the enemy approaches. Under 'Economic' missions, you can again choose roughly the same group of options, except that the single missions aren't split like the combat missions. What you can do under this area is Free Build Mode, a cool way to just play around with the possibilities of the game and not have to deal with any real structure other than what you impose on yourself. Finally, the Map Editor lets you script scenarios for play with friends or to challenge yourself once you exhaust the single-player modes. Man, this an extensive tool!

When the game starts in almost any mode other than the scripted battle modes, you have very little to your name other than a castle keep. You'll start developing the infrastructure of the place by introducing food production and attracting some villagers to your settlement. They will act as the labor that fuels all the hard industry in your growing town. Before long, as woodcutters transition into stonemasons and blacksmiths, you can develop strong walls and weapons to defend your successful castle so nobody will take it away from you. The 'castle' can take many forms, and playing the single mission modes, you'll see different styles that were successful throughout the ages in various places around the world. But, the main thing is that you can start out developing wood structures and move to stone and further reinforce with a moat and defend yourself with an entire army inside, outside, on and under your walls. All of the economic factors such as food, tax and industry make this more than a straight combat game, and it's not just as simple as resource harvesting, because in many cases (as with weapons) you'll need to utilize secondary and tertiary resource usage to accomplish your goal. For items you can't develop yourself, you can even trade with traveling merchants or individuals. The multiplayer gameplay is excellent, and a special 'Siege That' mode allows you to build a castle that the other then needs to try and knock down. You get points based on how long your castle holds up.

The biggest challenge Stronghold will face I think is that it is far from a 'pick up and play' game, even by RTS standards. The level of involvement you'll need to have in even the most basic missions starts off at a level that may leave some newer RTS enthusiasts in the dust. Most of the time, in economic scenarios, the real challenge is pretty simple and you'll need to just manage resources adequately to get the job done. But, it's not always clear until you've played for a good deal of time what effect certain actions will have. Changing taxes and rations could be expressed as fairly simple to gauge, but when you consider the placement of buildings, food production and even the way in which you'll build your castle, things get complicated fast. And, with the pressure of defending all this against an attacking army and still keeping it together, you can see how Stronghold gets to be a tough little game. But, for gamers who overcome the initial hurdle, there's a great game here with an unbelievable amount of depth.

Stronghold asks you to keep track of a lot of things at any given time, but it does a good job keeping the interface from being junked up. Essentially, you can navigate visually in a miniature view of the entire world by clicking on the area you want to transition your screen view to. You click on a group of buildings you'd like to develop, and either click individually or group-select characters to make them take action on an item in battle. For building purposes, Stronghold simplifies the way in which people are assigned to a task by creating an 'on demand' system for jobs. Basically, if you build it, they will come. Or at least they'll come when they're in town. The hardest thing is developing your castle when the population is fluctuating wildly. Sometimes, you'll find people leaving their jobs and moving out of the castle, and you may build something when there isn't anyone to staff it and have to wait until your economic influences can attract villagers. The item use is also simplified by rationing food. A nice variety makes people happier, and much like Tropico a popularity meter keeps track of how well you're doing with the populace.

Stronghold presents a nice interface and runs well on both OS 9 and OS X. I was making the change between these two as I was testing the game, and had a chance to install and run on both. Very little in the way of install or performance issues arose on my system, and the minimum specs are easily satisfied by Mac users who bought even many years ago. With more high-end hardware, this won't be a game that knocks your socks off visually, but if you're looking for graphics over all else, you're barking up the wrong tree anyway.

What Stronghold does have is a great mix of action, strategy and even a link to history for people who get excited about that. It's obvious that the developers got excited about making the game, and tried to create something strong and lasting. A lot like a big castle, in fact... Stronghold succeeds on many levels, and while it may not be the best entry point for gamers hoping to try RTS for the first time, it stands as a major addition to the library for this genre, especially on Mac.