When comparing Starcraft vs Stronghold Crusader HD, the Slant community recommends Starcraft for most people. In the question“What are the best LAN party PC games?” Starcraft is ranked 9th while Stronghold Crusader HD is ranked 33rd. The most important reason people chose Starcraft is:
There are three selectable races in the game, Terrans, Protoss and the Zerg. The Terrans being human, while the other two are alien races. What makes the game stand out is that each race feels exceptionally different from one another, each with their own personalities. This makes for a different experience depending on what race has been chosen to play with.
Specs
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Pros
Pro Tons of personality that keeps the story and gameplay interesting and entertaining
There are three selectable races in the game, Terrans, Protoss and the Zerg. The Terrans being human, while the other two are alien races. What makes the game stand out is that each race feels exceptionally different from one another, each with their own personalities. This makes for a different experience depending on what race has been chosen to play with.
Pro Built-in offline LAN support
Being an older game, Starcraft suports offline LAN due to not as many people having internet back when it was released. This is something that many games (including Starcraft 2) regrettably do not feature anymore.
Pro Well balanced race selection keeps the gameplay fair
The game is fairly well balanced, so nobody gets an advantage by choosing a certain race. While each race will have their own unique abilities, the balancing of these abilities allows the game to play even handed, with no real advantage to any race.
Pro This game can be downloaded for free
Blizzard is now offering the original Starcraft (titled Starcraft Anthology) as a free download.
Pro Highly specialized units that are easy to learn but hard to master
This helps keep the game challenging and interesting even at a high level of proficiency.
Pro Great for RTS beginners
Easy to learn mechanics of economy, castle building and army production.
Does not overwhelm players with choices.
Pro Deep yet intuitive interface
Many options are available in the game along with good tutorials that introduce the player to these. While not all options are necessary the inclusion of them is welcome for those that would like to take advantage of them.
Pro Unique Gameplay
A unique blend of real-time battles and castle-sim, which the Stronghold series is famous for
Cons
Con Old and outdated
With the original release dating back to 1998, the game is quite old now and its graphics are not on par with current game offerings.
Con Lacks widescreen support
Starcraft is only available in a 4:3 resolution. However, a hack to make it work in widescreen can be found here.
Con Lacks polish in some areas
Things like buttons on the bottom of the screen that are not intuitively placed as well as notifications that can not be filtered to the more important. This can detract from the gameplay as it is immersion breaking to have to rifle through inconvenient button placement as well as notifications looking for what you need at the time.
Con Multiplayer is a hassle
A third-party connection app like Tunngle, Hamachi, GameRanger is needed to play the non-steam version of the game and therefore multiplayer games are mostly unresponsive and error-prone