When comparing Stronghold Crusader HD vs Age of Empires II HD, the Slant community recommends Age of Empires II HD for most people. In the question“What are the best singleplayer games on Steam?” Age of Empires II HD is ranked 22nd while Stronghold Crusader HD is ranked 45th. The most important reason people chose Age of Empires II HD is:
While the graphics are slightly outdated, they were very well done for their time. And when combined with the history behind the game and its wonderful soundtrack, the game comes across as extremely polished.
Specs
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Pros
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
Pro Awesome ambiance with a great finish
While the graphics are slightly outdated, they were very well done for their time. And when combined with the history behind the game and its wonderful soundtrack, the game comes across as extremely polished.
Pro Runs on very old computers
As this game is quite old, requiring only a 1.2GHZ processor and 1 Gigabyte of RAM, this title will run on older PC's and laptops alike without issue.
Pro Facilitates the user's preferred pace
This game neither gives the impression of being thrown to the wolves nor that of being left stranded on an island. Whether you want to move slowly and steadily through the game or take things at a more heightened pace, Age of Empires 2 will allow for both (given a little planning).
Cons
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
Con A lack of proper User Interface scaling makes a clunky UI worse
While this is a remastered edition of a classic Real-Time Strategy title, the UI was left largely unchanged. Selecting workers still prompts you to click buttons to bring up both economic and military buildings, then choosing whichever building you wish to construct. This is uninteresting design and makes the UI difficult to navigate.
On top of this, the game does not feature UI scaling. Since the game is bound to your current desktop display settings, the UI will adjust itself to match that resolution. This means if you play at 4K resolution the User Interface will be absurdly small, making it near impossible to see what buildings you wish to construct or what units you want to train. This is counter-intuitive design, for this era of modern gaming, and makes properly playing the game more of a hassle than it should ever be.
Con Age of Empires II HD is an unsuccessful remaster due to its outdated graphics
With the only notable upgrade being high resolution options, Age of Empires II HD fails at being a proper remaster. While higher resolutions give the game a slight face lift, the rest of the engine is left largely unchanged. This means the graphics we see in this remaster are nearly the same in its original 1999 release. Due to this, the game is grating to the eye and does not deliver on its high definition promise.