Have you ever wanted to get fully functional arrow slits in your walls? Almost every stone castle built had arrow slits and they provided excellent protection for archers and crossbowmen - now your castles can have them too...

Submitted by Aubergine and Merrill the Just

This trick is relatively easy to do in the original version of Stronghold, but it's super simple in Crusader due to low walls! A third method takes advantage of very tall walls for some extremely cool effects. We'll show all three methods methods here to give you maximum possibilities...

Method 1: Original Stronghold (and Stronghold Crusader)

First, you need to place some walls - three rows of horizontal or vertical walls to be precise. Here's a flattened view so you can see the structure:

Next, you will place 2x2 stones o­n the wall where indicated - we're using the lowered walls trick here:

For reference our tutorial o­n brush sizes has this picture of what 2x2 stones look like (as the picture above may be misleading):

Then delete the stones and lower the terrain and you have arrow slits with a ledge behind them for your archers to stand o­n!

Method 2: Stronghold Crusader o­nly

In crusader, place a row of low wall as shown:

And then place o­ne row of normal stone wall in front:

When flattened it looks like this:

The lower wall is at the top of the picture, the higher wall is beneath it.

Place some more low wall tiles in the locations indicated by the black pitch in the above diagram and then you get your arrow slits:

Voila! Same effect, just much quicker! The flattened view at the bottom of the picture shows normal wall with red dots and low wall with blue dots.

Method 3: Very High Walls (Orignal Stronghold and Crusader)

If you've not made very high walls before, check out our tutorial o­n Stoney Veneers.

If a wall in front of an archer towers high above them, they will usually not attack any units o­n the other side of the wall:

And just to prove there are idle archers behind the wall, here it is flattened:

You can actually tell your archers to target a specific unit and they will actually fire arrows over the wall or sometimes even through it (a glitch in the game?). The problem with this is that it's far more difficult for them to hit the enemy units (angle and range seem to be the key factors in them having any success). Either way, it's not much use if your archers don't automatically attack enemy units o­n the other side of a wall...

So, if you thought our arrow slits were just eye candy, then think again. Prepare yourself for o­ne of the most unusual looking functional walls ever created in Stronghold or Crusader:

The horizontal and vertical walls will try to smooth themselves unless something gets in the way - here that something o­nly affects the wall part way up to give this awesome effect!

You can use normal height walls instead of low walls making the construction a little quicker in the map editor. The picture below shows the tall wall made by placing normal stone walls o­n mid-plain terrain (green dots - the bottom row of wall), low wall (blue dots to the top left) and normal wall (red dots to the top right). I left a space in the middle with no arrow slit so you can see what happens to the tall wall at the front:

Beware! If any slits appear o­n ground level, as shown here, you may find troops walking through them!

The biggest advantage to this is that you archers will now automatically attack and, as shown later in this tutorial, they have a good field of view especially if you place enough arrow slits to allow the field of view to overlap (the spacing we've shown throughout this tutorial is ideal).

Access For Troops

All this engineering is no good to us if we can't get our archers in position!

To give your troops access by stairs, delete some normal height stone wall tiles at o­ne end of your wall:

Then place stairs as shown:

Then replace the normal height wall:

You need to do it this way because stairs will automatically attach thremselves to the hieghest adjacent wall - get rid of that higher wall and all that's left is the low wall so the stairs have to attach to that.

An alternative, and personally this is my favourite, is to place a tower at o­ne end of your wall and then place stairs o­n your tower.

As long as the tower touches a tile of low wall and a tile of normal wall, troops will be able to get o­n to both levels from your tower!

Now, do you recognise anything o­n these pictures, perhaps from our tutorial o­n The Arch of Talos? That's right, the arrow slits allow arrows to pass through but units can still walk across the top of them. There's just so much potential here!

Testing your New Defences

Testing is simple, place some archers o­n the low wall and put some enemies in front of it. Here's what the enemies see:

And here is what you can see from behind the wall:

I placed braziers immediately behind each slit (on the lower wall section) - this looks nice and also allows your archers to set fire to pitch in front of the wall. Note that the archer directly behind the slit is actually standing in the brazier! It will keep him warm in winder no doubt.

As you can imagine, with arrow slits the chances of enemy archers hitting your troops is vastly reduced!

Field of View

These arrow slits are not just eye candy, they really do work!

As shown by the diagram below, they give the archer a good angle of attack (assuming he is stood directly behind the slit) when troops approach the front of the wall.

In the design we use throughout this tutorial, you can usually get three archers behind each arrow slit - o­ne directly behind it and the other two are either side. The archers either side of the slit will have a reduced attack angle, but as shown by Method 3 earlier, this is still a vast improvement o­n no attack angle at all!

Experiment!

As always, make sure you experiment with different heights at the front and back and also different types of walls. We showed how different heights of walls had an effect in Method 3 earlier, but to give you some more ideas here's a quick gallery of some other designs we came up with...

Replace the normal stone wall at the front with crenellated wall placed using the click-and-drag method. o­n this o­ne we also placed two additional rows of normal height wall at the back:

Although it looks nice without those two extra rows of wall:

And here's o­ne where the crenellated wall has been placed a single tile at a time (instead of the click-and-drag method):

And, by placing another wall like the o­ne above, but o­n higher terrain behind the first wall, you can get multi-storey arrow slits.

I think you will agree, the design possibilities of this technique are as wide and varied as your imagination!

Happy targetting!