This tutorial starts with the basics of placing crenellated walls then goes o­n to show various tricks for modifying their appearance including spikes, towers and zig-zags. We'll also show how to defend against laddermen, assassins and siege towers.  If you think you know everything there is to know about crenellated walls, think again...

Submitted by Aubergine and KoenFrancois

Note: While the basic placement of crenelated walls works the same in both Stronghold (original) and Stronghold Crusader, most of the special appearences will o­nly work in the original Stronghold.

Crenellated walls are the ideal accompanyment to your stone curtain walls. They give your troops something to hide behind while they stand o­n the stone walls and therefore give added protection against enemy archers. If you then place braziers in the crenellations you will have the perfect place for archers as shown below:

Note: The crenellated wall should face the enemy.

Placing Crenellated Walls

Crenellated wall can o­nly be placed next to stone wall or crenellated wall tiles o­n the map, so you first need to place some normal stone walls:

Next, select crenellated walls and then starting with a tile next to the stone wall click and drag to draw a line of crenellated wall:

When you release the mouse you will see the crenellated wall next to your normal wall:

Un-Crenellated Crenellated Walls

If you place the crenellated wall o­ne tile at a time, you will just get a raised row of wall without any crenellations:

In theory this will provide even better protection for troops o­n the wall.

Spikes (original Stronghold o­nly)

If you place two rows of crenellated wall next to each other you will get a spikes effect. It doesn't matter whether the crenellated wall is painted o­ne tile at a time or several tiles at o­nce as shown below:

The effect will be the same:

Here it is flattened so you can see how the two rows of crenellated wall are next to each other:

Tip: In Stronghold Crusader, you just end up with two layers of normal crenellated wall, however you will find that assassins cannot scale dual-crenellated walls!

Independent Crenellations

After placing the crenellated wall, you can delete the wall it was next to...

The picture above shows a composite of the normal and flattened view of a map so you can see how the walls are formed.

Perfect Distribution

You may have noticed that you sometimes get uneven crenellations like this:

That happens when you have an even number of wall tiles, eg. 4, 6 (shown above), 8, etc.

To get perfect distribution of crenellations, use odd numbers of wall tiles - in the examplewe have used 7 tiles:

Much nicer! Depending o­n the length of your wall and what it connects to, you may have to use trial and error to get the perfect result.

Towers

If you create square formations with crenellated wall, you get small towers as shown below:

The flattened view to the right shows how the normal view tower to the left is constructed.

Horizontal and Veritcal Walls are Special

If we create a horizontal (shown below) or vertical wall, o­nly the corners of the wall tiles touch each other as shown below:

However, for both stone walls an crenellated walls, the game will make them appear smooth as shown here:

When you flatten the map, you can see that that apparently smooth wall is jagged:

Now, we can take advantage of this in several ways...

Fancy Crenellations (orignal Stronghold o­nly)

When we placed two rows of crenellation together o­n diagonal walls, we got spikes. But what happens if we place two rows of horizontal (shown below) or vertical crenellation next to each other:

Regardless of whether you click and drag the wall (as shown above) or draw it a tile at a time, you will get the following when two rows of horizontal crenellation appear next to each other with a horizontal stone wall in the background:

If you look at that same wall from the other side, you can see how different it is starting to look:

Cool eh?

Zig-Zag Walls (original Stronghold o­nly)

Now, let's take that o­ne stage further and add another layer of stone wall alongside our crenellated wall, so that the two rows of crenellated wall are sandwiched between two outer rows of stone wall:

Here it is flattened so you can see more clearly:

And voila! Look what we get - cool zig-zagged walls:

But why does this happen?

Unsmooth Walls

Well, remember we said that the game will make horizontal and vertical walls look smooth - it will o­nly do this if there is nothing else it needs to display in the gaps.

The following picture illustrates this - we've placed some pebbles in the gaps o­n the right hand side of this wall:

As you can see the left side of the wall appears smooth. But o­n the right hand side the game needs to draw the pebbles so it can't make the wall appear smooth.

If we now make various patterns of crenellated wall and remove the stone wall and then place pebbles, we can get all sorts of other weird effects like this:

Well, I hope that's given you some extra design ideas about crenellated walls!

Siege Towers, Laddermen and Assassins

In Stronghold Crusader, there are some extra defence tactics you can perform with crenellated walls.  If you o­nly have a single row of crenellated wall, siege towers and assassins pose a significant threat to your castle:

But, if you place two rows of crenellated walls, they are unable to reach the top of your walls!

The siege tower still deploys but the engineers exit it meaning that no troops can climb up it!  If there are any locations o­n the wall that have either no crenellation or single crenellation, then telling laddermen or assassins to scale the wall will lead to them running to the nearest part of wall o­n your castle that they can still access.

And, for those of you who don't already know, the same works in the original version of the game!!

Of course, as well as using this trick o­n your own castles you can also use it in the map editor - for example, you might not want the player to be able to use assassins to quickly finish off enemy lords.

See Also: Glossary - Castle: Battlement, Crenel, Embrasure, Merlon, Parapet, Allure

Happy castle building!