499 Words About: Fighting “The Rat” in Stronghold Crusader
Duc dePuce, a.k.a. “The Rat” is a non-playable character(npc) from the PC videogame Stronghold Crusader, a game I have spent at least 100 hours playing at this point in my life.
Fun fact, the dude just sucks.
Stronghold Crusader was a City-Building, Real-time strategy PC game set in the region of the Middle East about the time of the actual European Crusades. These military movements and religious wars saw a number of European aristocrats and common people’s traveling to the “Holy Land” in order to “liberate” these territories from Muslim political powers which had conquered the region. Stronghold Crusader was also a sequel to the PC game Stronghold, hence the title. What was unique about Stronghold Crusader was that it included characters from this original game that the player could (and would) fight in various challenges or free-style battles.
Stronghold Crusader blends the city-building simulator genre with real-time strategy so that players will begin a game with a keep and a small handful of resources. From there I am supposed to establish farms, businesses, and quarries to create an economy which will let me build a castle and by extension, an army.
“The Rat” was typically the NPC I fought the most because, as I noted before, he sucked.
For clarification though I’ll explain why he sucked.
Each NPC in the game is programmed to build armies using particular units. For example you can recruit macemen, knights, pikemen, archers, and crossbowmen. The weakest European units were spearmen and archers and The Rat only ever uses these units. Starting the game I would recruit a host of archers and rock throwers, set them up on a row of towers, and then just wait. The Rat would taunt me before the attack, and in just a few seconds be screaming that his “stupid troops” ruined everything. This process would repeat itself with each successive army thrown at my castle steadily growing in size, but no matter what The Rat only ever used spearmen and a few archers. No catapults, no knights, no trebuchets, not even a ladder.
I said that I fought The Rat more than any other npc, and the reason for this should be obvious by now: it was really fun.
As much as I love RTS videogames, I’ve never been good at them. I much preferred the castle building and tower defense system. The Rat was a perfect opponent because he never posed an actual challenge, letting me relax and just build. Likewise his castle designs were ludicrous and strategically unsound to a level that was almost insulting. A handful of knights was always enough to finish the job.
Comparably, The Rat was Stronghold Crusader’s equivalent of the Goomba in Super Mario Bros. Posing no real challenge, The Rat teaches the player the basic mechanics of the game while also building the aesthetic.
The Rat, his castle destroyed and his troops dead, sniveling for mercy, always left me with the same impression:
Dude…this guy sucks.
Joshua “Jammer” Smith
2.10.2025
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