- Awesome Music: Stronghold is full of beautiful medieval-style music.
- Complacent Gaming Syndrome: Good luck trying to find a multiplayer game in Crusader without any Horse Archers or Assasins.
- Difficult, but Awesome: In Legends it is possible to create a Custom Map that allows one to control forces from all three alignments, Good, Ice, and Evil, and create more so long as one puts in a Round Table, an Ice Pit, and a Sorcerer's Tower. Sadly, regardless of which alignment you make your Lord, there are some units and buildings that one cannot make more of, mainly in terms of certain types of Siege Equipment and castle defenses, though pre-placed ones can be used. Still, there's nothing like sending the Knights of the Round Table out backed up by a force consisting of Men-At-Arms, Archers, Crossbowmen, Macemen, Swordsmen, Pikemen, regular Knights, Ice Maidens, Frost Giants, White Witches, White Wolves, Dwarves, Demons, Hell Hounds, Vampiric Creepers, Werewolves, Giant Demonic Bats, Saxon Warriors, Dragons (all three types), Laddermen, and all those other fellas, in what looks to be an Enemy Mine situation. That being said, there is a map in the Trials section that has one playing as an Evil Lord who has access to an Ice Pit in addition to the usual Sorcerer's Tower, allowing both Evil and Ice special units to be recruited.
- First Installment Wins: While the later games (with the possible exception of 3) are warmly regarded by the fans, the most well-received and popular games are Stronghold 1 and Crusader.
- Game-Breaker: You can make a fort, closer to the enemy stronghold, around your catapult so it can only be pelt with arrows. In maps that have enemy spawn points, you can build towers close to those points. This allows you to attack their units before they even walk into the map. This was rectified in later versions of the game.
- Somehow when fighting AI, you can build industrial building with intention to block entrance/gates of enemy, making them choose between keep the blocked gate or tear down their own gates and towers.
- In Stronghold 2, flaming logs are astonishingly destructive when employed in castle sieges. They have a huge range, crush everything in their path, and are fairly cost-effective to boot.
- Massed mobile ballistae in Stronghold Crusader are expensive, but lethal to everything weaker than a large formation of armored knights.
- Fire in general is hilariously overpowered in Stronghold 1. There's very little the A.I can do to counter a wall of flame, and if you can trick them to funnel onto fire traps and then spring them, there will be no survivors. This is a case of Surprisingly Realistic Outcome, of course, as fire burns right through armor and can't be "blocked" like a sword or mace can. Fire was nerfed somewhat in Crusader, as you can now build a well to put out fires, but it's still positively deadly in many situations.
- Germans Love David Hasselhoff: The games are popular in Germany, Russia and Poland.
Sheriff: (annoyed) "Hey, that's my castle you're destroying!"
- Love to Hate: Some of the enemy Lords such as Wolf or the Caliph can have this reaction with fans.
- More Popular Spin-Off: Arguably Stronghold Crusader, where it's the first to have HD remake, and later, sequel.
- Obvious Beta: Due to frequent crashes, lacking features from previous games, and the sheer number of bugs, Stronghold 3 could be argued that it's more of an Obvious Alpha.
- Spiritual Successor: To the first two Lords of the Realm games. It blends the highly customizable castle design of the first game and the more action-oriented gameplay of the second one. The unit types in the original Stronghold are practically identical to the ones in Lords of the Realm II (both have Archers, Macemen, Crossbowmen, Pikemen, Swordsmen, Knights and various siege engines, while Stronghold's Spearmen play the same role as Peasants in Lords of the Realm II), including their general abilities (e.g. Swordsmen are the Mighty Glacier in both games, while Archers are great against unarmored units but do very little damage to those in heavy armor).
- Most Wonderful Sound: Multiple:
- The sound of your advisor may be taken as sexy, or, more likely, just amusing.
- Whenever the advisor declares the player as the greatest lord, you know that you have superiority over all your other weak lords.
- When an enemy Lord dies, he makes a dying sound along with a defeated message that made the players feel good about defeating the Lord. In the original game each lord has a unique dying sound.
