This was one of my favorite games from way way back! I remember going through and beating the game on impossible as each of the different families.
One tip/cheat that I haven't seen mentioned elsewhere is that the merchant option doesn't check for whether or not you have sufficient resources when you trade. So you can still trade away your timber for gold even if you have 0 gold.
Also, just about all abilities (except scout) will help to increase your adm/mil/dip ratings, but the fastest one is merchant. So you can also increase your ratings more quickly by trading away resources you don't have.
Another is that some tasks such as food, timber, and attack take twice as long to complete in winter (Oct to Feb I think) compared with their usual rate, so you should try to do them in summer instead; stick to iron and gold in the winter, for example.
Lastly, I've always just gone for a mass number of archers. Archers grouped into a bunch take out everything including knights, especially when you start them in the corner of where you're allowed to place them (so that the enemy comes at you only a few at a time rather than all at once).
Has anyone gone through and looked at how the plots worked? I know that there's one that gets you an additional rating point in each of the categories (the "Etienne the spy" one) but I don't know if there are other "good" plots out there.
Unfortunately, I can't help much with install issues -- on all the machines I've had, the game worked fine when I simply ran the castles2.exe file, I've never had to use the install.exe file (or maybe that was too long ago).
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