There are faster ways to get a number of achievements but this is how I did it before I was aware of those. I do think this leads to some interesting game play choices you wouldn’t normally do in Stronghold and led me to think about some aspects of the game differently. I present it at least as a curiosity. It does feel like a more “legitimate” way of getting a lot of achievements to me. Not that that really matters.

Do a Free Build map with Grasslands. Set all your starting goods and gold to very high. Set invasions to very hard and every minute. Set a 60 minute peace time. Leave random events off.

Decrease game speed to 10. Place your keep somewhere in the middle area and then immediately destroy the stockpile before it gets a lot of goods.
Place your stockpile and granary in the middle but away from the keep with enough space between them for a double row of bakeries. Then build a market.

You’ll want about 4 stockpiles total. Around them place 9 wheat farms and 3 mills. Build 16 bakeries between your stockpile and granary. Eventually get your bakeries up to 32 total. This should easily support a population of 300 peasants.

Build 3 dairy farms with 8 tanners near them. Build 8 fletchers and set them to crossbow production. Try to keep them all close to the stockpile and armory so they’re as efficient as possible. Lastly build four blocks of 3x3 housing (that’s 9 hovels total in a square all next to each other).

As you run out of wood just buy more from the market.

Build quarries and ox tethers first. As resources allow build iron mines, pitch rigs, and 9 hops farms, 12 breweries, and 10 inns. That should get you 100% inn coverage. Keep your stone for building towers but sell all the other resources you can. You’re gonna have to buy stone for all the towers anyway so the biggest thing you want is to keep gold flowing in. Set taxes as high as you can without losing popularity. Start setting your market to autotrade to facilitate this. See below for more details on this.

Before peace time ends you want 5 towers with ballista at each sign post and at least 100 crossbowmen for the initial invasions. Save the game just before peace time ends so you can always reload at this point.

You will have to buy weapons to achieve this. The tanners and fletchers help, but whenever possible you should buy crossbows and leather armor to train more crossbowmen. I usually did it in groups of 25. That's 2575 gold total for the 25 weapons/armor and training the troops. To get 1500 troops that means we need at least 154,500 gold this way and that's not including engineers and ballista.

Keep building your defenses until you’ve got at least 17 round towers with ballista at each sign post and 500 crossbowmen on each set of towers. Build walls to funnel invasions toward the top middle sign post but don’t enclose the keep. The AI pathfinding will help keep them from attacking your defenses.

Set your market to autotrade all resources. I told it to buy all food resources if there were less than 20 available (including hops, ale, flour, and wheat) and to sell anything with more than 50 available. I told it to sell any other resource that it had more than 20 of and to buy if there were less than 10. This is important to keep your economy moving for hours of AFK, especially food and ale production.

The last thing to do once your defenses are fully built and manned is to set game speed to 90 so those waves are zooming in as quickly as possible.

Note in the pics below I also added additional food production for apples and dairy farms, as well as a bunch of churches. This helps with popularity but isn't really necessary. Make sure you take care of the stuff outlines above during peace time before doing anything else.

The following are pics of my castle set up. This set up got me something like 750,000 kills in about 6 hours before it fell. I just reloaded my save from just before peace time ended and let it go a bit longer to get to 1 million kills. Alternatively you could probably just do another batch of ballistas and 500 crossbowmen at the center opening.


Good luck!