After hitting the play option nothing happens.

Aside from verifying your game cache and checking your connection with Steam, you may also need to manually run secondary installers required by this game.

Exit Steam entirely.

Browse to your Stronghold 3 installation folder (Usually C:\Program files\Steam\Steamapps\common\stronghold3\)

Run the following installers:

...\Steamapps\common\stronghold3\resources\directx \DXSETUP.exe
...\Steamapps\common\stronghold3\resources\dotNetF x40\dotNetFx_Full_x86_x64.exe
...\Steamapps\common\stronghold3\resources\redist\ vcredist_x86.exe
...\Steamapps\common\stronghold3\resources\redist\ vcredist_2008_x86.exe

Reboot your computer and test any issues again.

Original thread - http://forums.steampowered.com/forum....php?t=2515423

Unable to select menus. None of the buttons can be selected but they do highlight OR Stronghold 3 doesn't do anything when the customers tries to run it.

This is caused by a virus checker running the Stronghold3.exe file in Sandbox mode. Running the exe in standard mode will resolve this problem.

Missing water, fire, rain or building outlines.

If you're missing graphically effects in-game, such as rain, water, fire or the outlines on buildings when using an ATI video card. You can resolve this problem by switching off AA within the Catalyst Control Panel.

More information is available here: http://www.neoseeker.com/Articles/Ha...feature/4.html

If you experience odd problems after updating, or the message 'This game is currently unavailable message on Steam' is shown.

Please verify your Steam cache files. Problems such as: Odd characters in the menu. Buildings cannot be placed in-game. Language speech is missing or anything you had in the game before but don't after updating the game.
To verify your Steam cache files:
1. Open Steam > Library
2. Right click on Stronghold 3 and select Properties
3. Select the Local Files tab and then click Verify Integrity of Game Cache
Also refer to the following for more information: https://support.steampowered.com/kb_...4595-wexn-6831.

Making Stronghold 3 autosave

Just to note this also makes saving occur in multiplayer and therefore must be switched off before playing multiplayer or it could cause problems.

You can autosave in Stonghold 3 to do this. Enter the folder where Steam is located, such as C:\Program Files\Steam\steamapps\common\stronghold3\bin\win32 _release. Within this folder there is a config.xml file. If you edit the config file with notepad and edit the autosave entry to, for example - <autosave interval=60 /> this will save roughly every game day.

Making Stronghold 3 run in a Window

You can run Stronghold 3 in a window to do this. Enter the folder where Steam is, such as C:\Program Files\Steam\steamapps\common\stronghold3\bin\win32 _release. Within this folder there is a config.xml file. If you edit the config file with notepad and edit then add windowed=1 <resolution width=1024 height=768 windowed=1/>

To change the Windowed size change the resolution while in-game.