First off, let me start by saying Stronghold sounds like the ideal game-mode, it offers RP, combat, siege, strategical thinking, more persistence and lots of freedom to build the castle you want. My great concern with this mode however, is that I see numerous opportunities for trolls to take advantage of people who want to play the game-mode as intended. How will a team manage to use all the resource points to build one castle instead of 20 different people all wanting their plan to be executed? How will you make sure some *sshole isn't going to deliberately spend all the resources on building five gatehouses next to each other just because he can? The lack of a anti-troll/anti-noob mechanic for artillery and sapping is one of the reasons Napoleonic Wars failed imo. There are pretty much four types of people in NW when you look at sappers and artillery, which in M:BG will be the exact same case. There is the innocent noob who is trying out all the different kinds of props and ammo and this way waisting resources, you can't really get mad with this kid. Then there is the obvious troll who is putting planks up all around just to f*ck with everyone else. Also there is the "pro" who thinks he knows everything, is constantly CAPSing in the chat about how wrong everyone else is placing stuff and destroying all but his creations. Last but not least there are the clan members who, generally speaking, know what they are doing and are just trying to help their team/clan the best they can. in Crpg we have seen similar things with ladder placing back in the day. you might say admins would be able to solve the problem, but with the intended 200 player servers, admins struggle to keep an eye on everything.
I think the Stronghold game-mode is a very good pro for this game and is an important feature to differentiate M:BG from other games alike, but being such a complicated game-mode, which makes it such a great concept, could also become its downfall. I think the press is also aware of this and it might slow promotion and funding down. I don't know if you guys already have solved these kinds of problems for Stronghold, but if you have, sharing them would bring good things I think.