Lothere will gladly answer any questions you have... but I'm not sure what kind of tutorial I could write. To my mind there isn't anything special about my castles -- I don't do much fancy stuff like turning off floor constraints and making arches and domes and what have you.

My best advice would be to study real castles. Start at the very awesome site of Bob Carney and his Lego castles. He puts up excellent plans of all the castles he builds -- both the "real" plans, and the plans for his Lego constructions -- plus oftentimes some photos, architectural cutaways, etc. I have never found a site with so many castle plans all together.

Otherwise, when I build I just try to keep in mind that the thing is supposedly made out of stone and timber. That means no giant rooms with no visible means of support for the walls and the roof. Also, most castles are small -- just a square keep with a "big" hall and a few tiny rooms, and the rest of the castle infrastructure built of wood and daub or whatever the local vernacular was. And likewise most rooms in a stone building built for defense are going to be small and with a few tiny windows or none at all. Unless you're building Versailles or something. Not the sort of castle they're building in the Dark Ages so I can't help you there. Plus I too often disregard my own advice.

If you look at most of my recent building efforts, the bigger rooms have piers and pillars, arches, hints of beams and roof trusses where my CC permits me, etc. If you looked at plans you would see that a lot of the castle is actually taken up by "stone walls", meaning rooms consisting of dead space. No more of the cardboard-box castle construction techniques for me, thanks. Also, I often add a platform to the entire room (which I know you can't, since you only have the base game) to raise the floor up closer to the ceiling. To me, all of those things are what gives the castle rooms a sense of mass and weight.

I would probably be better off just posting some more tours. *pants* But so few of my castles are finished. Maybe Eirik's would do... it's a good example of the "square keep with just a few rooms" architectural style.

Tired-out?

It's actually Eadgith's personal maid, and I doubt the canny woman she is would take anything less than a broken-down old hag for that purpose.

Ha, you are making plans in Excel too? We suck, but we suck together!! Or... err, you know what I mean...

Yeah the gotcha with castle courtyards and cloisters is the lighting. If you make an enclosed rectangle, it's pitch-black inside, even if it's open to the sky. The trick I use is a 1-square-wide passageway from the courtyard to the outside, and then I hide the entrance and exit behind some sort of very large buyable object so it all looks connected. The object I usually use is one of those quarter-circle round tower pieces (actually a column in build mode) since they are exactly as tall as a normal wall and have a stone wall texture. Nothing to see here, move along please.

(OK I guess that's a trick worthy of a tutorial...)

Making castles is tons of fun. I know there are people who don't get into the building aspect of the game at all, but I love it. Especially recreating old castles from plans... it's fun to work within those constraints. And I'm so tired of building cottages recently.

At Lotheresburh I have three open areas: Eadie's cloistered garden; the open area between the barracks and the wall where I have put the weaponsmithy, the Captains tiny house, and some various buildings related to guards and weaponry; and the paved court that you enter when you come through the castle gate, and which includes kitchen- and service-type buildings. Most of the buildings are butted up against one of the stone walls surrounding the castle proper. That's the detail that tends to be missing from castle plans... there are just these ginormous empty courts, but back in the day they were stuffed full of buildings and sheds and stables and workshops. (Not to mention people, wandering animals, wagons, dung heaps, and all that stinky noisy castle stuff....)

And don't forget a well!