Medieval II - Total War Review

I managed to miss the complete Total War series of games, Shogun, Medieval, Rome, because they were mainly advertised as real-time strategy games, and I prefer turn-based strategy games. But the Total War games always had both a turn-based and a real-time part, and the latest title in the series, Medieval II - Total War (M2TW) improved a lot on the turn-based part. After seeing a video review of the game on the DVD of a computer magazine I bought, I decided that it was time to try this.

I now played my first grand campaign, leading England from just three provinces to ruling all of England, Scotland, and Ireland, plus controlling the continental coast from Rennes to Hamburg. That already took a whole day of playing, and I think I'll stop that particular campaign there and restart with other settings.

The turn-based part of M2TW plays a bit like Heroes of Might and Magic, with some similarities to Civilization: You start out with some cities that produce both money and troops. You can construct buildings in these population centers to either increase your income, or to build more and better troops. You have heroes, known as "generals" in this game, which can gather the troops into armies to attack other armies, or to conquer more population centers. Thus your empire expands. You also have diplomats, merchants, priests, spies, assassins, and princesses. These "agents" walk over the same turn-based map to perform different functions, adding a bit of spice to the conquering game.

When your army gets into a fight with another army, you have the choice of either letting the computer calculate the result automatically, or fighting a real-time strategy battle. The RTS battles are simple enough, there is no building of bases or anything, both sides just fight with the troops that met on the turn-based map. This being a game about medieval warfare, your troops are archers, spearmen, and cavalry, in many different types. In the RTS battle you try to maneuver your troops in such a way that you gain some advantage by having local superiority, hitting the enemy at his weakest spot, outflanking him, and fighting his troops with the troops he is weakest against. For example spearmen are strong against cavalry, while cavalry can easily trample down archers. Archers can rain arrows on the spearmen, and if the spearmen break formation and run after the archers, they become vulnerable against cavalry attacks. Add the effects of terrain, weather, and in the case of sieges city walls and towers, and you get a wide variety of possible battles.

I really like Medieval 2 - Total War. The mix of turn-based and real-time strategy plays very well. The turn-base game has events and missions, giving you some guidance and direction. And with your agents roaming the map on different tasks, from diplomacy to strengthening your influence with the pope, you get a lot more than a simple build-and-conquer game. The real-time strategy battles are quite fun, once you got the hang of it. Before my first battles I saved the game, and replayed the same battle several times to learn what works and what doesn't. But later I just went ahead, and accepted the occasional setback, they usually aren't life-threatening.

The part I am not totally happy with is the user-interface, controls, and automated management on the turn-based map. You can move every character (general or agent) only a limited distance per turn, just like you would expect from other turn-based games. But unlike other games there apparently is no button to cycle to the next unit that hasn't moved yet. You have a button to cycle through all of your units, but every time you find one that hasn't acted yet and move him, the list resets and you start cycling through the same units again. You can't set a unit to "don't bring this unit up again this turn", as in other games. And the order in which the units are cycled through isn't totally logical either. I ended up using the list scrolls to cycle through all my units, but these need a couple of clicks to open, and then you see three lists: generals, settlements, and agents, through which you can click to check for characters that still haven't moved yet. As the list takes up half of the screen, you end up playing on just the other half. I don't know if I missed some keyboard shortcuts, nothing is mentioned in the manual, or whether this functionality is just badly designed.

The AI automanagement I know how to fix, but I will need to start over with a new campaign to do so. In the default setting you can control construction and recruitment only in cities which have a general as a governor present. Unfortunately your number of generals is limited to male members of the royal family, that is your king's sons or brothers, plus the husbands of your princesses, and sometimes you get the opportunity to adopt somebody. But in total your number of generals is usually lower than your number of cities and castles. I tried to play it with this default setting, having some generals wander from city to city to act as governors and set construction, with other generals leading the armies into battle. But it soon turned out that I also needed generals to transport troops between cities. You *can* move troops without a general, but if they can't make the move in one turn, they end up standing around being led by a "captain" with no stats. And there is a chance that this captain is disloyal and the whole stack of troops goes over to the rebels. Then your troop transport ends up creating a big rebel army in the middle of your territory, which is quite disrupting. So I used my generals to transport troops, which left lots of cities without a governor for several turns. Then it turned out that the AI which controls these cities with no governor is a bit paranoid, and starts recruiting massive amounts of spearmen for defence, even in the most secure locations. You can turn that off, but only manually, and you have to think of turning it off again every time a general enters the city and leaves again. So I am going to restart, and set the starting option of being able to govern cities without a general present, because the recruitment and upkeep cost for the thousands of useless spearmen the AI built for me was killing me. Fortunately this is a problem easily fixed in the campaign start options.

My last little niggle is with the merchants, whose role it is to sit on a resource on the campaign map to create income. So most of the time they don't do anything, unless another merchant arrives who wants to take over the same resource. That isn't very exciting. And the exact effect of having the merchant sit on that resource is hard to figure out. When you click on him he tells you he is creating X florins per turn of income, but the number seems to vary frequently, going up and down for no apparent reason. And the relationship between the merchants and the trade building you can construct in your cities isn't obvious, not even on the city trade screen. I never found out whether these merchants really were a good investment, as they aren't cheap to recruit.

But besides from these minor complaints, the game is very much fun and has a lot of depth, both strategically and economically. You can transform your castles into cities and vice versa, which is very interesting. Cities generally bring better income, while castles give better troops, and have better defensive walls and structures. But transformation costs some money, and destroys the buildings that the new type of settlement can't have, so you better decide whether you want a city or castle when the settlement is still small. Balancing your economics with your troops is an interesting task: If you would build only cities and money-making buildings, your empire won't expand, and you risk being attacked. If you only build castles and recruitment buildings, you soon are broke. Finding the good balance is a nice challenge.

The real-time strategy battles are fun too. You can try varying tactics, using the terrain to your advantage. Nevertheless it is good that you have the option of letting the battle result be calculated instead of playing it out, because fighting out every battle isn't worth it, especially if your troops are far superior in strength. I also ended up putting most siege battles on automatic. Breaching the walls with rams, ladders, and siege towers is fun enough. But inside the city combat takes mostly place in the streets, which aren't very broad and don't allow much maneuvering. So the fighting in the streets, until you conquer the plaza, resembles more a brawl than a battle, and your options for fiddling with the tactics are limited. You definitely should do it a couple of times to get the hang of it, but running it automatically doesn't produce much worse results.

Medieval II - Total War also has a multiplayer part of the game, but this is limited to the real-time battles. I wasn't much interested in that, and didn't try it. For me the single-player turn-based campaign game is the main attraction of M2TW. Of course your mileage may vary, and maybe you like the multiplayer battles more than the single-player campaign. When I play RTS battles against the computer, I enjoy the possibility to pause the game to give orders, or to speed up the time when nothing interesting is happening. I don't think that would work in a multiplayer battle. You can have up to 8 players in M2TW multiplayer battles, but I wouldn't consider this to be the strong point of the game. If you like the battles more than the campaign, but don't have other players to battle against, you can also fight historic or random battles against the computer.

Graphically the game is pretty enough. It ran smoothly on my computer, Pentium 4 640 3.2 GHz, 2 GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce 7800 GTX, which is "last years model", but on the more expensive end of the scale. M2TW has an autodetect function, which adjusts graphical settings to the power of your computer. On my computer the autodetect decided to turn off the anti-aliasing, so I see some jagged edges, and I'm only running on 1024 x 768 resolution. For maximum prettyness you would need a dual core processor and one of this year's high-end graphics cards, which wouldn't come cheap.

Winning M2TW isn't too difficult, at least not on the easy setting I tried for my first campaign. I'll try a medium difficulty setting for the next one. Another setting I'm going to change is the campaign length, I had chosen to fight until conquering 45 provinces, which would have taken far too long. Normally I would prefer to just play the long campaign, whether I finish it or not. But in M2TW winning campaigns unlocks new factions. From the 17 playable factions only 5 are accessible initially, the others have to be unlocked by winning campaigns. Or you could just cheat and edit the data\world\maps\campaign\imperial_campaign\descr_strat.txt text file to unlock the other factions.

The long campaign might be interesting, because apparently if you play long enough you get the option to discover America and conquer the new world, battling against the Aztecs. I'll try a short campaign playing Spain next, and maybe after "winning" I get the option to play on, which would be nice.

I think I'll be spending quite a number of hours playing some more of this game. Of course no single-player game has as many hours of gameplay as a MMORPG, but M2TW will still keep me occupied for some time. I've read some people complaining that if you have already played Rome - Total War, the Medieval 2 version didn't bring that many new things, being more an evolution than a revolution. But as I haven't played the predecessor, for me Medieval II - Total War is fresh and fun. Recommended.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:20 AM Permanent Link