PharaohsVizier

I bought this game on the Steam Holiday Sale for $5, and it is a surprisingly good game. It is sort of odd that the last I heard about any successful Total War game was Rome: Total War, while games such as Napoleon Total War remain rather unknown (or at least for me).



Quite honestly, I remember ditching Rome Total War completely because I didn't play the campaign. I simply ran the Quick Battles and judged it by that. Needless to say, my impressions were abysmal. I mean yes, it was epic in that there were just so many units, but then there was nothing RTS about it, just two massive armies that collide, you even have to option to let the AI control everything for you, etc. I was completely confused about why this game was popular, but now that I've given Medieval II Total War an actual play through, it is just AMAZING, enough so that I bought the expansion for full price. Not to mention that my feelings towards Rome: Total War has completely changed.



I was considering writing a review, but this is more of a first impression even though I’ve spent at least 10-20 hours on the game. I'm still learning all there is about the gameplay, and it is quite the complex game. So for now, I'm just writing what I know. The game is so incredibly well thought out, I’m finding little neat touches here and there, even after this long playing the game.



Let's begin with just a quick description of how the game works because I don't think a lot of people understand it. This is a mix of turn based strategy and real time strategy (despite everyone calling it simply a real time strategy). It is similar to something like the Civilization series for the turn based aspect, while the RTS side is similar but very different to all other games in the genre. You begin as an emperor, king, Kaiser; some leadership role of a faction. There are so many factions, and even more in the expansion, ranging from the Holy Roman Empire to the Aztecs or even the Turks and Papal States.



As the leader, you get an overhead view of your kingdom, and you manage your cities by building structures (for defence, economy, and military), your army, and your agents (diplomats, priests, and so on). You need to carefully spend your money so you don't skimp out on anything and basically not severely lack in any one area. I thought priests weren't important early on, and then I lost favour of the Pope, got excommunicated, and so begins the rioting and desertion of troops. With the Pope on your side, you can call on a crusade to fight a stronger faction you don’t like. The game pretty much gives you an overview of a medieval country. There are lots of little aspects I won’t describe it detail, but know that the game reeks of finicky, almost trifling matters. For example, there's a whole system regarding religion where your more successful priests become cardinals, who become the pope. There’s even a family tree where you choose who marries into your family so that only men with certain noble attributes join. As nobility, these men ultimately lead your army into battles, and a drunk general is a bad general.



Now with your army, you can take turns moving across the map, when two armies clash, or if your army runs into another city, you can fight it out in real time, which is where the real time strategy aspect comes into play. And honestly, I have never seen such a complex real time strategy in my life, and yes I've tried Supreme Commander. First off, you have your usual paper, rock, scissors scheme where spearman are good against cavalry, swordsman against spearman, etc. But there's a whole morale system in play too that connects to the turn based game.



The morale system is something I’ve seen before, but it is done rather well in Medieval II Total War. In the game, your troops all have a certain level of morale depending on the general leading them, your opponent’s force, etc. If morale drops, the unit routs (flees), and basically they run off the battlefield. The enemy can pick them off, they don’t obey your commands, and basically they run as fast as they can off the map. Morale drops for many reasons, and rises just as easily. If your general dies, morale skips straight down, if you are outnumbered, if they’ve been marching around the map to a degree at which they are exhausted, their morale will spiral downwards. Now, if your unit is routing, but they happen to be surrounded, they will choose to fight to the death. Their effectiveness skyrockets now that they have nothing to lose. The fatigue system in place ties with morale as well, if you have units that are fighting too much in the battle, or if you force them to run around the battlefield, they lose effectiveness and morale goes down. On the other hand, if you keep your troops from moving and let your enemy wear themselves out, you get an instant advantage.



The fights are as complex as I can imagine, and even now I’m finding out new things. Archers shooting at two battalions fighting are just as likely to hit your own unit as the enemy. Fire arrows take longer to shoot, and are less effective in terms of damage, but they damage morale rather severely.



The more impressive aspect is how it connects to the game. After each battle, men who flee (or rout as the game calls it) are sometimes captured by the winning team, you can release them, execute them, or ask for ransom (and execute if they don’t pay). If you release them, your diplomatic relationship between the countries are better, which yields higher trade, perhaps an alliance between your two countries, or even gain favour from the Pope. However, if you execute them, then your general gains dread, meaning the next time he goes on a battlefield, the other team may rout quicker, their morale drains faster, etc. Needless to say there’s also a wide range of how your decisions from the turn based side can affect your battle. Let’s say your country’s princess wants to marry a drunk and you let her. He becomes a general; your towns may rebel, but even worse is when the battles start, morale will already be intolerable.



The original problem I had with Rome Total War was the fact that I only played out these real time battles. I didn’t play the turn based portion of the game. In these real time battles, their goal is to simulate a real skirmish of old. This isn’t Starcraft where you’d have time to go and mine ores and build barracks to train more men, you go into a battle with a set amount of men, and that is it, no resources will save you, you don’t have time to build a fortress. If you are lucky, you may get reinforcements if you played your strategy out well from the turn based world map, but if not, you are set, that is all you get, whether you are outnumbered or not. Needless to say, when I didn’t build my armies and such, I was rather curious as to why the computer simply set up arbitrary amounts of troops on either side for a quick battle, with no builders or anything on either side. Now I understand that the two parts of Total War are so very interlinked that playing just the quick battle pretty much isn’t a game at all, but perhaps a tool to train your skills.



When I played this game, I really had a feeling that perhaps I was in control of a real medieval army. It is quite realistic (despite being absolutely breathtaking, I don’t mean the graphics) in that they really thought of everything. You’ll see that asides from the great morale systems and the obvious cavalry good against archers, they still have a great many good ideas. There’s a fatigue system, experience for units that have been to battle before, different advantages to flanking, archers on higher ground, etc. And I thought, perhaps not clever, but realistically speaking, they set the control to battalions instead of the usual single character selection with micro management involved. It makes sense that a general can only command a whole battalion and cannot micro-manage each unit, nothing gets more frustrating than seeing your troops get slaughtered because one or two units aren’t following the general movements of your battalion, but I can only imagine that be true on a real battlefield as well. There’s also delay in moving your troops, they don’t instantly follow your command, and if they are fighting, they don’t pull back just because you tell them to. Single units may chase hurt units, or perhaps fight to the death while their battalion moves back, etc.



The games are incredibly long though, after all this time, I’ve completed only 3 sets of campaigns (meaning 3 games). You can see why multiplayer is practically dead, no one wants to play with another person for 8+ hours in one game, one sitting. This is mainly a single player game, or if you have a sibling in the house, you can play hot-seat and swap turns that way (though I’m not sure how real time battles work out…). Even so, if you simply play one game, you’ll already get your money’s worth, and the replay value is fantastic.



Moving on, we have the graphics and atmosphere of the game. Honestly graphics are phenomenal. The game is already several years old, so the newer one is sure to impress me because this one already does. You have thousands of units on screen, each one fighting their own individual sword fights or little battles, each unit is beautifully detailed, and even some variety exists in the ranks, some have different designs on their shield, some have blood splattered on them, etc. It is really nice to see a thousand horsemen with some variations within them charging down to equally well designed archers, watching horses fling themselves onto enemies. Corpses don’t seem to disappear off the battlefield, and everything looks fantastic. The sound is also quite good, I think the soundtrack lacks a bit of sparkle, but the sounds of swords clanging together, horses marching, and screams and stuff were excellent, and more than offsets the average soundtrack.



The reason I bought the expansion pack at full price without a moment’s hesitation is because of the rich modding community involved with this game. There seems to be at least 10 or so fully modded versions of this game with new characters and new campaigns and many more with changes such as more bloodshed, balances, etc. The one I had my eye on was Third Age Total War. It is a Lord of the Rings mod, and really, it let me relive the gigantic battles at Helm’s Deep or the Pelennor Fields with ease. The mod is amazing, the last update was in December 2009 with more things planned, and already it seems like a great variation of the original game. The world map is entirely changed with the campaign reflecting the battle for Middle Earth, and units look like they are straight out of the movies with the exception of the units they designed themselves from descriptions in the book, but those look great as well. It was entertaining to try and recreate the battle of Minas Tirith with six thousand Rohan cavalry against lines of orc pikemen and archers, the hiding a few mumakils in the back to crush all hope. Perhaps a little nerdy (who am I kidding, it’s extremely nerdy to recreate a movie battle), but I know I’m not the only one out there, there are great screenshots on the net with people who recreated footage from the movies with this mod, and it is just so satisfying to play the game in a whole different light. It works well and definitely will extend the playability of this game.



Anyways, enough about that, what makes this game so great? Well I can summarize it in a few points.

- Absolutely epic battles
The battles are gigantic and look great. Perhaps I’m a bit weird, but I think the coolest (not necessarily the best) real time strategy games are the ones with large, gigantic armies pummelling each other.



- Stunning mods
There are mods that exist for pretty much anything, I believe there was one that looked rather good, but incomplete with Warhammer characters, but most of the mods seem to focus on making the existing game better, be it stronger AI, units with higher resolution models, etc.



- Realistic gameplay
Sometimes a game with too much realism just doesn’t work (I’m thinking the pin point accuracy of the new golf games on the Wii), but Total War moves it in the right direction where people must start thinking beyond micro-management and into actual battle tactics, or even planning where your troops should march in a world map. The system is cleverly done so that it isn’t absolutely necessary to think of everything, but the fact that it is there is quite nice.



- Mix between turn based and real time strategy
It’s not common to see a game that mixes two genres so flawlessly, but they did. The beauty is that they didn’t mix it up or present two completely different games, instead they let each type remain distinctly their own genre, but blended it with connections between the two.



- Extreme attention to details
I’ve seen great games that go down in flames because they didn’t pay attention to all the little things. On the other hand, games such as Medieval II Total War do pay attention to every detail of the game just to give the extra push for a great atmosphere. For one, all of the characters have accents from their own region, a French diplomat will give you the thick French accent while the people from the Holy Roman Empire seem to have a German accent or sorts.



In conclusion, this game was a great deal for me. I got the original off Steam for $5 during the Holiday Sale, but even at $20 it is well worth every dime. I’m itching to buy the next in the series, and I most definitely will once I beat the full campaign and really played through this one. I think some of these screenshots speak for themselves, and basically I highly recommend picking up a copy of Medieval II Total War. However, keep in mind that this is a single player game that takes a lot of time for each round. I know that in this day and age, multiplayer seems to be the most important aspect of a game, but you’ll have to forego that. As well, this game has a very traditional turn based strategy aspect to it, you will have to be able to endure hours and hours developing a country. Medieval II Total War is relatively cheap, so it is definitely worth a try regardless of how you feel.