Medieval 2: Total War

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It's definitely cheesy to do that - and I didn't use that tactic. I did as Barmy suggested, and recruited some mercenaries. As it turned out, there were two units of mailed knights (the worst heavy cavalry, but hey, I was in a bind, and certainly in no position to be picky) and three units of spearmen (who oddly had better attack and defense values than my seargent spearmen). I had four spaces left in the army, and so I took both mailed knight units and two of the three spearmen. I entered the battle with an advantage in total troops - 1008 vs. 850.

On the battle screen, the largest hill in the area was on my side of the deployment screen, and off to the left. I set up there. I don't consider it cheese to not start right in the middle, provided I'm up towards the front of the starting area. I set up the two mercenary spearmen in the middle, my four units of seargent spearmen flanked them, two on each side, and each of my two units of dismounted knights took the outer-most flanks. Crossbows were in front of the infantry, the cavalry immediately behind them, with the artillery in the back being guarded by a unit of town militia.

The beginning of the battle went pretty much as planned. In an effort to exploit their missile superiority, the AI sent all of their missile units forward. I countered by ordering my crossbowmen to fire back, while I targeted the middle of the three groups of the general's bodyguard with my artillery firing flaming missiles. Because my crossbowmen were on higher ground than the pavaise crossbowmen of the enemy, they actually were doing OK. They were taking more losses than they were giving, but it wasn't nearly as lopsided as I had anticipated.

Meanwhile, neither army's cavalry or infantry was doing anything. I was fine with that, as I had artillery, and I was willing to sacrifice my missile units to take out some of the enemy's better units. While my artillery was not hitting the unit I targeted with any regularly, they were almost always hitting something, due to the large number of enemy units on the field. The only time they missed completely is when their shots sailed long. If they missed left, right, or short of the target, they typically hit a different unit, so I was inflicting a pretty good amount of casaulties.

After a few minutes of this exchange, a pop-up screen showed a robed figure and his horse fall to the ground in flames, while my general proclaimed, "The enemy general lies dead!" When I pulled up the detail box on the left, it turns out the death was Pope Guido himself, and not the enemy's battlefield commander. That pissed them off however, and it was at this point that they called an all-out charge.

The units that were capable formed a spearwall for the on-rushing cavalry attack which arrived first (the infantry was a bit behind as they can't run as fast). I resisted the urge to call a counter-cavalry charge, as there was no way I was going to win that. Not only is four against five pretty lousy odds, but they had three general's bodyguard units, and two of my four units were the worst heavy cavalry available. It would have been a slaughter, so I crossed my fingers and hoped for the best.

The spearwall worked excellently. Four of the five groups of heavy cavalry was stopped dead in their tracks and took significant losses. One of the general bodyguard units broke through, and I threw all of my cavalry units at it. The mercenary mailed knights I hired were absolutely decimated by the body guard unit, but they took the hits while my general's body guard unit and my unit of Teutonic knights did most of the damage. Eventually we killed the general (the actual field commander this time), although that required killing nearly the entire unit, and took some time.

While I was busy killing the enemy general, I failed to notice that a couple of enemy infantry units had managed to get through the front line and were merrily hacking away my town militia (which was routing) and my artillery pieces. No matter though - the artillery had already done what they had been brought to do. I had ordered them to stop firing as soon as the enemy cavalry got close, as I didn't want to deal with friendly fire casaulties. I turned my remaining cavalry to charge this new threat. At about the same time, I got yet another pop-up telling me that my infantry had killed "an enemy of the Reich". So the third and final general was dead.

Losing all three of the generals probably did a lot to sway morale at this point, as it caused a chain-reaction rout of the enemy (love when that happens). My cavalry ran down what enemies they could, and the final tally indicated that only 26 of the enemy's 850 escaped death or capture, while I had 455 men remaining out of my initial 1008 (so I took some heavy losses as well).

As an added bonus, with the pope dead, there was a new papal election, and MY cardinal won! He readily reconciled with my king and I was off the hook! He also reconciled the Portugese, which was unfortunate for my future plans. Even more unfortunately, my pope died just five turns later, but hey, I'm still in the new pope's good graces (I didn't even get to vote in the most recent papal election, because I had no one in the college of cardinals).

My current plan is to not do anything to get excommunicated again. I'm only in the year 1250, and I already hold 34 settlements, including the one I have to hold - Rome. Since I only need 11 more, there's no reason to go crazy. All of my settlements got a significant boost to public order upon my reconciliation, and now is the time to work on building up my infrastructure with the money now pouring in from higher taxes. There's only one Portugese settlement left, and I may attack it, as you usually get one warning from the Pope before he excommunicated you. Sicily is also down to one settlement, so I may take that out too. Combined with the one rebel settlement I actually found next to the Portugese (I can't believe no one took that yet!) that will take me up to 37 settlements, and *then* I'll decide if I want to take on the Spanish or Venetians.

 

Well done Aldeth!

Bit jammy to kill their main guy with a lucky artillery shot, but history is littered with lucky little get-offs in warfare .

Mercenaries can be great if you have the florins for the recruitment cost and upkeep cost they demand. There are actually some unique units that you can only get via the mercenary tab. Some great, some crap, some so-so. Always worth checking what's in there though if you have the money.

BTW you shouldn't need to worry about excommunication if one of your own cardinals made pope. You should be able to get away with it in that case (iirc).

Hope you're enjoying the game. When you win this campaign, you'll probably find yourself starting a new one right away. It's always interesting to play as the Turks or the Egyptians or someone like that (some god damn awesome cavalry archers... and they rule, let me tell you).

 

I bought this game last night, and, am thus far unimpressed. Soldiers are idiots who don't go where you tell them to, city building is non-existent, and the controls are a bit wacky compared to what I'm used to. The learning curve for getting the game going seems a bit steep for me as well.

Any tips for gaining enjoyment here would be helpful, because so far my interest in playing is already dropped dramatically and I've owned the game for less than 24 hours. NOT a good sign.

 

I didn't when he was pope. Unfortunately, the poor bastard died of natural causes about 5 turns after he was elected - so my ability to strike with impunity was a short-lived time. The new Pope is Spanish, who I don't have particularly good relations with. In fact, the only people I'm on good terms with are Poland, Hungary and the Byzantines.

I definitely want to finish the game once before I start a new one, especially since I'm about 3/4 of the way through at this point. While I have not given serious thought into who I will attempt next, I am strongly leaning towards playing either a Muslim or Orthodox nation, just so I don't have to listen to the pope bitch about me attacking fellow Catholics.

Um... Did you do both tutorials? That gives you a pretty good idea of how to move your troops in combat. I have no explanation for why your troops are not doing what you're telling them to do, unless of course you're doing something wrong.

Another thing I would recommend is reading the game manual. It tells you a lot of stuff that isn't mentioned in the tutorial, such as how to group certain units together, how to get them to march in line. (It helps so that instead of clicking on a spot in the ground and having all 10 groups of units try to stand on that spot, you get them to advance forward as a line and spread out more). There's also things you need to learn about changing formations, such as loose versus tight, line, wedge, etc. That stuff isn't covered in the tutorial.

That having been said, the manual just brushes the surface of the game features. I recently bought the strategy guide for $15, and to give you an idea of what information isn't in the game manual, the guide is 320 pages long, versus the manual being 50 pages long - you do the math.

I will admit that there is a lot to learn in the beginning. When deciding what units and structures to build, at first you basically have to click on each individual picture, read the description and decide from there. As you become more familiar with the game, and you start to understand that many later buildings are just improved versions of previous buildings, the decision making process gets much easier.

All buildings in the game basically do one of four things: increase the amount of food produced, generate more revenue, improve public happiness/order, and allow for the construction of specific types of units. Some building do some combination of the above. For example, a drill square allows you to recruit town militia, and gives a bonus to public order.

From personal experience, I too will admit that I didn't like the game that much in the beginning. In the early going, you are very limited in what your cities can contruct, very limited in what units you can build, and you're always strapped for cash, so you have no money to spend on your very few options. As you play through a few rounds though, the game really opens up. The other thing I like about this game is the amount of strategy involved. It's not unusal for a couple of turns to take an hour to play though. I've had this game a couple of weeks now, and I haven't even finsihed my first full game!

 

If a man of such refined taste and quality such as Aldeth the Foppish Idiot likes the game, then it must be a serious blockbuster . Heed him, DR!

The game rules once you work it out and get into it.

 

I can vouch for that, after finishing my campaign with England I have already started a new one with Portugal. So far its proving an interesting challenge. The unit choices are very different to England at the Early period so I'm still sort of finding my feet. I'm also playing on 'large' unit size, if you havent tried it yet I'd suggest it, as you can have armies in excess of 1000 men straight away! Oh yeah, I had 2 marriage alliances with Spain and they still betrayed me. Do marriage alliances count for anything other than who your faction heir is screwing?

 

http://play.tm/story/8644/image/6/full

Call me a wet blanket, but IMHO the strategy map seems to look like Civ2 in 3D. Except that Civ2 sort of looked nicer. Especially to the eye I had at the point of Civ2's release. I like Medieval I's map much more. It's stylish.

Well, the terrain isn't that bad. In fact, it might even be nice. But the walking figures just can't seem to blend well with it.

 

TW tactical AI has been awful to mediocre for, oh, the entirety of the series. Unfortunately, the move in Rome to a Civ-esque strategy map rather than a boardgame map meant that the strategic AI started sucking as well.

If you want a challenge, cranking up the difficulty is a good idea (in Rome I found myself playing with strategic difficulty on hard and tactical difficulty on very hard after a week or two of acclimating to the game). I realize that lack of challenge isn't what's been bugging you, but for future reference is all.

Other thing to keep in mind is that the TW series has been uniformly buggy and unpolished on release of each title. If you can't get into it, shelve it and check back every few months to see what's been patched.

But definitely do as Aldeth suggests and play the tutorials.

 

Are we talking about the same game? TW games known to be buggy? That's the first I've ever heard about it.

The new map is an improvement. It sucked that the minute you moved troops into land you immediately declare war on the owners. That was a proper bag of poo. So much has been improved in the games throughout the series'. They're the best strategy games out there by a long shot.

 

I never had any of the previous editions of the Total War series. Medieval II is my first expeience with these products. I have not found the game to be buggy. The only time I had problems was once a battle was running really, really, slowly. I minimized the screen to find that my computer had decided to run a scan of itself which was slowing it down - it wasn't the game's fault.

I can see why, upon initial inspection, that the Medieval II map would look a lot like the Civ2 map. (Actually, you could even say the Civ3 or Civ4 map too - once they hit the second game, they kept the map appearance pretty much the same.) However, the interface with the map is totally different. For example there is no such thing as "tiles" like there are on a Civ map. Each unit in the game has a distinct space on the map, but it isn't broken down to specific pieces like it is in the Civ series.

 

It's growing on me...but not much. I understand how to do everything, but so far this doesn't seem like the kind of game I would enjoy. One thing I love about RTS is city planning, which is virtually non-existent here (castle vs. town...oh boy!). Another is custom territory placement, which (thus far) appears to be non-existent. I don't like the idea of merely conquering existing settlements...I'd like to build a few of my own. I also like variety in factions to play (the box says 21 are available, yet I can only play 5...lame.)

That said...I did play it for about 4 hours straight last night, which is certainly an indication that I could get some long-term enjoyment out of it. Still kind of boring, though.

 

More factions are unlocked when you defeat them, I think; at least, Rome TW did.

I got this game yesterday, and it's good fun. Only one point of annoyance so far: playing as Spain, and the Pope is Spanish. Portugal declares war, and the Pope says he'll excommunicate me if I attack them. However, he doesn't care when the Portugese blockade my ports and lay siege to my towns.

 

@DR - You'll never be able to build a settlement. I'm surprised you say the thing you like most about RTS games is city development, because most RTS games I've played have had even less city development that Medieval II. Looking at the classic RTS games like Warcraft and Starcraft, it was find the resources, and build structures around the resources to protect them. It doesn't get much more basic than that. Furthermore, I don't really consider Medieval II to be a classic RTS - the battles certainly are, but given diplomacy and special agent abilities, there's some decidedly un-RTS elements in the game.

One mistake that I made in early city planning was building a lot of "cookie cutter" settlements and castles. I figured that since I had the money (after a while) to build virtually whatever I wanted in every settlement, why not do so? I'm finding out now that I'm later in the game that I could have saved money by not building certain things in certain cities, and definitely there was no need to build certain things in certain castles.

At first it sounded cool to be able to train feudal knights in all my castles, but it eventually turned out to be overkill, especially considering another castle just a little further away could produce the same. I also thought it would be neat to add ballista towers to my castles - except that not all castles are likely to be attacked, and it's money wasted if the ballista will never be used.

I've come to the conclusion that the best bet is specialization. Have a few castles that produce you best missile units, another few for cavalry, etc. Obviously, as your empire grows you'll need to expand upon the initial few or your troops will take forever to get to the front lines.

Some other observations and recommendations:

The only thing that should be "cookie cutter" about all your settlements is they all should build things that increase revenue. Cities (castles not so much) will also need buildings that increase public order. Castles get a pretty hefty bonus to public order simply by being castles (people feel "safer" within the castle's walls), so as long as you have a few basic structures and a place of worship, you're usually OK.

Along the vein of specialization and taxation, since cities produce much more revenue than castles, and you don't need nearly as many castles for troop production as you need cities for a steady supply of income, it behooves you to have a much higher concentration of cities than castles. The way it's set up in the game, you have about a 50-50 split, but in practice a 75-25 split in favor of cities is the way to go. You have to start working on this early, because many structures are unique to castles, and if you covert it to a city, you lose those structures. For example, you'd never want to convert a full citadel to a large city - you'd lose most of the stuff you built there. As a result, by the time I came to this realization, most of my castles were already too far along in castle development to easily convert to cities. The smallest castles (mott & bailey) are the best canidates for conversion.

Finally, on playing other factions, there are two ways you can do this. If you conquer a faction, you can immediately start a new game as that faction, even if you don't complete the game you started playing. Additionally, as soon as you win a campaign game (regardless of what faction or what difficulty you play) you can play all the other playable factions. The five you get at the beginning are the five strongest factions at the start of the game, so I imagine this feature was added so that you could hone your technique with one of the easier factions before moving on to the more challenging ones.

If you want to play a different faction than the five currently available to you, the quickest way to do that would be to either enter a cheat, or if you don't like that idea, pick a short campaign on easy, beat it, (which won't take long, a short campaign only requires the defeat of one or two neighboring factions and owning a total of 15 settlements) and you'll be able to pick whatever other faction you want.

That having been said, there are some "unplayable" factions. You can never be the Papal States, the Mongol Hordes, or the Aztecs for example.

 

DR, funnily enough, this game is realistic (unlike Civ) and you can't just stick a city wherever you want one. Cities were defined long before this period in history.

I've never met anyone who dislikes this game after giving it a go. Trust me, if you've had the game for a couple of days you just DON'T know how to play it. That takes time and once you get the hang of everything, you'll find it worryingly addictive, because it's so strategically intense.

 

DR - Your gripe seems to be with the campaign area of the game. Have you played any large custom battles yet? Perhaps you havent gotten far enough in the campaign to experience how great some of the battles can be.

 

Ok, thanks Aldeth - I'll put that info into play this weekend. Now I'm more motivated to conquer other factions, now that I have a goal in mind.

edit - @ Duffin,

Yeah, only campaign so far. I'll give some custom battles a shot.

 

I'm actually not that keen on custom battles. It is kind of fun to see units that you don't normally encounter (like war elephants) but generally speaking, there aren't too many custom battles that you can make that strike a good balance between what you'll see in-game and still remain challenging. I make a big point of always trying to have an advantage in battles, or at least have about an equal force. While it might be a challenge to try and win a battle in which you're out-numbered 2 to 1 or 3 to 1, chances are you're not going to faced with that situation in the game if you play it smart.

 

Really? Do you/have you followed their forums (both .com and .org)? Plenty there on the buggy state of the games on release.

But, yes. Known to be buggy, absolutely.

Which is not the same as 'known to be bad', mind you; I have Shogun, Medieval, and Rome, and like them all.

Well, looking at the confirmed bug list on the .org forums, there are quite a few.

 

I have to confirm bugs in Medieval I. On some computers, it elects to crash to desktop at times. At some computers that's quite often. Since changing the resolution to 800*600 in the campaign map has solved the problem, I assume something was wrong with the way it worked in 1024*768. And yeah, changing to 800*600 has a reputation for being the cure in case of Medieval I crashes to desktop.

 

Well I must have been quite lucky then, as I have never experienced problems within the game.