Medieval 2 lives up to the legacy that was Rome: Total War. Featuring massive battles and complex strategic management.

User Rating: 8.4 | Medieval II: Total War PC
By olobolo1000 | Review Date:
Medieval 2: Total War lives up to the legacy that was Rome: Total War. Like in the previous versions Medieval 2 divide gameplay in a strategic 2D world and, when battles commence, in 3D. Massive armies featuring 1000's of infantry soldiers, cavalry, trebuchets, cannons, arquebusiers, pikemen, horsearchers and... elephants(yup, they're still here) clash together in nailbiting excitement. If you ever played Rome: Total War you'll know what I'm talking about. In any case, let me begin by describing the gameplay of the 2D strategic world. The 2D view gives an immediate view of Europe; from Scotland to the Russian steppes, from Norway to Egypt. The map, like in Rome, is divided in regions, with each big city(or castle) representing one region. London, for example, is located in London region. Each city or castle can produce buildings and units. While buildings mostly takes several turns to complete units always takes one turn; in Rome high level units could take 2 turns as where the case for example Pretorian Cavalry. Buildings is anything from roads to military buldings like barracks, stables and archery range. Marketplaces and ports are, again like in Rome, key to winning the game. Money rules the world, but profit moves it. And you won't be squirting out units for long if you don't have profit. The winning strategy is actually quite simple. Begin building ports as quickly as possible, next build roads, then "Grain Exchanges"(i.e. Marketplaces) and, when needed, buildings that maintain law, happiness and good order like Inns and City Watch. Be sure to produce naval fleets to protect your ports so that their large income may be preserved. This way you'll get an economic upper hand. Rome had a quote during the loading screen saying "The sinews of war are infinite money". The closer you get to "infinite money" the more units you can field and the more victories you'll have and the more cities you will conquer. Oh, by the way when you conquer a city be sure to "sack" it, since you will get a substantial influx og gold from this. Huge cities will often yield 30-40.000 florins. This ransacking money is best applied to building more trade buildings(insted of new units) thus financing your financial growth by sacking cities. Another benefit of "sacking" cities is that some of the population will we slaughtered, less people = less disorder. Also a 5-10% order bonus of "fear" applies to the happiness level of the city several turns after you sacked it. Thus preventing the peasants from overthrowing your righteous rule.
Every time your city reaches a certain population it can be upgraded to a larger city, the advantage of doing so being less disorder and maintaining population growth. Food buildings like Land Clearance and Irrigation should be postponed since a very fast growing population eventually will cause problems with happiness levels because you simply doesn't have time enough to build buildings that maintain good order, not to speak of lack of time to build trade buildings. So those of you who have played Sid Meiers Civilization, where optimizing food production where a key strategy, will have to refrain from that, unless you particularly fancy riots and revolts that is.
Having brought your economy into a healthy growth you can now focus on seriously fighting your dreaded neighboughs. If you a speculating about when might be the best time to declare war, don't bother. The computer will definately take care of that. Neighbough factions will declare war on you quite early, before you feel you are ready for war. And when first at war you won't be able to negotiate ceasefires. That is, you have the opportunity to propose ceasefires to your enemies but they will simply reject them. Every time, no exception. Unless you choose to offer up 3 of you total 6 regions as compensation or an equivalent amount of money, which could amount to as much as 80.000 florins or more. Money you'll never amass until late in the game. Even when you have brought your enemy to their knees, conquered all their cities but one, they will stubbornly reject unless you offer up the aforementioned riddiculously high compensations like several settlements or outragious amounts of money. A demand a faction seriously pressed up against the wall is in no position to demand. The option to offer the enemy to become a vassal is of no use because the enemy will plain out reject it, choosing extermination before surrender, which is on the other hand a quite chivalrous behaviour to choose. Like when King William of the Scots screams FREEDOOOOOM!!!!! and then gets crushed by the charge of my mighty iron clad knights muahahaha :-D. Well he actually didn't scream that in the game but I certainly did crush him like a worm beneath my heel. Ahem, back to the strategic portion of the review. Another part of the strategy is religion. A new aspect of the Total War series where the Pope decides who is good and who is evil. If you play as one of the european factions your lands and people will be catholic and the supreme leader of the catholics is, apart from God himself, his holiness the Pope. Your standing with the Papal Faction(yes the Pope has regions, cities and units like yourself) is of paramount importance. If your standing drops to low or if you refrain from following Papal orders you may be excommunicated from the catholic game meaning all the other factions won't see you as being catholic thus any attack on you won't be considered an attack on catholic brothers but a righteous and glories war against an infidel and unbeliever. the Pope may call for all catholic nations to partake in crusades againts regions owned by non-catholic factions. When a crusade is called any army containing a general and a minimum of 8 units total may join the crusade as a crusading army. All upkeep of units in such an army will be 0 and the general may hire special, very strong,crusader mercenary units. The crusading army must each turn make satisfactory progress towards the target region of the crusade, if the advance towards the target is to slow units within the crusading army may leave, meaning that unit will be lost. Fortunately a crusading army has double movement points. Beeing excommunicated is thus something you DO NOT want to happen; avoid it at all costs. IF it should happen to you, you can choose to defend the region in question, which will be all but almost impossible, because enemy forces will be very strong and numerous. You might consider bribing the pope with florins to get in better standing and simply choose to hand over the region to the pope at once or let the other factions conquer it without using a lot of florins defending it. Florins that you should have used maintaing the build up of your cities and expanding the empire. Also, you will suddenly be in war with all other catholic factions and as described earlier, making ceasefires is definately not a walk in the park.
SO, how does one actually maintain a good standing with the Papacy? Well, the good old tactic of jingling with golden coin is something that the Pope always welcomes, so this is certainly an option if standing drops too low. Absolution within the catholic church is very possible, but at a price; something that matches the history of the catholic church quite accurate. It was actually one of the main reasons for Martin Luther to protest against the church. Another way to please the Pope is to partake in the crusades, doing so won't cost you anything you will have lots of fun fighting battles, your units will pay no upkeep, the Pope will be happy and you might expand your empire with another region, allthough it may be situated a very long way from your empire and so will be diffivult to defend later on, not only because it is a long way from home, but also because the Muslims will possibly be making their own Jihads against that same city, if the target city was a Muslim city. An important part of the religious game is to have priest, and lots of them. The most pious of your priests may be selected by the Pope himself to become a cardinal in the College of Cardinals. There may be a maximum of 13 cardinals and when the Pope dies and he will, he gets older too you know, the cardinals will convene and select a new Pope from the 3 most pious, the preferati, of the 13 cardinals. You select which which preferati your cardinals should vote for. Voting for the cardinal that wins and become Pope increases your standing with him tremendously and he will like you more for it as long as he live. Voting on a preferati from your own faction and he wins, will ensure his holiness see you as his true friend. On the other hand, should you fail to support the preferati that becomes Pope he will se you as unfriendly and hard to please as long as he live.
Of course all this religion, excommunication and crusading business opens up great opportunities for your faction. Provided your standing with the Pope is high enough you may propose him to call a crusade against one the holy cities. If one of your neighbouring european factions have been excommunicated it is the perfect opportunity to ask the Pope to call a crusade against one of the excommunicated cities; you are almost sure to crush that faction with your mighty crusading armies.
Now lets move on to the different characters like spies, priest, assasins and merchants. Spies are used to spy on the enemy and can be sent in advance of your armies to see what challenges may lie ahead, they may be placed in enemy cities to incite riots there and open city gates when besieging the city. Assasins may kill generals, governors or other characters, a governor may have traits that benefit the maintance of good order, thus killing him may increase disorder. Assasins may also sabotage most bulding types, destroying buldings that maintain good order may casue disorder. Priest may convert a non catholic portion of the populace to catholic and if the enemy faction is muslim this will also, again, cause disorder. When used in conjunction, spies, assasins and priest will be very likely to incite a revolt in an enemy city thus making it full of mostly weak rebel forces and expelling the other factions forces to outside the city. Merchants can be placed on ressources to generate florins. The rarer the ressources the more florin, the better the skill of the merchant the more florins. Merchants doesn't cost upkeep. In the beginning of the game they may seem useless because everytime you merchant occupies a ressource some extremely skilled enemy merchant will moving and "acquire assets" putting your merchant out of business. Your mechant dissappears and income from ressource is lost. But later on in the game when you are more mighty and have more regions they will prove very useful. Late in the game, you will see why they become so useful generating income, but I will let you figure that out for yourself.

One thing haven't even mentioned yet is the aspect of castles. Cities may be convertet to castles and vice versa, but only once. The game will warn you about that the process will be irreversible, so you can choose to cancel.
Castles won't produce any trade buildings apart from roads and ports, and won't be able to support larger populations. This means income from castles will be quite low.Castles produce from the very start mailed knights. A powerful cavalry unit ecuipped with lances and sword and clad in iron armour.Castles also produce strong swordsmen infantry and powerful archers to rain death upon your enemies. All in all castles produce very strong old age units. Cities won't produce such units. But later on in the game gunpowder will be invented and only cities will be able to produce arquebusiers, infantry armed with guns! An arquebus is a sort of rifle that by igniting gunpowder shoots a round steel bullet out of a barrel with great speed enabling it to easily penetrate the armour of old age units like knights and slowmoving heavy infantry like swordsmen. This doesnt mean that era of knights is ended however. Knights are still very fast and very powerful both in attack and in defense because of their armour. And onse they close for the charge gunpowder units don't stand a chance. As I said before that your cities won't be able to produce knights, but there is an exception: Hospitaller and Templar knights. They may choose to offer you to build their guild building in your cities and thus enabling you to build these powerful knights. But it requires you to first partake in some crusades before they wish to do this though.

Now to the 3D battles of Medieval2: Total War.
Knights excel in the simpel tactic of charging into the enemy crushing all that stand agains them. Their dreaded counterpart is the spearmen or even worse the pikemen. A frontal charge into unit of pikemen in "spearwall" formation will cause sudden, and certain, death amongst your knights. Fortunately pikemen are slow and can be easily flanked by your horseridden knights and attacked from either the two flanks or from the rear.
Talking about knights these will be one of the most important units on the battlefield, perhaps a little too powerful. This is due to the fact that the probability for a victory will be greatly enhanced if you have knights to quickly encircle the enemy attacking them from the flanks and the rear. They are also useful for quickly dealing with the enemy general, the latter part having an unfortunate tendency to refrain from trying to escape pursuit. Only when most of his army are destroyed will he try to escape, in which case it wil probably be too late because you should have killed him by now. Cavalry charges are a problem though. Sometimes when clicking an enemy your cavalry will sometimes NOT charge but simply march normally right into the enemy. This may happen on purpose if they stand to close to the enemy; cavalry like to charge towards the enemy a while before clashing together. This makes sence, but when the distance is high enough it makes no sence to refrain to charging. Other times they will charge against the enemy but if the enemy tries to run withdraw backwards the cavalry will often too quickly shift to "Pursuit" mode thus ending the charge before charge meaning the impact won't very hard.
But to be honest this doesn't bother me too much,
Another bug is a very irritating bother me much though. When sallying forth to attack besiegers of a huge city with extra cannon towers you wil ALWAYS win. This is due to the fact that the enemy wil initially move just in range of your towers cannons. Even though their army are being blasted to smitherines by cannonballs they won't move out of range to safety but simply wait until more than 50% of their army are dead and thereafter withdraw resulsting in your faction to succesfully winning the battle without a single loss. This is obviously a major bug, I have a hard time understanding how playtesters could have overseen it. It happens everytime you sally forth from a huge city under siege. Thus a player controlled huge city cannot be lost, unless you choose to move your army outside the city walls to attack.
This is the reason to why I have only given a score of 7 in "reviewer's Tilt". Difficult levels are too easy though, since I have played Rome before I chose Very Hard difficult level and found that level almost hard enough but not quite.
Alt in all Medieval 2: Total War is a fantastic game. I really have a hard time stop playing it. Replayability is very high since you can choose to play the campaign with another faction, opening up other specialised units and special buildings, and also providing different starting regions.
I recommend this game to everyone with a love for strategy, epic medieval battles and the medieval age in general.

Other Helpful Reviews for Medieval II: Total War

Load Comments (0)