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TOTALLY AMAZING GAME!!!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 3 / 4
Date: August 26, 2004
Author: Amazon User

Medieval Total War has to be one of the BEST strategy games of all time! It has everything, from real like strategy to excellent graphics to extraordinary historical accuracy and much, much more!
There is something for everyone as the variety of countries to choose from is vast indeed; from the tiny Swiss Confederation to the mighty Byzantine Empire.
Let me tell you, NOTHING, I say NOTHING, compares to the endless hours of gaming enjoyment that I have experienced playing Medieval Total War!
Strongly recommended to both strategy as well as history enthusiasts. Trust me, you will not regret it!

Best Game of the Year

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 2 / 2
Date: January 28, 2003
Author: Amazon User

This game is the best I have played in months. I am a serious gamer and I love historical games like Age of Empires 2, but this is ultimate. This game combines a super complex awesome risklike gameplay and the best battle system I have every seen. Some people have said that this game does not work well on laptops. Well guess what, the reason is that this is a BIG game. I mean it takes almost two gigabytes of disk space. Most older laptops don't even have that much on their computer. Basically, look at the memory requirments first. This is a game that will take a long time to get old.

Buy this game ... and then get the patch

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 2 / 2
Date: December 31, 2002
Author: Amazon User

This game is simply amazing in its scope and is a must for anyone interested in strategy, political gamesmanship and history -- it is not, however, for anyone who is solely interested in "hack and slash" instant gratification or for a quick and certain victory against a computerized opponent.

A byproduct of the excellent level of detail throughout the game is that it makes for a very long game. Let's face it, directing the efforts of your armies, building your empire's infrastructure, dealing with untrustworthy foreign powers and worrying about the pitfalls of hereditary succession can be a time consuming process.

However, the game is still eminently playable thanks to a turn based system that makes it easy to put the game aside for a couple of days (if you can stand to be gone that long) without completely losing track of what you were doing. All in all this is the best strategy/war/empire building game I've seen.

As a final note, the technical problems mentioned by other reviewers have been solved by the availability of a patch --it's an 8.8 meg download ...

MTW is so great, I can't stay awake.....

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 2 / 2
Date: January 08, 2003
Author: Amazon User

It's pretty tough keeping my eyes open at the office after staying up to play Medieval: Total War. I keep telling myself, "One more turn, then I'm going to bed." Next thing I know, 3 hours have passed and I have to worry about when my alarm is going to go off.

With the tutorials and the included instructions, one can pretty easily play the strategy component of the game. For the battle component, I recommend picking up the strategy guide. It explains in depth the different types of troops as well as their strengths and weaknesses. Come to think of it, it's pretty darn helpful with the stretegy game too, explaining the technology tree and the role of strategic agents.

In short, pick this game up. You won't regret it.

They don't get any better than this!!!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 2 / 2
Date: November 04, 2003
Author: Amazon User

This one is the KING of strategy games, the perfect marriage of RTS to TBS, it will steal many hours of your life away, and you best start buying flowers for your spouse or girlfriend right away after purchasing it.

The real time battles are simply awesome, you can have in a custom battle up to 25,600 men on the battlefield at one time if your system can handle it and you have never seen such an awesome sight in any computer game before.

No other game company can match this engine for the amount of units you have on the battlefield. The sound, the gnawing and gnashing of teeth as the little units individually fight for their lives, sometimes running, sometimes doing heroic deeds to save the day. Individual generals/leaders for each army with vices and virtues just like people in real life can influence others with vices and virtues, so can your generals and leaders.

Just about every historical unit you can think of is included in this time period, with the ability to mod other time periods into the game, that many modders have already done. The Patrician v1.2 is a roman time period mod for MTW and it is simply fantastic.

The strategy portion of the game is simular to oh a little bit like civilization where you build buildings that give you upgraded units, or special units like assassins and or spies, religious pieces to convert the heathen on the map, Inquisitors that will eliminate any buildup opposing your factions religious beliefs and heretics. And princesses that you can marry off for alliances with other factions or have your princes marry other factions princesses for the same effect, as well as providing offspring for when each king dies.

There's just too much in this game to say it all in 1k words..GET THIS GAME and you won't need any others. ;)

awesome and highly addictive game

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 2 / 2
Date: March 27, 2003
Author: Amazon User

this game is one of the best strategy games ever, it has the same idea of risk, map of europe and northern africa divided into countries and you have to conquer all of the map. the best thing i found in the game is that it let you know why other leaders faild to conquer the world, at some point in the game when you are so strong and in the peak of your achievements. things start to go wrong and revolts starts to appear in different places, this thing sometimes gets pain in the ... but, to conquer the world you should advance to other countries slowly and plain all your moves make sure to build all the things that can increase your income. i think it is impossible to coquer the world in the expert level. as you will see that it is an achievement just to survive.two negative points i had about this game are: first the tutorial is almost nothing, there are many things that you have to figure out yourself wich might be considered a good point two. the second is when you run battles yourself it is bad because it takes a lot of time and the out come is always worse then when you let it go automatically.
anyways this game is absolutly worth the money.

Save you money and time, do not buy this game.

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 7 / 22
Date: September 07, 2002
Author: Amazon User

It should be noted to start with that calling this a game is inaccurate, games are suposed to be fun. There is very little enjoyment with this title.

First the good. The battles are good. The system for the real time battles is very well done. There is a reasonable challenge, but if you practice good tactics, you will succeed. You can get all of this in the demo, though, so do not waste your money. The battles get old fast.

Now the horrid, the Full Campaign. You are in control of one of a number of factions starting in the early, middle or late medieval period. The game bogs down in its complexity. You are also victim to the whims of the AI. The last game I played, and the last I will ever play as I am selling my copy, I was the Danes. I started with one aea and built it up to the east to around 8. I also built many ships for trade. In maybe five turns, one year per turn, I went from 50,000 florins to being in debt, I had already lost two of my provinces and with the Egyptians so strong I had no hope of surviving. I quit in frustration. i could not win! I had experienced this frustration as the Spanish, as the Germans, the Egyptians and as the Almohads (Nortwest Africa). It will take about 400 turns for the full campaign game. The game arbitrarily assigns bad events, to which I fell prey often.

To win you must at least conquesr 60% of Europe, the near east and North Africa. On the Total War bulletin board many people are bragging about beating the game on the most difficult setting. I am sorry, but that requires incredible luck, or the braggers are cheaters.

There is mind numbing detail and even if you read the manual and the separate Strategy Guide, there are still far too many unanswered questions.

As far as I can see, most of the tedium that ruins the game was intended. There are situations where the game indicates that you subjects are happy, but the next turn, you have a huge rebel army of the previously happy peasants. And, somehow the peasants are in huge numbers and the quality of the troops isridiculously strong.

I have been playing computer games for 20 years. Before that I played board games. I have a law degree and Mensa level intelligence.

I warn you all, do not buy this title unless you hate yourself, and are out of work. If you have the patience, you will eventually have enough luck that you can win a campaign occasionally.

ALL I CAN SAY IS: BUY BUY BUY!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 3 / 6
Date: September 29, 2002
Author: Amazon User

This game has EXCELLENT graphics, and it is rare to find a game this FUN! When i first played it, i went on playing for SIX HOURS!

Very good at battle, poor at strategy and history

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 3 / 6
Date: February 23, 2003
Author: Amazon User

This game is supposed to allow you to conquer medieval Europe by choosing one of the several kingdoms. However, this is simply impossible at the expert level. The reasons why the conquest strategy fail and the historical background is inaccurate are the following:
a) The Muslim kingdoms ( Almohads, Egyptians and Turkish) are always more powerful than the Christians.
b) Despite the fact that France didn't get rid of the English till the end of the Hundred Years War (about 1453) because the English controlled 2/3 of France, in this game the English are quickly smashed by the French
c) The Holy Roman Empire is a decorative kingdom more or less, when if fact the emperor of Germany was more powerful than the rest of medieval kings
d)Spanish kingdoms are wrongly conceived because the game has simply passed over the complexity of the unification process of Christian kingdoms and the variety of Islamic kingdoms in the Peninsula
e)The so-called Italians doesn't exist in the Middle Ages because Italy wasn't a nation until 1870, so Italy was fragmented in princedoms like Milan, Ferrara, Mantua, Naples and Sicily, Florence, Venice, the Papal States, ... Just as the Sicilians are quite an invention of the game, because Sicily belonged to the House of Anjou, and after to the kings of Aragon
f) It is impossible to keep a good profit out of cultivated lands, trade and mines. Sooner or later, by an unexplained cause, your profit turns negative and your economy ruined
g) Whatever happens when you smash a rival, it appears afterwards and quite illogically, like, for instance, smashing the French and appearing fifty years after in Prussia
h) When the Papacy is conquered, it always happens that the Pope manages to call a rebellion from the exile afterwards
i) There is a huge disproportion between kingdoms. For instance, the Aragonese are one of the weakest, when the truth is that the kingdom of Aragon controlled half the Mediterranean, including Sicily and Naples
j) The ship design is poor and the naval battles poorly conceived.
k) The diplomacy is very weak and the alliances are a joke
l) Unlike Shogun, in this game assassins are quite useless, and princesses even more useless if possible. Cardinals come after you've built a cathedral, a lot of money to invest in a figure which serves the same purpose as the bishop, being the latter much cheaper

And there is much more I can't remember just now. However, the battles, graphics and deployment of troops are excellent.

Great Potential Squandered - 4 Stars With XL Mod

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 6 / 19
Date: August 28, 2005
Author: Amazon User

While Medieval : Total War is commendable in it's ambition, it's complicated with a near useless manual, making very frustrated learning, and once you learn it's way too easy.

First the newbie griefs - The makers of the game kept it secret for several months that in order to avoid revolts in conquered provinces you in fact need 120 % loyalty value. Incredible? They wanted to spice it up, bad thing is it made the game unplayable as the revolts were 5000 elite knights out of nowhere, instead of 5000 peasants - another case of "spicing it up".

The pope is a pain in the butt until you simply learn to start wars as he is old so if you get excommunicated, it will be brief.

Diplomacy makes no goddamn sense at all. To get your prince laid,
by god never offer your princess as fair trade, or ally. You need
to keep asking for marriage and get allies only from factions with weak lineage. Just keep asking until you get the princess, get another from the same faction, then just forget about giving anything in return. The AI does not care what you do, as long as you don't act nice or start a war.

Never ever attack a faction without the intent to destroy it completely - prolonged grudge of any kind gets you excommunicated and hated by everyone in the world.

Once you get the hang of it the real problems start getting to you:

AI handles it's economy so lousy, it builds a few weak units and excessive amount of siege machines, then builds nothing at all, ever again. With crusades and wars taking their toll, by 50 years from start you hardly find a proper army to fight. XL Mod repairs this to a point, better and more units, but not enough for long challenge.

Just wayyy too much diplomacy - in order to know whats going on around you, produce at least 50 diplomats, and keep producing since they get assassinated, or just use a cheat code, much better. Getting princes laid is half the game, and gets exhausting, frustrating, then impossible after you beat a few factions.

Naval combat is just sheer horror - you need to chase & destroy every single small ship on your waters in order to secure your entire empire (!) or have revolts all over in provinces beyond sea. But worse is that AI can't trade at sea at all - it only attempts to stop yours. This is to a point fixed in XL Mod by simply decreasing trade profit and increasing agriculture profit.

All generals are rife with character traits which are just too powerful. 3 good traits will be undone by one bad one, and there are bugs in them which make some of them inherited twice and can ruin your entire future lineage. You have to constantly check which of your governers have been corrupted and replace them. You have to shuffle inactive units around just to avoid the laziness trait! Programmers apparently feel we paid $50 to pointlessly move our armies around so they (and us) won't get lazy.

Worst of all, the micromanaging and diplomacy (desperately seeking marriages allll the time with 50 diplomats moving every turn) makes it more work than fun very quickly. Also once you have more provinces than others, you just steamroll anyone - build and rush applies 300%. So once you have 20% or 30% of Europe, just quit... it gets to point where one round on strategy map = 2 hours ... one good battle = 20 hours of shuffling around.

Overall with XL Mod most problems are partly relieved to make it fun for the first 20-30 provinces. Without it, the saving grace of the game making it worth 3 stars is that the battle screen works, for good custom battles and online action. But the campaign has too many problems.

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