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Great Buy, but get a mod...

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: July 28, 2007
Author: Amazon User

This game is one of my favorite of all time, which is actually saying a bit since I have played everything from Atari on up. The only thing I can fault with the game is that it needed a bit of tweaking as found in the XL or BKB mods to make it truely, yet infinately, replayable. There are few other games that I have returned to so many times for so long.

Quick note, I just picked the game back up after going on a trip to Spain. Visit a country, learn a bit about it, then play as it for a REALLY fun experience. :D Trust me on this, you really feel a part of the game then.

Best Game ever!!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 4 / 6
Date: May 19, 2006
Author: Amazon User

This is a very great game. Our Computer is to slow to do the battles but even without it is very fun. This game is challenging enough to be fun, yet not to hard to make it impossible. It takes alot of strategy. You get certain generals you always use and they actual have characters. It is fun conqueroring the world as well as dealing with revolts and taxes and everything. It is the second best computer game I have ever played. And also I assume the battles must be very fun. Buy this game for hours of fun!!!!!!! Do not listen to bad reviews!

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.

Fun, for a while...

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 1 / 19
Date: July 22, 2005
Author: Amazon User

when i bought this game i thought i was getting a fun "total war" game. The game actually is turn based?!?! but when u engage in combat it goes into rts. The graphics suck and the game is so unrealistic and way to easy. i took down over 1000 units with 60 of my own. If u want a good game go pick up Empire Earth 2 a worthy sequel to number 1.

Look at All of the Wonderful Things to Eat!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 9 / 12
Date: April 11, 2005
Author: Amazon User

The download and install were uneventful, if rather long. The mod is available in two sizes: small (28MB) and large (140MB). I chose the large version and downloaded from the mirrors available in this forum post. The mod itself will automatically install itself into the Medieval: Total War directory on the player's hard drive, so the process is as hassle-free as they come. Once done, simply fire up the game as always.

Immediately noticeable upon starting a campaign is that the game is now running in version 2.0 (without any other patches applied), some basic screen art additions, alterations, and a big, sloppy smorgasbord of new features. If the player truly loves medieval European history, Medieval: Total War XL may be the only game played for months, if not years to come.

Choosing a faction and era to play in almost made my head explode, in the best way. Besides the additional factions added by the Viking Invasion pack (Hungarians, Sicilians, and the Aragonese), the XL pack doubles the amount of playable factions to include Armenians, Bulgarians, the Crusader States, the Knights Hospitaller, Lithuanians, Norwegians, Portuguese, Scots, Serbs, and the Teutonic Knights. Older factions like Italy are broken up between two new factions: the Genoese and the Venetians, and formerly unplayable factions like the Golden Horde and the Papacy are now playable. All of the old factions (English, French, Spanish, Holy Roman Empire, etc.) are still all playable as well, of course. In addition to doubling the amount of playable factions, the Medieval: Total War XL mod also adds a number of faction specific units: every faction now has at least two or three unique units. Some are modeled on older unit models, but some are all new creations added by VikingHorde himself.

Many of the newer units are ethnically and geographically based, such as Slav Javelin men, found in Balkan provinces, and some very exotic Eastern European and Islamic units. As I applied both the Viking Invasion pack and the Medieval: Total War XL mod back to back, it was difficult for me to be able discern which were added by the modder and which were "officially added" by Creative Assembly. It can only be to the modder's credit that determining the difference was no easy task.

Besides new units and factions, the map has been further broken into additional, historically accurate provinces. They are scattered across the entire original map, throughout every region, and are subtle and not noticeable until the player really gets a chance to study the map by investing some game time. Other more subtle changes to the programming of Medieval: Total War are tweaks to the economics of the game, specifically trade balances and farming income.

The Medieval: Total War XL patch is a little slice of gaming heaven, but alas, it's not absolutely perfect. There are scattered little typos in some of the added in-game text. Nobody is perfect, and I know this may not bother some, but as an editor and writer I couldn't help but notice them. More importantly, the load time between turns on the strategic map has become absolutely spirit-crushing. On some occasions it took the AI up to three or four minutes to complete its moves, much greater than the time it took for the same turns in the old Medieval: Total War. The game never actually crashed, but it appeared to be hung up. It only occurred on the strategic map, and there was no slow-down in any other parts of the game. The turn was always [eventually] completed, but I was able to leave the room, do the laundry, and let out the dog on some occasions between moves. Hopefully this is addressable in an available patch somewhere, because the Medieval: Total War XL mod is terrific and absolutely immersive. The replay value evident with Medieval: Total War XL goes beyond any other game I can recall, with such a variety of factions, units, and provinces to explore that any Medieval: Total War fan will be entertained for a very long time. Despite the problems, Medieval: Total War XL is a great demonstration of what PC wargaming can be: engaging, expandable, entertaining, and even [gasp!] educational. Wargamers with a taste for a more distant, darker history owe it to themselves to check out the Medieval: Total War XL mod.

Great game, except.......

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 9 / 16
Date: December 11, 2004
Author: Amazon User

Total War: Medieval is very enjoyable, but it has an unendurable glitch -- the program occasionally aborts and returns to the operating system, without saving the game. This happens usually during battles.

My computer exceeds all system requirements, and this is simply unacceptable. It ruins an otherwise fine game.

After the 4th or 5th "abort", I broke the CD to spare myself further frustration. No more Activision for me. It is unbelievable (in 2004) that a company can market a product with this kind of glitch.

Excellent Game

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 2 / 6
Date: October 21, 2004
Author: Amazon User

Having jumped to Medieval: Total War from Shogun: Total War, I was very pleased to see how they were able to greatly improve an already excellent game. I'm a history nut, and I love historical accuracy and historical themes in games, and if you do too you won't be disappointed in this game. The only thing I wish was different was diplomacy, but I understand why it is so limited, this is a war game.

I don't know what the people complaining about crashes are talking about, I've been playing the game for around a year now and I've NEVER had any problems with crashing or anything else.

I could go on, but I don't feel like writing a long review. Let the user rating speak for itself if you're into this type of game.

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!

Hours of entertainment

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: June 02, 2004
Author: Amazon User

Medieval: Total War is a great game that makes many demands on the player. Unlike the glut of shoot-em-up, kill-em-all, skate-until-you-drop games out there (many of which are FUN), this is a highly strategic game that requires total concentration. However, the battle sequences are gorgeous! (See? I like kill-em-all stuff too!) Some of the random events do get infuriating, but hey, that's the way things go. Nobody said ruling the medieval world would be easy.

Tactical nice - strategic needs work

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 2 / 3
Date: May 18, 2004
Author: Amazon User

I love the tactical battle part of this game. Its is far better designed than the strategic component. The only issues I had with tactical battle part was the camera didnt control very intuitively, and getting unit facings correct was somewhat of a hassle. Also the AI tended to throw away the life of its general. Apart from that I think this is the best battle simulator Ive ever played.

The strategic section had three important flaws in my opinion.

1- No underlying story to engage the players interest.
2- Became tedious rather than engaging when your empire got large.
3- Random events occured not related to game play.

I think they should really address those issues going forward to make a really great game. In the middle to late game the style of play needs to change entirely which I dont think they did very well. During that period you have massive assets and its almost tedious hunting down and crushing the last of your opponents. At the same time you need to micro manage a LOT of provinces which is also tedious.

Id suggest once you have accumulated a certain amount of provinces that the game has the function so you can delegate control of some to a hand picked general. You would be able to define his overall strategy, but the AI would handle the details.

To make the last part of the game interesting all remaining factions should begin to ally together to stop your empire, allowing them to put up at least some worthwhile resistance.

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