11/14/2006 - Medieval II - Total War

[Big Gulp]

Essentially Rome: Total War with a facelift.  There are some minor tweaks here and there, most of which are for the better, but this is really more of the same.  For me, that's great.  If you're like me and you're still playing Rome, you'll find that all your tried and true formations still work.  I personally go in for heavy use of artillery (around 6 artillery units or so), and this still works great as long as you're conservative with the use of your infantry and cavalry units.  In fact, artillery is almost more of a must in this game because fortifications are now really serious obstacles.  They've implemented a change in the game where you have to decide whether or not a settlement will be a town or a castle.  Castles make a lot less money, being that they're essentially just armed camps, but they also produce the most interesting units, allow you to retrain and upgrade your units, and are a stone cold bitch to take by force.  If you're assaulting a castle you should really just forget about the rams, towers, and ladders sufficient to take a town.  You'll need to spend some time reducing it's walls and towers before you even get around to storming the castle.

They have made some bizarre choices, like relocating pause to the pause/break key instead of the much more accessible space bar, but you can remap it back.  There are a lot of players out there who think that you can no longer issue orders from pause, but that's not true; they just made pausing the game a less obvious option than it was previously.  This was intentional, I believe.

If you liked the previous games in the series, pick this one up.  More of the same, but in a good way.

[Strazos]

Sounds cool. Is it possible to turn castles into towns at a later time as you push your borders further out? In such games I tend to play with a very strong perimiter around my soft, squishy economical center of the empire. It would certainly be nice if that's possible, so you can initially make important out outposts into castles, then turn them into towns as you push your borders out further.

[Big Gulp]

Sounds cool. Is it possible to turn castles into towns at a later time as you push your borders further out?

Yes indeedy.  It costs you, but it can be done.

[Strazos]

What an excellent mechanic. I might have to give this a look if I ever get the spare money to RMA my AIW card.

[stray]

I just bought it + strat guide (that thing is huge). My system is pretty mid-range, but I hopefully I can still make good use of it.

[edit]

Ah, didn't realize I got the Limited Edition. Pretty cool.

No fancy box, but it comes with a soundtrack and a 2 DVD edition of the History Channel's "The Crusades: Crescent and the Cross".

The game itself is 2 DVD's. Either it's bloated or I have a lot to play with here.

[Strazos]

I tried two battles in the demo...I did alright at Hastings, but got whomped eventually in the Cortes battle. How do you guys handle the use of Calvalry? I found they would just do one little dinky charge, and then try to melee. I'd rather they charge and trample through, run off, and come back and repeat.

[stray]

Depends on what you're attacking. Calvary is great for smashing typical foot soldiers, archers, and peasant armies. Just stay the hell away from spearmen.

[Big Gulp]

I'd rather they charge and trample through, run off, and come back and repeat.

You've got to do that manually, and yep, it's a better way to do things; shock effect is great just for morale alone, nevermind how badly you screw up their formations.  Listen to Stray also, though.  Never charge (or even engage, for that matter) spearmen with cavalry.

[Strazos]

Well yeah, history told me that.

Is it possible to set up a sequence of waypoints to accomplish the tactic I am after? I know you can in the Kingdom Under Fire series; Charge, move away, charge, move away, repeat repeat repeat. I don't want my guys even touching the hilt of their swords.

[Sky]

I don't want my guys even touching the hilt of their swords.

Barracks discipline is paramount!

[Mortriden]

Well yeah, history told me that.

Is it possible to set up a sequence of waypoints to accomplish the tactic I am after? I know you can in the Kingdom Under Fire series; Charge, move away, charge, move away, repeat repeat repeat. I don't want my guys even touching the hilt of their swords.

You can try it by holding down the shift key when you give the orders (hold shift + double click the target then hold shift and double click away), but it doesn't work so well.  Like Gulp posted above, manually controlling them works TONS better.  Without you telling them exactly where to break off too they have a tendancy to try and "escape" through enemy formations; or the computer closes up the gap you were going to escape through like it was a fucking mind reader.