Medieval II: Total War

When Steam had their Black Friday sales a while back, every game seemed to have some ridiculous discounts that I'd never be able to find anywhere else. One of the best deals I saw was the Total War Megapack, normally  sold for $50, something which I'd always consider way too expensive to buy even if it did come with 4 games, for only $12.50. Even though my computer can't run the newer ones, my friend said I might as well take advantage of the deal since it 75% off. So I got the pack which came with: Rome: Total War, Medieval II: Total War, Empire: Total War and Napoleon: Total War, along with all their expansions. I decided to start with Medieval II, mostly because I misremembered it as being the oldest of the four, forgetting Rome came out a few years before.

So I started it up and unsurprisingly enough, the game ran at about 8 whole frames a second even with all the graphics set to the lowest possible and nothing else running on the computer. For comparison, go to this Link to see the difference between 15, 30 and 60 fps. Despite the slowness of the game, once I got out of the tutorial I really started to enjoy the combat and almost forgot it was atrocious to watch. the battles of the tactical map were extremely fun to command, as you line up your hundreds of troops and then watch them fight the enemy. I managed to win my first seige, although i suffered extremely high casualties. I had a grand total of 4 archers left. Not 4 units of archers, literally four men. When a unit comes with 75 men a piece, you can see how much I sucked. I decided the only way to get better was to keep playing the game. I started a short campaign playing as England. I got hooked and spent the next few days mostly playing the game.

The campaign map is turned based as opposed to real time, and includes up to sixteen different factions. To win the campaign as the English, you need to control 15 regions and eliminate the French and the Scottish. I got to work and learned how to play the game and how to command my men, what units worked best against which, the importance of morale, and most importantly, how badass Cavalry units are. If you use them properly, they're the strongest units in the game. they can beat almost anything if you used them properly. foot soldiers are losing a melee and are outnumbered? Cavalry charge. Archers are chipping away at your troops? Cavalry Charge. the enemy cavalry is charging you? Cavalry Charge. As long as you hit them from the side or behind, your horses will slaughter the enemy and force them to rout. Later on, once the French started to use heavy infantry (basically armoured knights), you can see how easily those can fight everything to a standstill .and how one unit of those can hold off 3 or 4 times their number in light infantry. they're also much harder to charge with your own cavalry.

As I played, I discovered one of my favourite features about the game; the Royal Family. Each faction has a Royal family where the males act as governors of Towns and Castles during the campaign, and Generals on the battlefield. You need to use them as governors in order to recruit new soldiers for your army and build new buildings in towns, otherwise the towns only provide income. You also need them on the battlefield since they can affect the course of battle, and also act as an extra unit of Heavy Cavalry. They each display 4 ratings which impact how important they are, which are ranked on a scale of 1-10. the first is Command, which increases morale on the battlefield. Chivalry/Dread increases your own units morale, or lowers the enemies, respectively. Chivalry is better for governors, while Dread is better for war. Loyalty is the chance they have of rebelling, being bribed, and also affects the amount of unrest in lands they govern. Kings have authority, and if they have a high enough score it'll keep low loyalty family members from rebelling. Piety is how religious they are, and whether the inquisition will get them.

Maybe its just me, but as I got family members, they seemed to develop a personality depending on how I used them and seemed to tell a story. they got traits which affected their stats and made sense.  For example, I had one character who had three children. he got traits such as alcoholic and angry. As his children grew up, they all get traits which said they abhorred drinking. I thought this was a clever touch on the games part. Since this was my first campaign, I grew quite attached to some members of the family, and hated some others. each character seemed to tell his own story if I thought about it, and just made the game more fun and exciting to play.