StrategyFront Gaming Everything Strategy Games
Medieval II: Total War Retrospective Released in 2006, Medieval II Total War is sandwiched between the beloved Rome Total War, and the series’s first major misfire, Empire Total War. It’s […]
Released in 2006, Medieval II Total War is sandwiched between the beloved Rome Total War, and the series’s first major misfire, Empire Total War. It’s the first Total War game that is a direct sequel, specifically to Medieval Total War (Duh) and is the last Total War game to allow true Total Conversion modding.
And perhaps it’s best remembered today for those Total Conversion mods which haven’t been surpassed due to the limitations of the newer Total War game’s engines. But does the vanilla Medieval II experience hold up in its own right?
If the original Medieval Total War expanded and refined Shogun’s gameplay then Medieval II does the same to Rome Total War. Medieval II’s design focus centers on solidifying the series’ successes so far and improving the quality of Rome’s systems while adding a cohesive atmosphere to the game.
Medieval II Total War thrives on its minor details. When you upgrade a unit’s armor at the barracks it actually changes its model with new armor. Cannons and arquebus the units have incredibly well-done animations even though those units will be absent for most of the game. Knights have a weight to them as they charge across the battlefield. These features aren’t revolutionary but they do speak to the attention paid to making Medieval II a cohesive experience.
Where Medieval stumbles is in its increased focus on the Grand Strategy elements of the campaign. Medieval II clearly wants you to be worrying a lot more about alliances, religious relations, and fighting far-flung holy wars far more than you ever did in Rome. In this way, this game is truly a sequel to the original Medieval.
It feels like it wants you to be more concerned with Royal families and geopolitics than just outright warfare. But the AI and design of the game haven’t yet caught up with Creative Assembly’s vision, and it’s a mistake they’ll repeat in Empire Total War.
While Medieval succeeds at being a worthy successor and improving upon Rome it doesn’t go so far as to succeed at being the game of politics and diplomacy it seems to hint at wanting to be. Unlike Crusader Kings 2, It’s not good at being a simulation of a medieval world but it is still a great Total War game.
Up to and including Medieval Total War, the Total War series has been pretty much a straight upshot in terms of quality. Which is one of the rarest things in strategy games series. It’s also hard to argue that the series to this point has been critically dumbed-down or made too casual, which are accusations that will plague later games.
The Medieval II grand campaign starts much like all Total War campaigns. You can choose from a few starter factions, as to not overwhelm you with choices. Your first choice should be England or France which are both strong starter nations.
But what’s missing from the original Medieval is the different campaign eras. This is such a shame since Medieval II gameplay changes drastically over as technology progresses.
Medieval II focuses far more on the disparity of the quality among Medieval troops than previous games did. It’s immediately clear during battles how much better-armored knights are than the peasant infantry they’ll be smashing into. But in the early game, you’ll mostly be fielding those low-tier peasant units. This is why it’d be great to have a later era campaign where you could jump right into using higher-tier units.
Medieval II also focuses on the technological changes which took place during this period. In this focus perhaps the only other Total War game to rival Medieval II is Fall of The Samurai in how radically different your armies will change in composition and function. Whereas in Rome Total War you’d be fielding legionnaires throughout the whole game, granted they got more advanced as time went on but the core make-up of your army and your tactics would stay the same. In Medieval II you’ll begin by fielding peasant militia and end the game with proto-Pike and Shot warfare.
Most factions in Medieval II start out with very similar rosters, mostly light or medium spear militia as a mainline, peasant archers, and whatever cavalry you can muster. But as the game goes on you’ll eventually specialize toward your faction’s strengths. Spanish employ their horse javelineers, the Jinetes, while the English could recruit deadly Longbowmen. While in Rome Total War each faction was immediately distinct through its roster, Medieval’s factions take some time to grow into themselves as they get higher-tier units.
Throughout the game, you’ll move from peasant levies and toward better-equipped men-at-arms. This mirrors the historical trend toward professionalized mercenary armies and by the late game, you’ll see battlefields filled with cannon and arquebusiers as a prelude to renaissance warfare. The new units you unlock radically expand your options on the battlefield which removes the relative sameness of the factions rosters in the early game.
This would also help with the number of rebel provinces in the game. Almost every faction is separated by a buffer of rebel provinces which is likely meant to represent the decentralized nature of control in many Medieval states. What it means in gameplay terms is that you’ll be spending a lot of time fighting rebels who are more a nuisance than a real threat before you get to tackle more interesting opponents.
This allows new players to ease into conquest and massive wars with other powers, which is good but it’d be better to have a later-era campaign that allows you to start those wars immediately.
Another advantage to having multiple campaigns is that it would allow you to play as the emergent factions which appear later in the game. These are the fearsome Mongols and Timurids who will rage across the Eastern part of the map destroying everything in their path. These emergent factions offer a great challenge to those Eastern factions and add even more unit variety to the game. Even some insane units like the Timurids Elephant cannons.
The technological arms race extends not just to units but to fortifications as well. Settlements are now divided between cities, which act as your economic hubs, and castles which act as fortified bastions and unit production centers.
Castles are strong points of defense, especially once you upgrade them to have multiple circuits of walls. Upgrading these castles is critical since the increased defenses will allow you to leave less men garrisoning the castle and move them into field armies for conquest. Upgrading them will also mean you will now have access to higher tier units for recruitment.
You can convert any city to a castle and vice versa, which is a great design decision that allows players to decide where they’d like their fortified production centers to be. It can be critical to convert border cities to well-fortified citadels and convert safe castles into rich cities.
Other than that, settlements work much the same as in Rome Total War. They have dynamic population numbers, growth rates, and taxes. The major difference in terms of gameplay is that it’s much easier to maintain public order in Medieval than it was in Rome. This is great because in Rome many of your cities would become endless centers of rebellion due to their high population, which is not the case in Medieval II.
Medieval II also has the distinction of being the last game in the series where buildings served as the sole way to upgrade your technology. Later entries would implement a Civilization-like technology tree, alongside upgrading buildings.
Buildings are more varied than in Rome, with Guilds being the most important edition. Guilds will appear organically once some hidden requirement has been met within a settlement. This means that Guilds don’t just appear randomly, you’ll have to specialize a city in a certain way for them to appear. This allows you access to higher tier upgrades. Some of the most powerful Guilds are the Holy Orders, which grant you the ability to recruit elite heavy knights.
Religion is a key aspect of Medieval II’s campaign. The Papacy has an adapted version of Rome’s senate mechanics. Meaning he will occasionally send you missions.
In Rome Total War, these missions were easily ignored. Here in Medieval the Pope has power and will excommunicate you if at the drop of a hat. The most annoying mission he will give is to stop fighting another Catholic nation. Let me give you a tip, never do this. It’s never worth it to go out of your way to break a siege just to please the Pope.
It would be much better if you could bribe the Pope into relenting when this happens so you at least have some control over this. What these really are is a not-so-subtle way of slowing down your conquests so that you won’t outpace the AI too quickly.
Excommunication will mostly cause greater unrest among your population and make other Catholic factions hate you but if you play on the harder difficulties most factions will constantly be at war with you anyway.
The benefit of the Papal System is that now you can influence the Papal Election. You can do this when a Pope dies. You can demand their votes in return for a bribe or other concessions if you have a cardinal in the running to become the new Pope.
When you get a Pope from your faction elected you can influence him to call a crusade. Crusades target specific settlements of another religion or an excommunicated faction. You can assign one of your armies to become a “Crusader Army” and gain access to unique Crusader units as mercenaries.
Once you assign this army to be Crusaders you will need to steadily move them toward the Crusade target or else they will begin to desert.
The crusades are great in Medieval II, they force you to take your forces far away from your centers of reinforcement and send them on an expedition to the other side of the world. They force you to think carefully about what battles you want to take since you’ll need to be clever about preserving your forces in this hostile land.
Catholics also have their own unique agents beyond the priests. These are Cardinals, who act as stronger priests and are eligible for the Papacy, Inquisitors, who are controlled by the Papacy and can burn your characters at the stake for Heresy, and Heretical preachers, these are rebel units who will convert your populations away from Christianity and lower public order. The other version of these Heretics is the Witches, who function in the same manner.
Overall the religious mechanics, especially for Catholics exist mostly to slow your expansion down, increasing unrest, eliminating your generals, or giving you missions to not conquer. While I appreciate the attempt to force the player to think about things besides just expansion, it often feels like these are mere annoyances rather than real challenges in your conquests.
Speaking of agents, besides the religious agents the newest addition is the Merchant. Merchants have generated a lot of debate over the years about their usefulness. I generally come down on the side of them being a waste for a few reasons.
The first is that most enemy agents will try and seize your merchant’s assets which will eventually succeed. The second is that they often don’t produce enough gold to make good on the initial investment.
Merchants can be useful if you send them all the way across the map, especially sending them to Timbuktu but at that point, you could have spent that 500 gold on something else. Keeping your treasury full is far more of a challenge than in Rome Total War.
Otherwise, agents are mostly the same, the problem here is that there are just so many of them, that this is the point here agent spam really started to become a problem for the series. It is also a problem that agents are largely useless on higher difficulties since the AI will always get buffs to their agents making yours nearly ineffective.
Diplomacy is still the game’s main problem area. With the increased focus on religious relations, marriages with Princesses, and Royal Lineage it is sad to see this hasn’t been improved.
Diplomacy has long been the Total War series’ Elephant in the room. It’s cumbersome, takes away from the overall campaign, and kills any roleplay. This is entirely due to the arbitrary nature of the AI in relation to the player. The AI will accept your trade agreement then capriciously attack you for no reason.
This is partly due to the fact that the game wants to keep you constantly at war. This means that AI relations are meaningless, as they may simply declare war on you at any point.
The solution is simple, the Total War AI respects only one thing: strength. That alliance you have with France? Yeah, that’s a useless piece of paper. But an army parked on their border? That will make the AI think twice.
This force-based diplomacy system is poorly explained by the game. The way diplomacy works and the way it seems it should work is a gap that a lot of players have had problems with.
On the hardest difficulty, the AI warmongering can get insane. Playing as England, by turn 70 Spain, France, Portugal, Denmark, and the HRE had all declared war on me. While this made for a fun challenge it Portuguese armies invading Wales broke all immersion in the campaign.
This hatred of the player hurts the games in other ways, namely that it creates a less interesting campaign world. Instead of each faction feeling like the protagonist of their own story it feels like they are all just looking to take you down like every faction has geared their entire national effort simply towards killing you.
The Royal family and political mechanics haven’t been improved over Rome or the original Medieval individually but Medieval II combines elements of both.
Gone are the dynamic Civil Wars which appeared in the original Medieval. Now when generals have low enough loyalty they will simply become rebels, taking their whole army with them. This can be interesting, as when I had a commander besieging an important French citadel, waiting to starve them out.
One turn before their garrison was set to surrender the Commander rebelled, lifted the siege, and took that whole army with him. It completely changed the dynamic of the war and left me scrambling to plug that flank.
It’s those great character moments that Medieval II does so well.
One of the strongest aspects of the game is the character system. In terms of how the Total War series handles characters, Medieval II is the best in the series. The system is a more robust version of the Attributes-Traits-Retinue system of Rome Total War. In the Medieval era when most politics were personal, characters have to be a central focus.
Any male character will automatically be made a commander, who can then be assigned to either lead armies or govern settlements. Mostly gone are the unique titles for governors from Medieval Total War, which is a shame.
Characters will receive a laundry list of traits that flesh out their personality and impact their Attributes. Attributes generally determine what a character should be doing, if they have high command then put them at the head of a host, if they have high chivalry put them in a city to increase population growth.
The best thing about the traits system is how it can affect the speeches that generals give at the beginning of battles, it is a small detail that most people won’t notice but Medieval II thrives on these little touches that add a sense of realism to the game.
Battles haven’t changed much mechanically in Medieval II but slight tweaks to the formula ensure that battles play out much differently than in previous titles. Here battles are probably the weightiest in the series. Units move slower and charge with a higher impact. They also take longer to break than in Rome which allows for more tactics to be employed on the player’s side.
Whereas in Rome the focus was on heavy-infantry, here the dreaded knights rule the battlefield. Cavalry is no longer as vulnerable as it was in Rome. Knights look far more menacing than another cavalry as well.
Medieval II nails unit design in general, no longer are your regiments populated by identically faced soldiers. Now there is a rag-tag quality to your troops, they’ve clearly all brought their own armor here.
The differences in the tiers of medieval troops I mentioned earlier also plays out here. Your Spear militia is going to get crushed by mail knights or torn apart by longbowmen. Their use, then, is to hold the line long enough for your own heavy cavalry to flank the enemy and crush them.
It’s a great system overall which is only enhanced by the variety of terrains you’re going to encounter on the battlefield. The reliance on heavy cavalry means that finding open fields is paramount, and you’ll want to position your battles carefully since Medieval II uses the same dynamic battle generation system as Rome.
There are also a number of Historical Battles in the game. These are generally mixed in quality with the best being Agincourt and Arsuf. These mostly do a competent job of depicting the historical event but more importantly their challenging scenarios that you can’t recreate on the campaign map.
Sieges here are the best in the series. There is now a far greater variety of siege maps to play on, and they’re split between cities and castles. Castles are far harder to attack than cities and may feature multiple rings of walls you will have to penetrate before claiming victory.
Critically unit pathfinding has been far improved in settlements, meaning you’ll be less frustrated during these engagements. Pathfinding is still worse than in field battles mind you but at least it’s improved.
Medieval II only featured one expansion: Kingdoms. It featured four separate mini-campaigns which in terms of content for money, Kingdoms is the best Total war DLC out there. Though Fall of The Samurai is likely the best in terms of quality content. The four campaigns are Britannia, Americas, Teutonic, and the Crusades. They are vastly different from each other and the main campaign, and each is interesting in its own way.
I won’t talk much more about them here because they deserve their own separate review.
Medieval 2 continued the upward trend in terms of the quality of the Total War series. It is the last Total War for many things and is considered the last of the “Old Total War” games.
The game survives today with a fairly large player base mostly due to its insanely talented and dedicated modding scene which have kept the game on par with modern Total War releases.
It succeeded mechanically mostly due to refining what made previous games great and forged its own identity with its unique attention to detail, and character.
Where Medieval II failed it’s mostly due to failings for the series, those being diplomacy and agents. Both of these would receive massive overhauls in later games.
As I said before, Medieval II is an awkward place in the series. It felt like CA wanted to do far more with the game than the engine allowed, a failing they’d attempt to remedy with the unabashedly huge Empire Total War.
This article is part of a series on the Total War Series you can find the other articles in the series here:
2 Comments »