Medieval: Total War

List Price: $19.99 Discount Price: $14.13

Features:

• 400 Years of Medieval Warfare - From the preaching of the first crusade in 1095 to the fall of Constantinople in 1453. Guide your kingdom's fortunes through the early dominance of the feudal knights and longbowmen to the emergence of gunpowder and the advent of heavy siege cannons and handguns.
• Turn-Based - An in-depth turn based game, where players must manage the affairs of their kingdom by forging strategic alliances and marriage treaties, creating trade routes, constructing castles, deploying naval power, training warriors and more.
• Real Time Strategy - Spectacular battles featuring over 10,000 troops in real-time 3D terrain over hundreds of distinct battlefields from the lush farmlands of Western Europe to the arid deserts of North Africa.
• 12 Playable Factions - Each with distinct playing styles and unique units, including the English, German, Byzantine, French and Turkish Empires.

Accessories:
PC Gamer (1-year)	Games for Windows: The Official Magazine

Customer Reviews:

Great game, except....... [Posted on 2004-12-11]
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.

Fun, for a while... [Posted on 2005-07-22]
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.

Great Potential Squandered - 4 Stars With XL Mod [Posted on 2005-08-28]
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.

Best Game ever!! [Posted on 2006-05-19]
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 Buy, but get a mod... [Posted on 2007-07-28]
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.

Click here for more details and discount information...