Medieval 2: Total War
I have a reputation on this site of sorts for what I think of m2tw and how vocal I can be about it. Here then is my take on m2tw.
M2tw is without a doubt the most disappointing game I have played mainly because of how its potential was squandered and how the developers lied. It’s more depressing, because when the game works it's great fun.
For the sake of not having fanboys close this review before actually reading why this game actually isn’t the “b34t TTOAL WARR EVARR!!!111”n I’ll cover the things I like about the game before I open the floodgates
Medieval 2 total war is a remake of Medieval: Total War, the second game in the Total War series. It features the same sort of gameplay as the previous games in the series. You have the strategic campaign map overview part of the game and tactical real time 3d battles with thousands of troops which you also fully control.
The campaign map part of the game involves you constructing buildings and training armies. You have economical buildings to increase your income or trade, like farms and markets, as well as military buildings like barracks and bowyers to train your military.
A new feature of M2:TW is that settlements are either cities or castles now, rather than just every settlement being the same. A castle focuses on training troops: Strong infantry and cavalry can be trained here, as well as good archers. They also have far better defense than towns, high level castles have multiple rings of defences, depending on the castle and can be upgraded with deadler defences like gun towers. The population is also more loyal in castles than cities. The drawbacks of castles are that the tax rate can’t be changed and they produce much less income than cities.
Cities are your economic strongholds. They feature huge populations and fast population growth. giving a large tax income and support advanced farming and economical buildings. They can only train weaker unit types like militia level troops and tend to have few types of cavalry to train. Oddly towns support gunpowder troops and they can only be trained there. Castles only feature trainable gunpowder artillery. Another new feature is that towns and castles support a few units for free, depending on their size. You do not need to pay upkeep for these troops and they are shown as blue unit cards on the unit panel on the campaign map.
Another new feature on the campaign map is that the pope is much more noticeable and interactive. The papacy shows up as a proper faction this time around and has ratings for each faction in the game. The higher ranked a faction is the more chance the pope will listen to what they want and the better he will treat them. Attacking catholic factions and allying with Muslims will lower your rating with him and he will treat you badly giving you missions where failure will mean excommunication or simply excommunicating you. Having papal favour is very useful as the pope will turn a blind eye to an extent if you attack Catholics, but will penalize them very quickly if they attack you back. Using diplomacy you can bribe the pope and manipulate him to gain an advantage against other factions. This time around there are also papal elections when the pope dies. When this happens the College of Cardinals, made up of all factions most pious priests vote on who will be the next pope. You can rig the election by attempting to bribe other factions to vote for you and cast your own vote. Depending on what faction the new pope came from he might hate you or like you and it also affects his disposition towards other factions. If your pope is elected he will be very biased towards your faction, tho annoyingly you can’t directly control him.
The 3d battles side of the game is the same as RTW only much better and/or worse for reasons stated later in this review
The battle animations are much better and there are now canned combos of sorts like you might see a spearmen smash his opponent in the face with the haft of his spear then stab him with it before he can get up. While these animations are nice, they don’t always line up making them look glitchy and they really don’t add anything to the game. Melee as a whole doesn’t look too bad but RTW’s looked better. M2tws melee just looks slow and too choreographed and unnatural.
Graphically the game is far better than Rome. Troops are very nicely detailed and look very realistic when they aren’t fighting at least and battlefields look MUCH better than Rome with much better grass and trees, far better looking sky textures and great looking cities.
M2tws sound is also excellent. Battle sounds are great indeed, especially for archers and gun units. Melee has lots of new sounds and you can hear men saying things in melee. Voice acting is good as well. There are some annoying bits like the fact that almost every unit has a generic “infantry” “cavalry” etc acknowledgement, compared to Rome where troops always said their own name or a nice quote like “Rome’s finest”. Having this boring speech seems a bit lazy. Pre battle speeches range from boring to very funny or cool. A major black mark again the sound is this really annoying voice over that says things like if you are winning or losing the battle or telling you your troops are under fire, when you ALREADY KNOW this stuff. This feature just stinks of noobishness and it’s a wonder why it’s in there as it’s the same stuff every battle and gets extremely annoying.
There aren’t too many differences in actual gameplay from Rome except for the fact there’s medieval type units like gunpowder infantry and cavalry and artillery and a lot of knights and the like. Battles take longer this time around as even the weakest units have quite a lot or morale and melee takes allot longer, as kill rates are lower and units move slower. Melee can be pretty silly as said above, its very slow sometimes and it looks silly seeing swordsmen swing around in slow motion. One plus is that general’s bodyguards aren’t stupidly powerful like in Rome. This time it’s far easier to kill generals. Armies also start further away from each other ensuring there’s a lot more room to manoeuvre and there are far more hills and the like allowing for much more strategy with the larger battlefields.
One thing that’s an improvement over Rome is there is far less generic “Barbarian Cavalry” type units. All units have a name and model and have more personality than Rome’s units did. You can see that CA tried to make factions different and it’s appreciated. Sadly only the beginning factions have battle speeches. A lot of factions like Scotland and all the Muslim factions only have crappy one liner speeches with nowhere near the detail that factions like England and Spain have. This is similar to the way that only Roman factions in RTW had good speeches.
Depressingly all this good stuff is partly squandered because of some horrible bugs and hangovers from RTW. There are so many and they are so in your face and obvious and partly break the game.
Top of the list is the 2hand and general combat bugs. There is a bug with units that use two handed weapons, such as large axes, halberds and the like. This bug completely neuters any units with two handed weapons. It was the worst on release because the game shipped with hardly any 2handed animations, so they would charge into the melee and just stand there as the enemy killed them except for the occasional canned combo animation.
Note thus is in the RELEASE gold version of the game.
After the first patch they were sort of fixed, as in they could attack but they still were too slowly animated and since m2tw is based on actually hitting rather than number crunching they lose to just about anything. Things got even worse when the last patch was released, as that fixed the shield bug that has existed since the release version of Rome total war that caused shields to have a negative defence bonus instead of positive.
This means that all units with shields got a big increase to their defence from their now working shields and this made two handed units even more useless as their attack and defence was unchanged and as a result they became much, much weaker and can’t beat anyone. You see things like the first and weakest knight easily beating Gothic Knights, a very expensive knight that the Holy Roman Empire gets at the very end of its tech tree. Horrible. This makes certain factions like Poland with its polearms and Turkey with its Janissary Heavy Infantry polearm troops useless as their best troops don’t work.
Pike units are useless, as they just don’t use pikes correctly. A pike unit will change to swords almost instantly after it’s attacked instead of using the spearwall and holding the enemy. Spearwall just never works: every time they just put away their pikes or keep raising them letting the cavalry get close enough for the pikemen to start using their swords anyway. When they actually keep their pikes out, they do this animation where they walk forwards stabbing with their pikes. If they don’t kill the enemies their walking eventually carrying them get close enough to the enemy to – again - use their swords.
Pikemen are useless with swords as they have horrible defense stats and without shields they die very quickly. This makes every pike unit useless, and this really hurts Scotland, as they use a lot of pike units.
There is also a problem with gun units as they routinely get stuck reforming or raise their weapons to shoot but never do, especially when under fire they sit there and sit there without shooting back until they rout. You have to manually move them, which makes them fire an empty volley with no actual bullets and then move. There’s no excuse why this wasn’t fixed, as it works fine in kingdoms and gun units work just as you’d expect.
If missile units or units with alternate weapons are ordered to charge, often they run up to melee range THEN change from bows to swords or whatnot. It also takes soldiers an incredible amount of time to turn around literally two seconds or turning each way.
As you can see there are almost no units than aren’t at least slightly bugged and some are so bugged to be unusable.
Besides the actual game effects, the graphics might be visibly proficient, but technically they are busted. Cavalry sit around when fighting other cavalry and look at each other. When they fight infantry they thrash and spaz around like their arms are rubber, spearmen do the same animations over and over, two handed axemen use incredibly slow dumb looking animations like they are using table legs as weapons, peasants attack at hyper speed and block sword hits like it’s made of cardboard and everyone dies in the same exact animation if they are hit from in front or behind. Cavalry always have the same animation no matter what kills them. Gun units routinely do the animation of them firing but there’s no muzzle flash and the game’s unit animations as a whole just look rather wooden, in stark contrast to how good the graphics actually look. RTW’s animations were better.
Another major problem is the diplomacy. Despite the fact that the games hype actually mentioned diplomacy being a valid way of playing the game it is every bit as bad as RTW’s, just a bit more complex. The same stuff happens: you get backstabbed out of nowhere, you get ridiculous offers when you’re destroying a faction like ceasefires with 10,000 to be paid by your you can’t stay at peace with anyone the second they share a border you’ll be attacked.
They don’t need a reason to invade you you’ll be peaceful stay off their land trade with them etc and they will just attack you when they feel like it.
Following are videos of most of the glitches created by me.
Passive AI
A siege showing terrible pathfinding and various other bugs
Stuck units
More Passive AI
All up, while medieval 2 does advance the series a bit and the graphics are certainly miles better and when the game works properly its great fun as it has that classic total war gameplay. If you’re a fan of the series you’ll at least like it. Annoyingly it often doesn’t work. With another patch or two this game could be as close to perfect as the total war series has gotten.
Originally Posted by Darth Ravenous
