Product Details
 | Medieval II Gold Pack (Total War, Total War Kingdoms) |
| List Price: | $19.99 |
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Product Description
Medieval: Total War Gold Edition is the compilation of the critically-acclaimed Medieval: Total War and its official expansion pack - Total War Kingdoms. Set in the turbulent Middle Ages, Medieval puts you in command of your own empire as you crush neighboring kingdoms and unify all of Europe, the Mediterranean, and the Middle East. Medieval: Total War Kingdoms features four entire campaigns centered on expanded maps of the British Isles, Teutonic Northern Europe, the Middle East, and the Americas. In Medieval II, you were only given a glimpse of South America, but in Kingdoms, vast tracts of land in both North and South America have been opened up for you to conquer. All-new factions from the New World are also now fully playable, including the Aztecs, Apaches, and Mayans. In both games, you rule all aspects of your kingdom throughout centuries of medieval warfare. Lay siege to mighty fortresses and command vast armies across the battlefields of Europe and North Africa. This is Total War.Product Details
- Amazon Sales Rank: #834 in Video Games
- Brand: Sega
- Model: 85223
- Released on: 2008-02-06
- ESRB Rating: Teen
- Platforms: Windows XP, Windows
- Format: CD
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 1.25" h x 5.50" w x 7.50" l, 1.00 pounds
Features
- Richly detailed battles that feature thousands of 3D units and intense combat.
- Manage the economic, civil, religious and military arms of your empire.
- Over 100 different units, including knights, men-at-arms, English longbowmen, and more.
- Spectacular sieges, as you pound castles into dust with cannons, catapults, and ballistae.
- Multiplayer battles with up to seven other players over the Internet.
Customer Reviews
Utterly Consuming
I picked up Medieval II Total
War / Total War Kingdoms Gold Pack for $30 and I have to say, for that
price it's a great deal. There are months of gameplay packed into this
game. I was up until 4am, 4 nights in a row!
Concept: 9/10
In
Medieval 2GP, you play as 1 of 17 different Factions / Nations in an
attempt to use diplomacy, treachery, and military might to take over the
world. The game features a Battle Mode where you can fight a Battle
against AI, a Short Campaign where you must wipe out 1 or 2 rival
nations and occupy a good portion of the world map, or a Grand Campaign,
where you must occupy Jerusalem and a very large portion of the world.
The "Short" Campaign could take you anywhere from 8 - 40 hours to
finish. With the expansions, there are more maps, 13 more Factions, and
110 more military units... There is also a dedicated Modding community
that has further enhanced the game.
Graphics: 8/10
The
graphics are impressive on the high settings and it's pretty incredible
to watch 4000 soldiers clash on the battlefield with arrows raining from
the sky and catapults destroying fully destructible cities.
NOTE: I
had an awful time getting my NVidia 7900GT to work with this game, but I
finally found the solution on a forum. Creative Assembly's and SEGA's
websites were less helpful than a Magic 8 Ball. I'll post the solution
in the Comments Section below.
Gameplay: 7/10
There are three
types of gameplay in the game. There is a World Map where you can move
armies and units across a battlefield and into enemy territories. You
strategically use diplomats, merchants, religious figures, spies,
assassins, princesses, and armies to thwart your opposing nations. This
plays out like old school RISK.
There is faction management,
where you govern your cities, raise or lower taxes, build structures
that provide troops and upgrades for your army, balance your budget, put
your leaders in the most optimal places, and assemble your armies. Your
Heirs, Commanders, and Governors have stats... some make great
generals, some make great governors. It's up to you to put them in the
right places. If you have a brother in-law who is a weak commander and
not very loyal, you can send him off to fight the Mongols Far Far away
from your homeland. Think of it as chlorine in your family gene pool.
You don't want his offspring inheriting your kingdom.
There are
the battles. The battles are fought between units in an RTS, rock,
paper, scissors, type of battle. Archers are great at long range,
Horsemen can run over the archers, spearmen can set themselves in a
defensive formation and impale a cavalry charge. There are also infantry
(swordsmen) who fare well against the spearmen. There are literally
hundreds of different types of units. There are open field battles in
different types of environments, mountains, snow, forests...
There
are castle sieges where you must use catapults, rams, ladders, siege
towers, to take over a walled city. And there are castle sieges where
you must defend your city from invaders. During a battle, you can also
pause the action and issue commands, or speed it up 2x - 6x so you don't
have to wait for the troops to get into position.
If you want to
play the game RISK style, you can have the AI simulate the battles and
get a results screen that says something like: Victory, you lost 200
men, the enemy lost 650 men.
If you want to play the game like an
RTS, you can have the AI govern your cities, while you fight the
battles. It was a great idea to cater the game to both styles of play.
Strategies:
8/10
The AI is pretty simple in the game, and once you figure out
how to play, you will rarely lose a battle. You can use units and the
terrain to your advantage. Unlike Starcraft, you don't have to kill
every enemy on the battlefield. You can break their morale and get them
to run away. If you see a bunch of enemy swordsmen, you can pepper them
with arrows and kill half of them as they are charging, then run them
down (literally) with heavy calvary. The game displays their morale and
you can see when they are about to break. When they flee, you can let
them retreat, or run them down to finish them off.
On the World
Map, you can hide your armies in the woods to ambush enemies, or
position them in choke points to halt enemy advances. If you are at war
with another Christian Faction, the Pope may order you to cease fire for
a few turns, which usually allows the enemy to regroup and
counterattack. But you can actually destroy an enemy city without
attacking it. Send spies, and assassins to take out the governor, kill
the militia, and the citizens could riot and rebel against their king.
If you have a charming princess, you can marry an enemy general into
your family, stealing their army... or you can send diplomats to
negotiate with your enemy and harm their economy. There are many ways to
topple an enemy town. You can even form an alliance with another
nation, and use spies and assassins on them if you don't get caught. If
they declare war on you, the Pope may excommunicate them for violating
the alliance, or even launch a Holy Crusade against them! How you
conquer your enemies is completely up to you.
Interface Screens:
5/10
Switching screens to manage your cities is pretty clunky and it
seems that you have to click to 3 different screens to gather
information before you make a decision. This gets a little irritating
after a while because it feels like everything is 3 clicks away, when it
should be 1 click. For example, after a battle, if you decide to
execute your Prisoners of war, a box appears on the far left of the
screen. Left Click on the Box and it says, "Your Commander has +1 Dread"
- right click to close the box. Now find your commander on the battle
map, left click on him, then double right click to bring up his stats to
see how much Dread he actually has and what it means. It would have
been great if that first window showed my all of my commander's stats
and his location.
Issues: Diplomacy. Diplomatic Negotiations are
pretty broken in the game. It feels like a die roll, instead of
strategy. You may ask another nation for Map Information and offer 200
gold. They may refuse and GIVE YOU 1000 GOLD. The game would have been
much better if the Map Information cost X, and you had to negotiate to
get X down.
Overall: 8/10
Learning the World Map and Battle
Strategies is great fun and feels rewarding, but the limited AI and
clunky interface keep the game from being GREAT!
The game is
rated T for Alcohol References, Blood, Mild Language, a bit of innuendo,
and Violence in the form of large scale battles.
Buy it cheap if
you want months of light strategy and epic battles.
If you're
looking for a Starcraft Killer, you should probably keep looking.
The Grandest of Strategy games
How many games do you know
where your political machinations include plotting the assassination of
the Pope so as to be able to elect a pontiff more favorable to your own
faction? It's not just because the in-battle graphics are the best
you've ever seen in any strategy game, it's not that you can influence
the life course of your individual family members by the kinds of
actions they take in of off the battlefield, it's not that you can
become an economic powerhouse by deploying an army of merchants to
conquer markets and put competing merchants out of business for good,
what makes this game truly grand is the diplomatic warfare in which all
of this is shrouded.
Military might is important, but not
necessarily primordial. Have a giant, all-engulfing, land-hungry
neighbor that threatens your national security? No problem. Assassinate
the current Pope, elect one that's favorable to you and not so much to
him, find a way to get him to be excommunicated and ask the pope to call
a crusade against him! Now you'll have five or more other factions
attack him in the name of Holy religion and he'll be weaker as a result.
You may even manage to expand your borders in the bargain.
Now,
you may just be one of these people for whom this will be insufficient.
Maybe the 21 different playable factions don't quite do it for you.
Maybe the different roles your agents (priests, assassins, spies,
diplomats/princesses, and merchants) can play don't impress you. Maybe
you don't care much for the guilds that offer to quarter themselves into
your cities. This is where the Kingdom campaigns come in. All of them
are beautiful mods of the original game with a variety of interesting
twists. But even without the expansion, this game is worth buying. This
said, allow me one warning: stay away from this game if you are
addiction-prone.
Most fun computer game I
have owned in a long time...
I have recently bought this
game off Amazon and have been very, very impressed with it. The only
word of caution I have would be to invest in a higher quality graphics
card if you are looking into this game, plus the memory requirments are
steep.
I have bought all the previous Total War games, and
got sick of Rome:Total War after 4 years of playing, much to my wife's
disgust and nagging, and decided to buy Medieval Total War 2:Kingdoms,
to bug her that much more. :)
My overall expereince is very
impressed. Graphics are great, battles are much harder then Rome: Total
War, Politics and Religion actually play a large part. Different from
Rome and the other previous Total War games, you have to please not only
your own nobles, but have to make the Pope happy, usually by not
attacking other Catholic Christian factions. If not, you incure the
wrath of the Church and can become excommunicated, then all havoc breaks
loose on you for different Catholic factions as well.
To me it
seems that Medieval Total War 2 is a combination of all the previous
Total War games into one. The cool assination video from Shogun Total
War, the ransoming of captured prisoners and depth of troop types from
Medieval Total War 1, and the stunning graphics and map (not like a Risk
board but actually holding mountain passes or hiding in forests to
ambush unsuspecting armies)of Rome Total War.
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