Medieval Total War and alternatives.

is_dead · Post by **is_dead** » Mon Nov 01, 2004 3:53 pm

So I’ve been playing Medieval Total War and enjoying it. I’ll probably get a lot of use out of it still, but I’m looking forward to a couple alternatives.

First, the strategic element has nice features, but the impacts and background processes are hard to judge. What role does religion have other than loyalty? What about the heir/wedding process, I haven’t been able to claim anything. Trade routes and trade are implied but impossible to follow. It all seems a bit superficial because the game is about war. And the combat is great but the computer tends to do better than I can, so I’m tempted to use ‘automatically resolve’ a lot. The graphics are a bit dated too.

I’m considering Rise of Nations, Rome Total War, and Crusader Kings. The last one might be the best to satisfy my deeper strategy wants but has no combat and a long learning curve. RON and RTW are both s’posed to be good, so comments about them answering my issues would be appreciated. How many hours of game time are you expecting out of RTW?

SuperHiro · Post by **SuperHiro** » Mon Nov 01, 2004 4:13 pm

I'm definitely not one of the resident Total War Gurus. But I hope I can answer your questions.

1) Religion affects what kind of religious unit you have (duh). It's also a real big deal if you're a Catholic faction, since the Pope isn't going to look too kindly on you beating up other Catholics. Also I believe the Catholics can make a Crusade to attack Muslim countries. Muslim factions can make Jihad to take those said places back.

2) The Heir/Wedding thing is weird. Basically, you marry your princesses to your generals. Those generals then have a claim to the throne. So sometimes when your king dies, and he has no princes, your country divides into civil war, and you get to chose with general to side with (I think).

3) The graphics are dated but Crusader Kings is even worse.

4) I forgot how trade routes worked, but I think you needed a ship in every ocean square or something.

Massena · Post by **Massena** » Mon Nov 01, 2004 4:18 pm

Crusader Kings is massively bugged, or so the rumor goes. R:TW is just awesome, with some niggling AI bugs that don't bother me much.

Regarding M:TW, trade is easy to do and very easy to trace. You need two buildings in a province that has trade goods: a port and a merchant. Then you build chain of ships from you sea zone to other sea zones that have ports. That should dramatically increase your income. You can see the results in the economy tab, along the bottom, irrc.

I've been playing Rome since it came out, still not tired of it. The heir process is better organized (you can designate your heir, as well as adopt new ones), the trade process handles itself more than it did in M:TW. I think Rome is the better game, but it needs a patch to fix a few little details. There is a late game "feature"/bug with unrest (squalor) that annoys me. And the AI doesn't respect its generals. But it's by FAR the best game I've played all year.
Hope that helps.

Dirt · Post by **Dirt** » Mon Nov 01, 2004 5:03 pm

Is it worth going back to Medieval War or just to move onto Rome War?

Grifman · Post by **Grifman** » Mon Nov 01, 2004 5:12 pm

I love Medieval for the time period and IMO is still worth playing - after all, what other game lets you play the Byzantines. But if you aren't really interested in the period, then move on to Rome - it's got some bugs and quirks they still need to fix, but it's the game we've all wanted.

Grifman

Kratz · Post by **Kratz** » Mon Nov 01, 2004 6:16 pm

I think Medieval was the weakest of the series by far... year long terms made me insane.

I'd say skip it and go straight for RTW, which takes the good elements from Shogun and MTW, and makes them about 20x better... it's just all around the best of them by a long, long way.

is_dead · Post by **is_dead** » Tue Nov 02, 2004 6:03 pm

Thanks for the replies. I'll probably pick up RTW when the price drops to 35, which will hopefully be before Christmas. I'm still not sure about RON though, can someone comment on the differences and similarities, and whether RON has more or less strategic elements?

Kelric · Post by **Kelric** » Tue Nov 02, 2004 9:22 pm

is_dead wrote:Thanks for the replies. I'll probably pick up RTW when the price drops to 35, which will hopefully be before Christmas. I'm still not sure about RON though, can someone comment on the differences and similarities, and whether RON has more or less strategic elements?

RoN has much, much less strategic elements if you're talking about simply the Risk-style board part of the game. The guy is really an RTS with the 'board' as a nice change from a story-based campaign. It's still a real good RTS though and you can probably find it packaged with it's expansion pack relatively cheap.