Are people looking forward to this game, or are you as wary as I am? I love the Total War series, but the Creative Assembly is one of the worst game companies ever. After all the crap I put up with waiting for Rome: TW to finally work right, I vowed not to buy Medieval 2 until it had been out for awhile and all the kinks worked out. When the Gold version came out, I assumed it would be a “final” version, but lo and behold there were still major bugs that were not addressed for several months, and other bugs that were not addressed at all but left up to the modding community to fix.
But that seems to be the Creative Assembly’s MO. Hype the hell out of a game, promise a lot of features, then only deliver half of what you promised and drag your feet fixing the issues as your developers move on to another project. Once again, I’ve vowed not to buy Empire until I can be sure it actually works as promised.
It won’t be different. The game will include a jillion bugs. Mods will fix about 0.9 jillion of them, leaving the remaining 100000 zillion as game-breaking, rage-inducing hardcoded mistakes.
But it’ll probably kick ass just like all the others, too. I’m eagerly awaiting pike-and-shot battles.
Sure the bugs are going to be annoying, but … NAVAL battles! Ships of the line pounding each other at point blank range. That alone has me sold.
Despite all the flaws, I found the whole series to be solid, and with a little fan tweaking nothing short of amazing. I sure have gotten hundreds of hours of enjoyment out of it.
Hmm, I thought Rome was one of the best games of the past ten years, and Medieval II was more of the same with better graphics. One or two bugs, but then, what doesn’t?
Having a hard time getting too exited about Empire though; for one it’s a long ways away, and secondly I doubt my rig would be able to run it without a major upgrade.
I think most of the bugs people complain about are enemy AI issues, both on the main map (strategic bugs, diplomacy bugs, etc) and the battlefield maps (again with strategic problems/Dumb AI, unresponsive/stuck units, etc).
I don’t recall any crash issues, at least not with Medieval II, it’s been a while since I played Rome.
Personally, I love the series. From the original Medieval Total War, to Rome to Medieval II, even with the AI issues, the games were great, addictive (just ONE MORE TURN!), a lot of fun and engaging/challenging. So I’m definitely looking forward to Empire.
BTW: Does anyone have recommendations for mods for Medieval II?
For the record, it’s almost exactly like Medeival: TW. There are fewer units, but because of this (and better balancing from it), the game does feel much more purist. It’s a real strategy matchup, and there’s less “grossly huge army crunching”. Religion actually plays a greater part of the game, too: The decision to go Christian or Buddhist changes things.
I just started playing Rome: Total War about 2 weeks ago. As a big fan of Age of Empires, I was very impressed. I don’t play many games and I’m not sure if my system could handle it, but I’m looking forward to buying both Medieval II and Empire when I get the chance.
The AI had plenty of issues in RTW and M2TW, especially during sieges. There was also a bug with shadows in M2TW that took months for the Creative Assembly to fix (and this was after the Gold version was released).
As for M2TW mods, I like Stainless Steel, though it’s a big game and the AI turns take longer to process. For something leaner try Custom Campaign mod 2, which lets you play games in smaller map areas (Iberia, southern Europe, etc).
The bug with Timurid Elephants also ended a couple of my campaigns early…
Trying to install the Custom Campaign mods was a world of pain for me; trying to run them, SecuROM popped up and asked me to put in the Medieval gold CD. I have Medieval II and Kingdoms seperate, so couldn’t play it. Gave up, played vanilla for a bit until I decided I fancied a bit of Kingdoms, whereupon I get the same message again. Can’t remember how I fixed it (I think some patching and renaming .exes was involved), but I do remember it being a massive ballache.
I’m looking forward to it: I’ve always wanted a good musket-era game. Only two things I’m worried about:
– I am not looking forward to naval combat. Naval combat is too “flat” for me, as it were, since the one with the numerical advantage nearly always wins and is able to keep that advantage as long as they keep building ships (in the real world, that is.) I’m glad there wasn’t the ability to do naval combat in M2:TW.
– That said, I did not like the inability to start off at different time frames in M2:TW, and I fear Empires will be the same way if it is by the same development team. I prefer the Napoleonic era to the pike and shot era (and if it doesn’t include the Napoleonic era, or at least Revolutionary War era, I won’t want to play it.)
I’m also looking forward to it. My last game of M2:TW I played the Turks. First thing I did was load all my troops onto a boat, sailed through the Mediterranean, and landed in Dublin.* After eliminating the Scots and English, I sat on the British Isles teching up until I had Janissary musketeers, and then I blitzed Europe. Twas great fun, but the musketeers had a few issues. Most critically, vulnerability to cavalry charges. Naturally I kept a bunch of Janissary heavy infantry around to deal with horsies, but the Turks really lack appropriate troops to absorb a real charge. And even if you have pikemen, they’re obscenely unwieldy in the game. I have found it absolutely impossible to use them in such a way as to actually protect gunpowder troops from cavalry. Actually, I find pikes in M2:TW to be completely useless in every case except defending a gate. They’re even more hopeless than phalanx formations in Rome.
Errr…you mean in the real world? Glance through the list of major naval battles of the French Revolutionary wars and Napoleonic wars on wikipedia and you’ll see that it’s hardly true that the fleet with the most ships necessarily wins.
They initially did win victories on tactics in which the French could have done differently, but once they won them, they had control of the seas, which means the French couldn’t train effectively. While it’s true that that didn’t stop the French from building as my post stated, the English force multiplier never went down.
I actually came into the series with Medieval: Total and never got around to playing the original shogun.