Medieval: Total War

Medieval: Total War is the second in the Total War series, presenting the Middle Ages around Western and Eastern Europe and the Middle East. It combines a turn based, Risk style strategy for the campaign component, with the actual battles being fleshed out using a tactical real time engine that literally pits thousands of guys against each other. You can opt for straight up melee battles, or bypass the action for a strictly turn based game, or combine the two in a standard campaign. Either option is worth the admission price alone, and combined they make for some excellent historical strategy.

Medieval sits somewhere between the historical fluff of the "Age of" style of RTS and the deep, hard core strategy titles typical of developers like Paradox. It presents you with the machinations and politics of the time. There's the Byzantine empire; the Holy Roman Empire (what used to be the Roman Empire, before it converted to Christianity and became the Catholic Church); the Turks, the patchwork quilt that was Western Europe - a collection of small kingdoms ruled over by parochial warlords; the Slavs; the Middle East; and much of North Africa. The map is carved up into distinct territories, where you create and move your armies around in the turn based campaign.

This is Medieval Europe progressing out of the Dark Ages and onwards towards the Renaissance. Your nation's culture and learning is becoming as important as its religion and military strength, influencing your diplomatic relations and your capacity to influence other powers, not to mention your ability to "tech up" and take a leading role. While the main focus is on the military expansion and the battles, there's huge amount of detail in managing your state and your power, with hundreds of buildings units available throughout the game.

This game models a monarchy. You get a monarch (of course), many princes and princesses, and each territory you annex produces a Lord, who acts as governor and general for any forces created or moved there. Marriage between kingdoms is an essential way to shore up diplomatic and trading relations between nations, while assigning princes to valuable territories is a great way to improve their leadership qualities both on the map and in the battlefield. The leadership and character stats of your royal family and dukes are critical to your success, as they used to be in real monarchies. A good leader in a territory can work wonders, and bestow some useful perks in combat. Experience builds them up, but your strategy must also take into account the passing of years and the mortality of your royal family, lest your kingdom disintegrate when the ruler dies without any heirs.

There are other characters as well: Bishops can help bolster your state religion in a freshly annexed territory, or negotiate treaties if you drop them on a neighbouring Lord. Spies can sniff out scandal about your rivals, and use it to embarrass them and seriously degrade their character ratings. Assissins can take this to its logical conclusion, and you can simply bump off troublesome rivals.

Nevertheless, all your military units and your own stately reputation is expressed in Valour points. Powerful and more advanced military units have more "valour" than lesser ones, and require more time and effort to produce. Each unit in the turn based map is seen as a division of guys in the real time engine.

The RTS component is a highly stylised battlefield simulator. Its completely tactical, and your use of formations, troop morale and better judgement is going to make or break you. Like many tactical battle simulators, the Total War series makes a big point of modelling humans in combat. That is, your forces get tired, get worried if they feel exposed on the field, fight better downhill than up, and have a habit of freaking out and running for their lives if things suddenly go pear shaped. Which they can, quickly and unexpectedly. Unlike the usual RTS convention where units are inhuman Olympians who can run marathons at a sprint on only one health point, a lot of the men in your armies might only be conscripted peasants, or lightly trained skirmishers who are more worried about getting back home to the farm alive than military glory. Morale and stamina plays a significant part in proceedings. Running your guys ragged can seriously degrade their fighting skills, not to mention the impact of blind panic. Having a good general can sometimes make or break you, and battles sometimes aren't decided by who has the most units and how many get killed. I've had a number of battles where superior numbers turned tail and fled, either because they lost their General (very bad) or the survivors made it to a forest, rallied, and were able to turn the tables on the pursing cavalry and routed them completely.