Civilization vs Age of empires and you get medieval 2.

User Rating: 8 | Medieval II: Total War PC
The game has alot to be said for it, its large, with many factions. There are alot of unit types, and the combat system based on a good idea, not to mention the actual real history involved with this game over its peers, and many scenarios and maps to play across with the expansion from many perspectives if you wish.

Attacking and defending cities is an interesting experience if not somewhat lengthy/repetitive for whats actually achieved. It basically feels like a civilization map with an age of empires battles system for the armies.

For the first half of the game i thought this was the best game made in the last decade until i hit that half way point. Once armies hit a certain size in the campaign, they just go stupid. The game has an incredible lack of coding for unit ai and pathing (for both friend and foe). Your forced to control each unit you own individually or they wont respond at all in many circumstances, and when you have a large army this gets more and more time consuming as well as frustrating. Sometimes even individual attention is not enough as you see your units start running back and forth for no reason thats easy to detect (or simply sit and do nothing at all, or ive started even seeing them run away from the point you click).

Large battles can turn bad as well and imo this is where the game loses its shine, as units you send into combat have a tendancy to just sit and do nothing until you spam order commands over and over several dozen times to attack targets. And for you normal rts kids, dont even try dancing your units. Units barely respond within a minute much less fast enough to react to an enemy, so its all or nothing in virtually every battle with little input required once your units are in position. Calvalry can be the exception, as you will need to run away and recharge all the time to do any damage, but narrow pathing makes this difficult when things start to get crowded, and i swear they do stuff just to aggravate you. The challenge to the game really does become battling ai pathing rather then your field command skill.

The game is a good game, and i hear the multiplayer is still pretty kickin, but the campaign is a buncha bs after the enemies get leveled up. Your ai just cant do anything right, and they get armies twice the size of yours when they only control a single city for example. Then lets say you are winning the pope will just show up and say 'stop attacking this faction or you get excommunicated.' The whole world just seems to turn against you part way through the game in a unified screw over (altho i guess id probly try and dogpile the big guy too hehe).

The computer seems to have infinite resources at its disposal, and has every building already built that he can own, and as mentioned above, the farther you get into the game, the less control you have over your own armies to deal with these more and more exotic weapons/units/buildings the enemy has all over the place. The brains of the ai isnt all too intelligent either .

Good game tho. Better then most games being released right now. Being able to assassinate the pope if you dont like what he's preaching was a nice touch as well as giving the religious side their own bureaucracy and nationality as well as some other nice tidbits that fleshes out the feel of the world. It was very interesting playing the cloak and dagger part of this game. My favorite tricks were to get a clergymen of my own into the Vatican and murder off my rivals house members and other tricks to disrupt my opponent during an invasion.

EDIT: gameplay with large armies can be improved significantly by turning on the ui hud tools. There they have included a time toggling bar you can use to stop the clock and babysit your huge armies. Makes those huge unbearable battles less tedious. Still wish someone would try actually working on the ai for their games. In many cases the ai insists on suiciding troops despite repeated click spamming to do the just the opposite.