First off, I must say that Medieval 2: Total War surpasses its predecessor Rome: Total War. Rome was pretty much known as a cakewalk. I’d say Medieval 2 is one of the more difficult games in the series (i.e., more difficult than Medieval, but still way, way less than Shogun.) Actually, it was so hard that it took me a bit off guard when I first played it. I really wanted to write about my first playthrough in the game’s campaign, but I lost.

I decided that the first faction that I would play would be the Holy Roman Empire. The Holy Roman Empire has the unfortunate condition of being entirely surrounded by potential enemies on all sides. The Danes, Poles, French, Hungarians, Milians, and Venetians are all early potential foes for the empire. Unfortunately in my first game, all of those previously listed faction, sans the Hungarians, hated me and the Pope oft previously belonged to one of those Factions, usually those darn Danes.

One of the many victorious battles I would have against the Scots.

Pretty much what happened is that even though I had the strongest military in the campaign for most of the game until the Mongols came in, all of my enemies were forcing my to separate my armies, which made it hard to take land from them. That, in combination with me trying to fight off the Egyptians to keep Jerusalem and being excommunicated with the Pope because of my ‘aggression against the Venetians’ caused my forces to be very withered down. The last strike was when the Mongols came and started taking my Egyptian lands and when the crusades starting coming.

I decided to start again with the English since, judging from the Total War Center forums, they seemed to be a pretty easy faction to start out with. The English have an excellent starting position, an island. The only faction that can easily attack them is Scotland, who are pretty weak at the beginning.

It’s really only a matter of time before the Scots become displeased and declare war on them. My war started around turn 15 (I think somewhere in the 1110’s. It’s a pet-peeve of mine that you can’t tell what year it is by looking at the main campaign screen.) The bad thing about the Scots is that almost all of their power is concentrated in one spot, while my power was all spread (a similar problem from when I was play as HRE.)

The result of France’s treachery: the lost of Paris, their most prized city.

After two wars, the first ending in a ceasefire because the Pope deemed it necessary to butt into our affairs, I totally annihilated the Scots and controlled both Ireland and the Britain. At that time, I had no other enemies, so I decided to try to conquer some of the rebel provinces on France’s coast. I thought that this move might have brought me into direct conflict with France, so I decided to marry me faction heir to their princess, which would later turn out to be a worthless gesture, but I won’t get into that in this post.

The situation with France reminded me of one of my most serious complaints about the game: diplomacy. The diplomacy in this game still feels a bit broken. Alliances seem to mean almost nothing in the game. I remember reading this post on a forum talking about how the AI determines whether to support an ally or not. I believe that as it was now, support as an ally is pretty hard to get.

The battle AI could use some work as well. There have been many sieges I’ve won just by lining my walls with archers and tempting the enemy archers to approach my walls by using a fast cavalry unit. Other than that, the game is pretty enjoyable. I hope future patches can fix the AI a bit, in both battle and diplomacy.