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Medieval: Total War | 
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| From: Activision
Category: Video Games
List Price: $19.99
Buy Used: $3.50
You Save: $16.49 (82%)
New (7) Used (18) from $3.50
Rating:  112 reviews
Sales Rank: 4910
Format: Cd-rom
Platforms: Windows 98, Windows 2000, Windows Me, Windows Xp
Genre: Strategry Games
ESRB: Teen
Media: CD-ROM
Age: 12 - 20 years
Operating System: Windows 2000
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 7.5 x 5.4 x 1
UPC: 047875322479
EAN: 0047875322479
ASIN: B000063SAU
Release Date: August 20, 2002
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Features:
| • | 400 Years of Medieval Warfare - From the preaching of the first crusade in 1095 to the fall of Constantinople in 1453. Guide your kingdom's fortunes through the early dominance of the feudal knights and longbowmen to the emergence of gunpowder and the advent of heavy siege cannons and handguns. | | • | Turn-Based - An in-depth turn based game, where players must manage the affairs of their kingdom by forging strategic alliances and marriage treaties, creating trade routes, constructing castles, deploying naval power, training warriors and more. | | • | Real Time Strategy - Spectacular battles featuring over 10,000 troops in real-time 3D terrain over hundreds of distinct battlefields from the lush farmlands of Western Europe to the arid deserts of North Africa. | | • | 12 Playable Factions - Each with distinct playing styles and unique units, including the English, German, Byzantine, French and Turkish Empires. |
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| Editorial Reviews:
Amazon.com Review
On the heels of their successful Shogun: Total War Creative Assembly moves back in time and westward on the map to shed some light on the Dark Ages. Medieval: Total War concerns the power struggles of pre-Renaissance European kings and Middle Eastern powers, as well as the conflict between the last vestiges of paganism and the growing influences of Islam, the Orthodox (Eastern) Church, and the Roman Catholic Church. These were violent and passionate times to be sure, perfect for a historical strategy game that thrives on brutality, dynasty, and war. There are three time periods to choose from, the earliest of which features more fragmented factions and primitive weaponry, the last represents a more unified period where most power struggles have been decided and gunpowder has entered the scene. With three time periods and 12 factions representing three different religions, there's a lot of replay value in the strategic game alone. Like Shogun, the game is divided into two parts: strategic and tactical. The strategic part features a map of Europe, some of Asia, and some of Africa. It's divided into territories a la Risk or Axis & Allies, and each territory represents a kingdom. Each faction begins with its own holdings and must quickly begin to out produce and conquer its neighbors. Each kingdom has its own population, loyalty rating, economy, and religious affiliations. Installing a feared or loved general as governor can enhance the kingdom, but giving an unscrupulous general the job could lead to revolt. Building structures can enhance the kingdom as well; a dock or a salt or silver mine can lead to riches while a castle protects. A bowyer or spear maker can outfit new troops. As time progresses, your king will grow old, have children, and die. If he dies without a male heir a revolution can occur. Daughters are used primarily to reward your governors and generals or offered to allies as wives. The tactical portion of the game is the 3-D battlefield, complete with deserts, rivers, rolling hills, forests, mountains, and the vast rainy plains of England. It is here that you will decide the fate of your empire. You have to use terrain effectively to win, managing your varied troops with efficiency and skill: pikemen against mounted troops, mounted troops against archers, archers against pikemen. The specialized troop types of the Turkish, Byzantine, French, and other cultures offer unique abilities and open up combat options to wily generals. Guiding the actions of thousands of meticulously researched troops and watching them execute historical military maneuvers on a giant battlefield is a joy, but if deep tactical combat is not to your liking, you can skip individual battles or have the computer control them for you. Creative Assembly added sieges to the game as well, and those can be spectacular undertakings--complete with castle walls, sorties, and machines of war. A multiplayer option is offered, but only using the tactical battle engine. There are also a few warfare only historical battles and scenarios. The two halves of the game make a rich whole. The AI is sharp, and a sense of history permeates the game. From the eerie medieval chanting that underscores playing as a Western power to the lively Islamic music that you'll hear if you play as a Middle Eastern power. The game recreates history well, but more importantly it's also fantastic to play. --Bob Andrews Pros: - Excellent gameplay; strong AI
- Two perfect game engines working together
Cons: - Deep, intellectual subject matter might be too dense for some
- Multiplayer only exists in battle mode
Product Description
Medieval: Total War takes everything that was compelling about the critically-acclaimed Shogun: Total War and adds new levels of depth, accessibility, gameplay and strategy. The game provides a chance to experience the Middle Ages in all their blood-soaked magnificence. Battles rage across deserts, mountains, plains and forests. Massive armies lay siege to mighty fortresses and pound them into dust with catapults and cannons. Players command medieval armies of knights, men-at-arms, archers a
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| Customer Reviews: Read 107 more reviews...
Great Buy, but get a mod... July 28, 2007
This game is one of my favorite of all time, which is actually saying a bit since I have played everything from Atari on up. The only thing I can fault with the game is that it needed a bit of tweaking as found in the XL or BKB mods to make it truely, yet infinately, replayable. There are few other games that I have returned to so many times for so long.
Quick note, I just picked the game back up after going on a trip to Spain. Visit a country, learn a bit about it, then play as it for a REALLY fun experience. :D Trust me on this, you really feel a part of the game then.
 Best Game ever!! May 19, 2006
4 out of 6 found this review helpful
This is a very great game. Our Computer is to slow to do the battles but even without it is very fun. This game is challenging enough to be fun, yet not to hard to make it impossible. It takes alot of strategy. You get certain generals you always use and they actual have characters. It is fun conqueroring the world as well as dealing with revolts and taxes and everything. It is the second best computer game I have ever played. And also I assume the battles must be very fun. Buy this game for hours of fun!!!!!!! Do not listen to bad reviews!
 Great Potential Squandered - 4 Stars With XL Mod August 27, 2005
6 out of 18 found this review helpful
While Medieval : Total War is commendable in it's ambition, it's complicated with a near useless manual, making very frustrated learning, and once you learn it's way too easy.
First the newbie griefs - The makers of the game kept it secret for several months that in order to avoid revolts in conquered provinces you in fact need 120 % loyalty value. Incredible? They wanted to spice it up, bad thing is it made the game unplayable as the revolts were 5000 elite knights out of nowhere, instead of 5000 peasants - another case of "spicing it up".
The pope is a pain in the butt until you simply learn to start wars as he is old so if you get excommunicated, it will be brief.
Diplomacy makes no goddamn sense at all. To get your prince laid,
by god never offer your princess as fair trade, or ally. You need
to keep asking for marriage and get allies only from factions with weak lineage. Just keep asking until you get the princess, get another from the same faction, then just forget about giving anything in return. The AI does not care what you do, as long as you don't act nice or start a war.
Never ever attack a faction without the intent to destroy it completely - prolonged grudge of any kind gets you excommunicated and hated by everyone in the world.
Once you get the hang of it the real problems start getting to you:
AI handles it's economy so lousy, it builds a few weak units and excessive amount of siege machines, then builds nothing at all, ever again. With crusades and wars taking their toll, by 50 years from start you hardly find a proper army to fight. XL Mod repairs this to a point, better and more units, but not enough for long challenge.
Just wayyy too much diplomacy - in order to know whats going on around you, produce at least 50 diplomats, and keep producing since they get assassinated, or just use a cheat code, much better. Getting princes laid is half the game, and gets exhausting, frustrating, then impossible after you beat a few factions.
Naval combat is just sheer horror - you need to chase & destroy every single small ship on your waters in order to secure your entire empire (!) or have revolts all over in provinces beyond sea. But worse is that AI can't trade at sea at all - it only attempts to stop yours. This is to a point fixed in XL Mod by simply decreasing trade profit and increasing agriculture profit.
All generals are rife with character traits which are just too powerful. 3 good traits will be undone by one bad one, and there are bugs in them which make some of them inherited twice and can ruin your entire future lineage. You have to constantly check which of your governers have been corrupted and replace them. You have to shuffle inactive units around just to avoid the laziness trait! Programmers apparently feel we paid $50 to pointlessly move our armies around so they (and us) won't get lazy.
Worst of all, the micromanaging and diplomacy (desperately seeking marriages allll the time with 50 diplomats moving every turn) makes it more work than fun very quickly. Also once you have more provinces than others, you just steamroll anyone - build and rush applies 300%. So once you have 20% or 30% of Europe, just quit... it gets to point where one round on strategy map = 2 hours ... one good battle = 20 hours of shuffling around.
Overall with XL Mod most problems are partly relieved to make it fun for the first 20-30 provinces. Without it, the saving grace of the game making it worth 3 stars is that the battle screen works, for good custom battles and online action. But the campaign has too many problems.
Fun, for a while... July 22, 2005
1 out of 18 found this review helpful
when i bought this game i thought i was getting a fun "total war" game. The game actually is turn based?!?! but when u engage in combat it goes into rts. The graphics suck and the game is so unrealistic and way to easy. i took down over 1000 units with 60 of my own. If u want a good game go pick up Empire Earth 2 a worthy sequel to number 1.
Great game, except....... December 11, 2004
9 out of 15 found this review helpful
Total War: Medieval is very enjoyable, but it has an unendurable glitch -- the program occasionally aborts and returns to the operating system, without saving the game. This happens usually during battles.
My computer exceeds all system requirements, and this is simply unacceptable. It ruins an otherwise fine game.
After the 4th or 5th "abort", I broke the CD to spare myself further frustration. No more Activision for me. It is unbelievable (in 2004) that a company can market a product with this kind of glitch.
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