Steven Till

So lately I haven’t achieved my writing goals of submitting short stories for publication or starting on the fourth revision of my novel. I’m still waiting on those reading my novel to finish and give me feedback, so it’s looking like I won’t be able to start editing again until the end of summer. Hopefully, I’ll have time to submit those short stories to publication, like I meant to do in May. I’m in the process of selling my house right now, so that has taken the better part of my nights and weekends over the past month. Hopefully it will sell soon, and I can get back to some sort of normal routine. Selling a house is quite the job.

Also, I’ve recently become addicted to the Medieval II Total War PC game. It’s a combination turn-based / real-time strategy game where you build your empire and try to conquer all of Europe and the Middle East. I prefer to play with England, partly because I love studying English history, and secondly because they have longbowmen, and longbowmen are fantastic archers, though they appear a bit too early in the game by about a century and a half. The English did not start employing longbowmen with widespread effect until the 13th century. English longbowmen really showed their prowess on the battelfied against the French at the Battle of Crecy in 1346, and again at Agincourt in 1415.

Each turn of the game gives you the opportunity to perform various actions:

- Military: recruit units, move units, attack with units
- Diplomatic: form alliances, offer trade rights, marry princesses to foreign factions, exchange map information, bribe other factions
- Religious: denounce heretics, convert populations to your religion, elect a new pope when the former pope dies
- Economic: construct buildings for trade/military/relgious/public welfare/and monetary purposes, recruit merchants to collect and send back resources to your capital, sieze other merchants’ assets, sack an enemy faction and take their gold, etc.

All of the above actions occur in turn-based sequence, except for attacking other units (land units). Land battles are resolved in real-time where you must command all of your forces on the battlefield, either in open pitched battles or castle sieges. Like true medieval battles, most battles in the game involve sieges of castles between small armies. It’s a misconception to think that medieval battles involved tens of thousands of troops at a time. In fact, most were small engagements fought between hundreds of troops on both sides, not thousands. In Medieval II Total War, it’s rare to have both sides amassing over a thousand troops in their armies, which I like in terms of accuracy.

Overall, I feel the game does a great job with the accuracy of the medieval period … for a video game. Castles and walled cities dominate territories, and you must conquer those fortifications before moving on. Otherwise, you could have an enemy army wreaking havoc behind you and splitting you off from the rest of your forces. While castle sieges play an all important role in the game, there are still a few things I would like to have when besieging an enemy castle. It’s nice that you do have the opportunity to starve the enemy out — you may have to wait eight or nine turns for this to happen — at which point, they’ll have to come out and meet you in pitched battle, if reinforcements don’t arrive first. What I would like to see is an extra military unit that could mine underneath the fortification and bring down the walls and towers. This was one of the most common ways to create breaches in the walls when attacking a castle, but this feature is not available in the game. Also, the gatehouses are very simple structures with a couple of towers that shoot at you while you’re forces are attempting to bring down the gates with a battering ram or scale the walls with ladders and siege towers. Once through the gates, you’re already into the city streets. It would be nice to have more complex gatehouses, where the defenders can drop scalding liquids down on the attackers’ heads, and even shoot them through murder holes and trap them between the portcullis and gates. There are no portcullis and gate combinations in the game. I think in the expanision pack, Total War Kingdoms, some of these features might be available, like dropping scalding liquid on the attackers. I have the expansion pack but haven’t played it yet.

One other thing about sieges that I do like. If you can infiltrate the city or castle with a spy, the spy can sometimes open the gates to allow the besiegers into the city without having to pound down the gates. Historically, this was another very common way of entry into a castle during a siege.

For the most part, the clothes of the characters — when you zoom in closely — seem to be fairly accurate in regards to the padded and leather armor and mail. Usually, the general or captain of your units is wearing some type of plate or heavy armor, which isn’t accurate, but it makes it easy to determine who he is during a melee.

Another important factor in the game is your relationship to the Pope — if you’re a Catholic nation. Since the English are catholic, it’s important to maintain a good relationship with the Pope. If I’m England — which I usually am — and I go off and attack Scotland or France, the Pope will threaten excomumunication unless I stop. If I continue over the next few turns to attack other Catholic factions, the Pope will excommunicate me. This has negative consequences: one, your people will start to become restless, and public order can become an issue; second, the Pope may call a Crusade against you, and several Catholic nations will flock to his call and declare war on you. Not a good situation. I’ve been excommunicated a couple of times. One time, I managed to reconcile. The second time, I had to end up going after the Papal States because the Pope wouldn’t leave me alone and kept attacking me with his personal army even though I tried numerous times to reconcile. Apparently, money doesn’t solve all problems.

If you’re in good standing with the Pope, he will give you missions throughout the game that it is wise for you to complete. He may ask you to build a chapel in a certain city, or recruit more priests to convert the population, or he may call for all Catholic nations to join a crusade and march on Jerusalem. One of your objectives as a Catholic nation is to conquer and hold Jerusalem, so you’ll have to do this at some point if you want to win, with or without the Pope’s blessing.

One last minor issue that I noticed: your characters do not age appropriately along with the timeline of the game. As the English, you start off shortly after the Norman Conquest — around 1080 — with William the Conqueror as King of England. Well, William was already about 52 by then, as he was born in 1027 or 1028. He actually didn’t die in my game until 1126. That would make him around 100, possible but not likely and certainly not historically accurate. His son, William Rufus, became king for me next in the game, and he lived well into the early 1200s. So he died around age 170.

Despite these minor issues I’ve pointed out, Medieval II Total War is one of the best real-time strategy games I’ve ever played. Like I said, it’s highly addicting, and if you have some free time on your hands — and you’ll need a lot — then I’d suggest giving it a shot.

My rating: 5 out of 5 stars

Filed under: Middle Ages History, Medieval History on June 2nd, 2009