Medieval: Total War

I like playing strategy and wargames, and thus, the Total War series of games by The Creative Assembly naturally appealed to me. Medieval: Total War is the second game in the series, after Shogun: Total War.

The setting is in the middle ages of Europe, with the game world extending into the Middle East and northern Africa. You control a faction, which is basically a kingdom, such as the Byzantines, the Turks, the English, etc. Each faction also belongs to a religion, either Catholic, Orthodox Christian or Islam. The Catholics and Muslims are able to send out crusades and jihads respectively, bringing their armies far further than their immediate borders.

Besides the strategic map, in which you manage your kingdom's economy and troop production, the main appeal of Total War games is the battle map. Here, you control units of your troops in battle against the enemy's troops. Each type of unit has its own strengths and weaknesses, and the battle map allows you to exploit the strengths of your units against the weaknesses of your enemy, such that even a smaller force may be able to win against a bigger force using skillful manoeuvre and superior tactics.

Of course, if controlling units in battle does not appeal to you, you can always get the computer to automatically resolve battles for you. In such a case, the computer computes victory or defeat based on numerical strengths as well as unit strengths and weaknesses, but does not factor in the human genius in manoeuvre and tactics.

There are also many mods available, which can be found at The Guild, a fan site devoted to the Total War series. They allow you to play using the game engine in different settings, such as during the Napolean war, Hellenic times, even the ancient world. There are also mods that add factions to the original medieval world and improve on the units.

So if you are a wargame/strategy game freak like me, this is something that you will not want to miss.