Two Weeks of MTW - my impressions so far.

[Morindin]

Well am I obsessed with this game or what? After purchasing it, I have had two weeks of non-stop death, destruction, and conquering.
I sent so many emails to my friend about how great this game was he went and purchased it, and now he's obsessed too :)
Im also purposely avoiding RTW until Im sick to death of MTW for obvious reasons.

You could say im in the "honeymoon period" with this game, and since everyone is always moaning about this and that I thought I'd make a post of some of the things I really love about this game so far:

1. Scale. This is a game on Epic scale. You won't finish it after 7 hours like the console generation of games (12 levels 30 minutes per level standard), and once you've beaten it as say the English, you can play as the Turks for a completely different gaming experiance. E.G. the terrain you fight on is different, your opponents are different, your units are different.

2. The Tactical AI. Yes this is a matter of personal perspective, but to be honest I am quite satisfied with the tactical AI. Yes - it is easy to beat (when you are defending), but playing on Hard I have routinely see it defend two bridges competently, outflank, use the terrain effectively, and make sound decisions. I have however, also seen some funny moments.
Where the AI becomes "easy to beat" is the strategic level. It doesnt play so great there. However in my current game as the English I am currently fighting the Egyptians and they have very competent (I have yet to see an army of peasants or other rabble) troops, and have handed me a couple defeats when I thought I couldnt be beaten (by the AI) :)
I also must mention the pathfinding is pretty good, i.e. when the AI is sieging castles and launching assaults. I have seen much much worse pathfinding in many games.

3. Two games in one. When I originally picked this game up I didn't know much about it, and I thought it would be mainly battlefield orientated. I was very pleasantly surprized to find the strategic level quite in depth. Obviously more diplomatic options would be great, and I wouldnt mind a more in depth economic management system akin to Lords of the Realm. Things like having populations that you raise troops from and can die in disasters would add another level to MTW. I understand populations and added diplomacy will be included in RTW which will be great.

4. Performance. This game doesn't look too bad in 1280x1024 in battles (unless you zoom right up, then it looks a bit like doom2) and runs very well indeed. To put it to the test I fired up a custom 4v4 on huge armies, and while sluggish on my system (which runs Doom3 fine) it was still playable. :) That's a lot of calculations and rendering to be done, it certianly looked impressive too.

5. Atmosphere. The battles have atmosphere (again dont zoom in!) The music that kicks in when you march your troops has a sort of morbid feel to it and I sometimes feel a bit sorry for my men. I also get a bit of a feeling of dread and awe when I see a massive AI army marching towards my pitiful defenders (I play with Large sized armies, it makes the game far more epic for me). After you have won a hard victory and the battlefield is littered in bodies it really feels good.
After a battle like that I like to scan the battlefield and take in what my virtual men have accomplished and lived through!

And last but not least...

6. Tactical Realism. Sure it's only a computer game, but I have never played a game before that uses such systems and fatigue and morale as well as MTW. Also the fact you actually command fairly large sized armies is really cool. Unlike Warcraft like games where you might have 60 individual troops if you're lucky, the best was Rise of Nations where you could get a few hundred units. This is probably one of the only games I have ever played where you can begin to apply the Art of War on a basic level and gain some success.

I have yet to venture in the world of team MP, I might try tonight. I have played plenty of lan battles against my GF however (usually siege battles she loves them) and playing a human opponent is very rewarding.

All in all I must say that MTW is probably one of the more enjoyable games I have played in a very long time (hence my posting here about it!), and while not perfect, what is? It is a definate 8/10, and im sure Rome Total War has the potential to be a 9 or even 10, but just as easily a 6 or a 7.

Fingers crossed.

[Papewaio]

Welcome to the Org Morindin!

[Morindin]

Welcome to the Org Morindin!

Thanks Papewaio - it's a slow day at the office today.

[Papewaio]

Just realised you are a Kiwi... which part of NZ?

Type of Job?

I used to live in Northland...

[Colovion]

Welcome!

That was one of the best First Posts I've ever seen. Anywhere.

Yeah when I started playing MTW I was hooked after realizing how Epic the game is and how many options you have to replayability. I was actually tired of video games for almost a year until I started playing MTW. Then I remembered that Rome was coming out and saw the amazing game engine on Time Commanders - I was hooked! Ahhh sweet sweet Total War.

[Tamur]

I have played plenty of lan battles against my GF however (usually siege battles she loves them) and playing a human opponent is very rewarding.

Hi and welcome! Nice summary of the good points, there is a lot to love about the game. Also, it's absolutely Wonderful that you've got someone to play LAN battles with. I tried getting my wife hooked on it but, alas, not yet.

I'm very much looking forward to having all the negotiations options that RTW will add, but you're probably right to play MTW till you've got your fill! Getting good on the battlefield is a major (fun) challenge.

Anyway, welcome welcome.

[Morindin]

Papewaio Auckland CBD, I work in the Film Industry - and no, not for Peter Jackson unfortunately ;)
Are you still in NZ or have you moved?

Colovion thanks, it's actually was my 5th or so post, but sssh.
I am just really impressed with this game, and because people just love to highlight the bugs and annoyances with it, I decided to highlight the good things for once.
RTW has potential certianly - I just hope the developers follow the age old rule 'If it aint broke why fix it?'. So far from reading to RTW forum here it seems a bit touch and go.
No problem for me though, im loving MTW so far and not even worried about RTW :)

[Papewaio]

My cousin was an artist for Lord of the Rings ... but quit over artistic differences :D

I moved to Aus at 15 and am now teaching ESL in Taiwan (not that I bother with my spelling online) ... so a long way from the Bay of Islands...

[Morindin]

Hi and welcome! Nice summary of the good points, there is a lot to love about the game. Also, it's absolutely Wonderful that you've got someone to play LAN battles with. I tried getting my wife hooked on it but, alas, not yet.

I'm very much looking forward to having all the negotiations options that RTW will add, but you're probably right to play MTW till you've got your fill! Getting good on the battlefield is a major (fun) challenge.

Anyway, welcome welcome.

The GF loves it - she even kicks me off my single player game so we can play together.
She is fairly competent and does spring some tactical surprizes on me (I was attacking her castle and she had hidden two units of cavalry on the other side, and sent them charging into my unaware units after the battle was well engaged. Needless to say my exhausted flanked units routed and the battle was lost), but I generally find I have to give myself a big disadvantage which can be very challanging.
The real fun for me however is in team games encorporating tactical manouvers, traps, and so on, so I really should get online one of these days.

[octavian]

aye, you will find that MP is a very different (and most often rewarding) experience.

welcome to the ORG :)

[Tamur]

My cousin was an artist for Lord of the Rings ... but quit over artistic differences :D

Well good for him! or her! I had serious artistic differences with PJ from minute 4 of the first film.

[Adrian II]

Well am I obsessed with this game or what?

Yeah, you're a bad case of medievalitis like most of us here. Welcome, Morindin, please keep posting and tell us about your MP experiences, too, if you will.

[Magraev]

Good to see a positive attitude. Let's not forget that M:TW is probably the best game ever - period.

The only contenders I can think of are Morrowind and Neverwinter Nights, but that's another genre.

[zentuit]

And lets not forget that when (or should I say if?) MTW gets stale you grab one of the mods available and bingo a new experience. Don't want large peasant armies? Grab the mod that removes them. Don't want Scandinavia a rebel waste? Grab the mod that changes those provinces to factions.

Its really a fantastic game and one I will still be playing even with RTW in my grubby little hands because of the richness of the units and I love the time period.

tom
bash: /usr/games/fortune: command not found

[Morindin]

Yes Im looking forward to a few mods out there too, WoT and LoTR especially.

Also when I've played the game myself I will probably end up modding it (mainly the AI) to my own liking.

I finally got into the gaming lobby last night (using enter on the keypad let it accept my CDKey), but a combination of not having VI and being in a GMT+12 timezone meant I couldnt find any games after waiting for around 30 minutes. My 5:30pm is 10:30pm+ in America and 5:30am in Europe.
Ill definately have to pick up VI this weekend if I plan on playing any multiplayer any time soon :)

I am currently enjoying my single player game immensly, the only faction with hordes of peasants seems to be the Byzantines(and they truely have hordes of them). This is mainly due to the fact they have been kicked out of their home empire and have now occupied most of the steppes and parts of eastern Europe, in other words, they dont have their massive economy anymore.
The Golden Horde turned up with a massive army and the Byzantines are STILL considered to have the largest military might, however im not too concerned over thousands of peasants knocking on my door.

I find the game much more enjoyable if you limit the amount of trade you do by the sea and only put ships in "realistic" places. This keeps money tight making wars quite expensive, and you have to concentrate on getting a good governers more. I can really only afford one war at a time which is how it should be, this have given the AI chances to grow themselves before being wiped out by a Human player like me.
Also because your not bringing in massive profits from other factions across the other side of the world (at that time), and hence rely on factions close to you for trade, you have to be very careful where you expand.

[Lou Cypher]

My Medieval Total War Experiences

Hi everyone, this is my first post in this forum. I have been playing computer games since Wizardry I in my Apple II+. I usually play either role-playing games or strategic games. Last month I went to Electronics Boutique(EBX) to buy a new game for our LAN parties. I usually buy games that cost $20 or less because I had a very bad experience wasting $55 in a brand new Total Annihilation: Kingdoms. I was going to buy Command & Conquer Generals for $20 when a friend of mine pointed out Medieval Total War Battle Collection for $30, he said that for $30 we could have two games. I was skeptic because I had never heard of Medieval Total War(MTW) before and it was $10 over my game buying budget, while I had played all of the Command & Conquer games and I new the game was popular. I finally decided to buy Medieval Total War Battle Collection because the total cost of Command & Conquer Generals and the expansion would have been more than $40. When we went home we started to play the game and discovered it was a turn based game!! There is no way we can play a turn based game in a LAN party because it takes 1 week to finish a game so we threw out the game and started playing the same games we had been playing before.

The day after the LAN party was over, I started to look for information on MTW because I learned a long time ago that you can’t judge a game by it’s manual. So I used my favorite tool for this kind of emergency, Copernic to find out more about the game. My fist stop was totalwar.com where I learned that MTW was used by the History Channel to simulate battles. Since the History Channel is one of my favorite channels, that statement made me very curious about this game but the brief information I found in totalwar.com just left me salivating and starving for more. I did more searches in Copernic and still I found nothing that would feed my appetite, until I did a search for Medieval: Total War Forums(all the words) and I found totalwar.org. I found a heaven full of strategies, experiences, files, mods, etc. Since then I haven’t stop playing MTW, I have played with Turks, Byzantines, Italians, English, Egyptians, Hungarians and Almohads. I have won even in expert but I always let the computer do the battles for me. The battle system is way too complicated for me. I wish they would eliminate the reinforcements which complicates the battles even more and add a formation move that would select all your troops and make all your troops move in a formation plus some classic RTS features like dragging the mouse across the map selects all the units dragged over, double clicking on a unit selects all the units of the same type. It would also be great if you could configure the auto construct buildings and auto train for each specific land and set priorities in case you run out of money. Maybe you could set global auto construct and auto train like all lands with water access or all lands with mines, etc.

I was really impressed with the support this game has, this game has been out for a long time and there is still a lot of community support. On the other hand the week after I bought MTW, I bought Empire Earth Gold Edition in Costco for $15.99 for our LAN parties. After playing for a while and searching in Copernic in vain for some information, I gave up on Empire Earth, mainly because the poor citizen control system. Citizens would just stand there and let themselves be killed, you couldn’t attack move with citizens and you couldn’t send them back to work to where they were working once they were done attacking. In a game where there are so many resources and so many workers it is completely absurd to assume that a player will be able to manually control all the workers and remember were every worker should be working. I don’t post a lot in forums but when I post, I usually make a very long post. I apologize to all that have suffered because of my ramblings but I just had to get this off my chest.

Lou Cypher

[Adrian II]

Since then I haven’t stop playing MTW, I have played with Turks, Byzantines, Italians, English, Egyptians, Hungarians and Almohads.

Yup, one more addict. Welcome, Lou Cypher.

The battle system is way too complicated for me.

No it isn't, take it from me. You dig a little deeper into your manual, the available guides and these message boards and you'll discover various ways to customize your control through the use of "hot keys", for instance to select all units of the same kind. Oh, and if you play your cards right you'll be able to fight without reinforcements yourself while those of your enemies will be mere fodder to you.

I apologize to all that have suffered because of my ramblings but I just had to get this off my chest.

Hey, I don't hear anybody complaining.

[Morindin]

My Medieval Total War Experiences

Hi everyone, this is my first post in this forum. I have been playing computer games since Wizardry I in my Apple II+. I usually play either role-playing games or strategic games. Last month I went to Electronics Boutique(EBX) to buy a new game for our LAN parties. I usually buy games that cost $20 or less because I had a very bad experience wasting $55 in a brand new Total Annihilation: Kingdoms. I was going to buy Command & Conquer Generals for $20 when a friend of mine pointed out Medieval Total War Battle Collection for $30, he said that for $30 we could have two games. I was skeptic because I had never heard of Medieval Total War(MTW) before and it was $10 over my game buying budget, while I had played all of the Command & Conquer games and I new the game was popular. I finally decided to buy Medieval Total War Battle Collection because the total cost of Command & Conquer Generals and the expansion would have been more than $40. When we went home we started to play the game and discovered it was a turn based game!! There is no way we can play a turn based game in a LAN party because it takes 1 week to finish a game so we threw out the game and started playing the same games we had been playing before.

The day after the LAN party was over, I started to look for information on MTW because I learned a long time ago that you can’t judge a game by it’s manual. So I used my favorite tool for this kind of emergency, Copernic to find out more about the game. My fist stop was totalwar.com where I learned that MTW was used by the History Channel to simulate battles. Since the History Channel is one of my favorite channels, that statement made me very curious about this game but the brief information I found in totalwar.com just left me salivating and starving for more. I did more searches in Copernic and still I found nothing that would feed my appetite, until I did a search for Medieval: Total War Forums(all the words) and I found totalwar.org. I found a heaven full of strategies, experiences, files, mods, etc. Since then I haven’t stop playing MTW, I have played with Turks, Byzantines, Italians, English, Egyptians, Hungarians and Almohads. I have won even in expert but I always let the computer do the battles for me. The battle system is way too complicated for me. I wish they would eliminate the reinforcements which complicates the battles even more and add a formation move that would select all your troops and make all your troops move in a formation plus some classic RTS features like dragging the mouse across the map selects all the units dragged over, double clicking on a unit selects all the units of the same type. It would also be great if you could configure the auto construct buildings and auto train for each specific land and set priorities in case you run out of money. Maybe you could set global auto construct and auto train like all lands with water access or all lands with mines, etc.

I was really impressed with the support this game has, this game has been out for a long time and there is still a lot of community support. On the other hand the week after I bought MTW, I bought Empire Earth Gold Edition in Costco for $15.99 for our LAN parties. After playing for a while and searching in Copernic in vain for some information, I gave up on Empire Earth, mainly because the poor citizen control system. Citizens would just stand there and let themselves be killed, you couldn’t attack move with citizens and you couldn’t send them back to work to where they were working once they were done attacking. In a game where there are so many resources and so many workers it is completely absurd to assume that a player will be able to manually control all the workers and remember were every worker should be working. I don’t post a lot in forums but when I post, I usually make a very long post. I apologize to all that have suffered because of my ramblings but I just had to get this off my chest.

Lou Cypher

Hi and welcome to the forums. I know exactly how you feel. :)