MTW2 Guide, tongue in cheek

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[Shahed]

Excellent !

[Tambarskjelve]

Slightly spot on..
The game is what you make of it, though..
*wasting hours reading unit descriptions*

[Shahed]

LMAO ! Sombody has to do NAVIES !

Actually, apart from the fact that this is good humor, it's a very good attempt to highlight the shortcomings of the game.
I love the game as you all know, of course.

[Whacker]

- Diplomacy: the diplomacy screen may pop up from time to time. Simply press the escape key and continue about your business. Diplomacy is an attempt to lull you into complacency. Don't be naive - they're all going to end up attacking you anyway, and no matter how hard you try to be a good neighbor your rep will somehow managed to reach the 9th ring of hell soon enough.

- Characters: Don't waste time reading character attributes that accumulate over time. Not only are these intended to confuse you, they're secretly mutating on a continuous basis. You will receive a certain amount of trait notifications, to trick you into thinking you're being kept in the loop. If you pay attention to these, inevitably you'll waste valuable brainpower assigning a general to a task he'll be no good at by the time he gets there. That's one point for the AI and zero for you. Besides, they're all just going to end up with the worst traits/ancils possible no matter what you do. Utterly Profane, here we come!

- Troop requirements: You might suppose that if a unit requires extensive infrastructure, it must be top notch. Hah - this is another clever joke by the developers. Some of the worst units in the game can be produced only in very expensive buildings, while some of the best are available right away in the lowliest hovel in your kingdom. Yes yes, that would be you Milan! 8 turns for that lovely Royal Barracks, and what do you get!? Pike Militia, clocking in at a heavy 150 florins per whack, one of the most utterly useless units in the entire game! Bet you wish you had some peasants now, eh?

- Walls: Don't waste money upgrading wall defenses with ballistas or cannons. Wall defenses are obsolete before the campaign begins, no matter how much you spend. Upgraded walls just means more towers that you can't capture no matter what and keep firing at you, even if you manage to cram at least 3 whole units inside of one.

- Factions: Ignore the faction overviews on the campaign selection screen. One might imagine that those descriptions were written using information from a parallel universe.

- Modding: Don't even bother. Half of the time the files that you want to edit aren't documented at all, the other half you can't mod what you want to mod. Got questions? Expect less than 5% of any question threads you post in any given forum to go unanswered, and the 5% response rate you DO get will be 3 completely different and conflicting anecdotal accounts on how to perform whatever if was you wanted to do. The reality of it is even CA doesn't know the answer to your question, because they've coded the game in Esperanto for 'security purposes!' Just accept the game as it is and play it without complaining, you Neanderthal!

Some corrections and additions.

[Doug-Thompson]

I'm honestly bewildered by all the complaints about the diplomacy system.

I'm 80 or so turns into my Hungarian campaign. I've had alliances with both the Papal States and Poland that have lasted more than 70 turns. My current relations with the Pope are outstanding and are very good with Poland. I've never been attacked by either of them and have only just now been warned by the Pope about being my naughty by attacking the Milanese, fellow Christians who are also on Crusade against the excommunicated French.

I've asked for three crusades and was readily granted two of them.

My reputation is untrustworthy because I betrayed an alliance with the Milanese very early in the game when they were excommunicated, and I still have no complaints.

I've also gifted the Pope and the Poles 100 florins apiece on every turn I could afford it. Small price to pay for the right to clobber everybody else.

[Whacker]

HUMOR Doug, HUMOR!

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

See my thread here for serious Diplomacy complaints: https://forums.totalwar.org/vb/showthread.php?t=86149

[Kobal2fr]

A few more just for fun :)

- Don't bother building navies. You might *think* you utterly control the Meditteranian, but you're only one pirate stack away from total obliteration. See : Autocalc.

- The morale and fatigue system are actually clever misnommers. In that they don't affect either morale OR fatigue. They're just here for you to waste time checking them while the Dread and Chivalry system go to town and carouse.

- The Dread and Chivalry system is drunk from all that carousing. That lone figure atop the crest who'll charge with the sunset in his back, and slam right in the front of a million spearmen, sending them on their way and saving the day for his men ? Oh he's Cruel & Cunning. You have no idea.

- You might have heard the press release and game reviews talk about the exciting possibility of discovering the New World. That is actually a mistranslation from the Esperanto.
What you'll end up discovering is the result of a drunk coder's bored free time : misshapen blobs of land with no relation whatsoever to any known fictionnal or real land mass, occupied by ever regenerating full stacks of naked units who'll somehow trounce your best units (see : Units).
Oh and it has only one battlemap, aptly named MoreBloodyTrees

- Religion doesn't make any sense. In that, Medieval 2 is probably the most involved social commentary in the world. You thought converting people to your way of thinking might make them agree with you ? You nimrod ! Hellooooo Religious Unrest. Then your priests turn heretic just so the game has an excuse to spawn Inquisitors.

- said Inquisitors will then proceed to kill every single male in your whole Empire, in keeping with Biblical teachings. Only apparently Jesus was too much of a stoner wuss, so they picked King Herod as their guide.

[John_Longarrow]

Pike Unit - A very large hedgehog that slaughters horses on sight, but only if its not moving. Against anything else it needs a solid defender, such as archers or pesants or small rabid children to keep it safe.

The Papacy - An odd old man in a large pointy hat who keeps telling you to be nice, even if you are being nice. Unless you are trying to play with diplomacy (see above), you are best off by ignoring anything he says so you can con him into giving you free experience for your troops by calling a crusade on you. If you want free experience, do not pay the pope. If you do, he is less likely to call a crusade against you. Instead you must drink large quantities of ale and then proceed to relieve yourself upon his breakfast.

Alliance - This is a request for the AI to send random ships to blockade your ports. This will be done as soon as the AI removes any military forces from your region. So long as the AI has large, powerful armies on your borders you are safe. As soon as the AI has to deal with another faction and really needs troops to fight on another front it will attack you.,