Spurious Logic

Medieval 2: Total Bore

So, I'm a big fan of the Total War series of games. I've owned them all except for the most recent Napoleon one and I've spent far too many hours playing them (for what it's worth my favourite is the first Medieval: Total War).

Yesterday morning I had some free time and I said I'd sit down with Medieval 2: Total War and play for a bit - I get the bug every now and then when I'm reading history books. It's a decent game which is much prettier but dumber than the first . The main change really was going from a region based map (i.e your army occupied the whole region as opposed to now being in a specific location on the map)

The problem with this is that I find myself thinking, "well if I have this army of 120 people can't I send a squad of like five to just watch over this one mountiain pass?" or "why can't I just demob my army in enemy territory and let them ravage the countryside, as the English did to France during the 100 year war?"

These kind of questions crop up because of an attempt to introduce increased realism. By moving from the "army controls the region" model which looked like it was an actual representation of a board game, to a "this army is exactly here.." representation, they've removed that level of abstraction which made it easier to ignore the bits of medieval warfare which are excluded. It's not really possible to model all these parts so taking a more abstract model is arguably more realistic.

But, if you are going to require me to move my army around and divide up forces to monitor a region then at least I want to be able to conduct a proper campaign between two (or more) large armies (one defending, one attacking) in a region with:

This is never going to happen.

Mainly because it would never sell. This sort of game would require massive amounts of time to play and frankly would be very, very slow. Also the development effort would be huge.

As for the game I played Saturday, I set it to very hard and started as the Milanese. After spending the first few turns building roads, basic garrison buildings and forging and alliance with the Pope, I was invaded by the Sicilians with no provocation with what must have been their full army. They besieged Genoa and I beat them off with minimal casualties (yay me!).

Straight away the next turn, another army of quite advanced troops (rebels) appeared from nowhere right next to Genoa. I was just starting the battle (which I would have won with a good few casualties ~10-20% probably) and I realised that the rest of the game would be just like this.

Supposedly friendly factions just attacking for no reason, rebels appearing on my doorstep from nowhere and every bloody time I'd have to actually fight the battles because the A.I. generals are useless. The crushing sense of inevitably winning every fight unless massively outnumbered while all the time slowly, slowly expanding the Milanese empire. Thanks to the sudden moment of insight to the sheer boredom I was about to start I went and bought the THQ complete pack and downloaded Red Faction