Any Total War players here?

Storming large castles is a great undertaking. I'm not too surprised that the AI cant really handle it. But maybe I'm too forgiving, the AI should be able to handle it. At least it brings siege engines to the show !

Here's me and my big mouth. I just lost Genoa to the Pope; he showed up with a bunch of siege towers, ladders, and rams, knocked down my gate *and* stormed my walls, and proceeded to beat the living crap out of my spearmen and archers. I did manage to put an arrow through the eye of his general, though, which was some consolation. Yup, he had me outgunned and (somewhat) outnumbered, but I thought I had a good chance of holding it anyway.

Those Papal Guards ain't kidding around. Still, better the Pope than Milan. What with that and the Crusades, I'm getting a bit testy with the Hat. I think I'll burn down Rome and call it even...

Hey guys, I just got MTWII and something doesn't add up - the number of playable factions, in fact. I'm only given the option of 5 - England, France, Germany, (HRE), Spain, and Venice.
I know I've read in the game manual about playing other factions, and plenty of players on the forum have eluded to such. What am I missing?

A whole bunch of them "opens up" once you've finished the game once. I'm not quite sure why they picked that list to choose from, other than that they're all Catholic and get to experience the nifty Pope-related stuff. Perhaps they feel they're the most polished ones.

If you want to skip it, set first_time_play = 0 in medieval2.preference.cfg.

Great! Thanks PJ! I was planning on playing the HRE anyway (my favorite since MTW), but I just thought something was amiss with my game. I'll make the adjustment to the cfg file just to see all my options.

Here's what to do to unlock the other playable factions:
find the descr_strat.txt file (SEGA\Med II TW\data\world\maps\campaign\imperial_campaign);
open it with wordpad and move all the factions under the unlockable heading to the playable section above it (but not the nonplayable factions).
save and exit. (Note: you'll have to remove the read-only attribute in properties before making any change to the file.)

Okay, so I unlocked all of the playable factions from the get-go and decided to go with the Poles. I like their starting position for one thing, I think it would be a little more challenging for an experienced TW player like myself. I also am a big calvary fan, and apparently they gots the goods.

I am wondering if I should up the difficulty though? I'm currently on medium and rarely have a close battle. Does the increased difficulty really change AI tactics? Or does it just make enemy armies larger? I don't want to face larger foes, I want to face smarter ones.

P.S. Any chance you can change faction colors from one to another? I know the national colors of the units are supposed to be accurate n all, but some factions just don't look that great compared to others. The Poland red and white seems rather plain compared to the vibrant colors of the HRE, England, etc... Plus it makes me think I'm on a permanent Crusade...

I haven't played M2TW at anything other than max difficulty, but in RTW it certainly does affect AI -- at the harder levels it's a lot more aggressive and "active," even if it still makes some pretty boneheaded decisions at times. -- I don't know how to mod M2TW, but it's certainly possible, just not through the game UI.

Patch is out tomorrow.

Yes, that's what I was thinking about regarding the colors - a mod for the game. I thought maybe someone knew of one. Thanks for answering my question about the AI, I think I'll bump it up a notch.

Walp, I finished as the Moors; took a lot longer than with the French, until the early 15th century as a matter of fact. It was a much more interesting campaign too, once the Christians got their act together and fought back at me. Got a bit tedious towards the end, and the Timurids could have caused a problem if the strategic AI hadn't been so completely boneheaded.

I patched the game, and am thinking of starting another campaign as a faction that'll have to face the Mongols and the Timurids head-on. That would be either the Russians, Poles, Hungarians, Byzantines, or Turks. I gave the Russians a quick whirl but got turned off by the carelessness of the implementation -- the unit icons look frankly bad, there are typos galore (e.g. Ysevolod instead of Vsevolod), and, being a Finn, I was somewhat amused/embarrassed to see Helsinki on the map, considering that it was only founded in 1550 and was known only as Helsingfors for another 300 years or so.

I guess I've been a bit spoiled by Rome: Total Realism. It hurt my suspension of disbelief to be able to recruit camel gunners in Toulouse, and Tuareg spearmen in Constantinople, never mind that firearm-equipped cavalry is available long before firearm-equipped infantry, and such. Here's to hoping there'll be a M2TR mod as well, one of these years. The game deserves it.

Yes, I'm sure there will be PJ. I also got the impression that some of the factions were quality slighted. Some of the textures just don't look equal to that of other factions. Playing a battle with the Poles versus the Rebels I was having a seriously hard time differentiating friend from foe - the Flags and colors are almost identical. There was another slight I was thinking of earlier but can't remember what it was at the moment. Anyway, I tried using the unpacker CA provided and it wrecked my game. I had to reinstall, and in the process once again changed my fickle mind and decided to go with the HRE long campaign.

You seriously were able to recruit camel gunners in France? That sounds out of character for the CA series. I mean, I know they don't get everything spot on, but that's rediculous!

Hell, I'm sure I could've recruited camel gunners in Denmark, had I bothered to invade it.

The requirement for camel units is a caravan stop. For camel gunners, it's the invention of gunpowder + caravanserai. You can build caravan stops and caravanserais in any fortress/citadel. It gets even more amusing if the citadel happens to be on an island. How the hell does a caravan get to Cyprus, by swimming?

Another (minor) letdown was that apparently cultural affinity doesn't work for Muslim factions as well as for Christian ones; if I wanted to keep a Muslim city I had to exterminate the population first even if I played as another Muslim faction; as the French I could play pretty nice as long as I was in Europe. Then again, the Fatimids were Shi'ite and the Moors were Sunni, so I suppose you could always ascribe it to that...

But these are really niggles; the gameplay was excellent and the fighting was varied, especially when it got to the East. It was actually quite complicated to face off with the Byzantines on the one hand and the Egyptians on the other, since the two forces are so different and need different counters.

I'll probably be giving M2TW (and other computer games too) a bit of a rest -- we're getting a puppy tomorrow and he'll be needing a quite a bit of attention...

Yeah, I am really enjoying the game as well. I always have been a big fan of CA. I mean, as far as historical accuracy goes, who else comes any closer? I think that the atmosphere and backdrops of the battle scenes are fantastic. I just took over Prague last night in a sunset battle in the middle of winter with snow blowing fiercely. The towns really do look excellent, with all of the chimney stacks billowing smoke - it all adds up to a very cinematic quality.

Have fun with the new dog. Some friends of ours just got a miniature Dachsund puppy and named him "Rowdy." Boy does the name fit.