Medieval 2 : Total War Game Guide

In a nutshell, that summarizes what is both awesome and somewhat daunting about the latest game in the popular Total War strategy series. Medieval 2 offers a deep strategic layer that lets you manage the military, economy, and religion of a medieval kingdom.

Since it's a Total War game, Medieval 2 sports two layers. From here, you have command of all your settlements, armies, navies, and agents. Medieval 2 introduces a few new twists to the established formula of the original game. Basically, towns and cities generate a lot more cash, but castles generate a wider variety of military units and are much harder to capture. The economic game has been bulked up a bit with the addition of merchants and resources. Basically, there are resources such as wheat and wine that are located on the map, and by enlisting a merchant and placing one on a resource, you can tap that resource for gold. However, one merchant can try and "buy out" another merchant sitting on a resource, so you'll be managing merchants while you're also busy maneuvering all the other pieces in the game.

As you'd expect, it's combined arms that wins the battles, so you can create armies consisting of spearmen, men-at-arms, mounted knights, bowmen, siege weapons, and much more. And after a battle, you'll be sending these units back to a castle or a town to replace losses, so there's a lot of army management throughout the game.