My favorite country so far is England, though i havent actually beaten a campaign as anyone yet, so i am stuck with the first five countries

Go Longbowmen!!!

oh yea, i can't wait for empire to come out.
I love being england too, being surrounded by water gives good trade.

Is the new Total War about the Revolutionary war?

and more. go to gamespot.com and check it out.

I have been playing too much since it came out. I really like the Total War series starting with Shogun. I have been playing the Stainless Steel modification that you can get on Totalar Center
http://www.twcenter.net/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=314

YES I LOVE IT!!! hahaha

I played the first Medieval Total War. One of my favorite games ever.

Played Medieval Total War II - great game, defineately one of my favorates. Can't wait for Empire.

What is the stainless steel mod?

France threatened me in one of my games, so i paid him the gold he wanted, and then immediately sent a ton of assasains over to kill all of his people. Unnfair! :)

I also play the Stainless steel mod of Med Total War(a free mod that expands the map and changes the cost/attack/defense and lots of other factors to make the game longer and more difficult- i recommend it once you have won on very hard mode in the vanilla(regular) game) England is alright (longbowmen are too good)but its an easy victory really. ive won on very hard with them but playing other central European factions is a lot more difficult. i like playing Muslim factions myself, good defensive position and i don't have to worry about that annoying git of a pope. the Iberian factions are also a lot of fun as you get to go to mexico.

Has anyone played other med total war mods? i choose stainless steel because it worked, other mods i had trouble getting to work, probably coz i dl med total war from bit torrent and its a cracked free copy.

i will definitely buy the new Empire game but. Does anyone know when it comes out? i hope they go back to pre Renaissance europe myself in future games , i prefer the roman/barbarian type era fighting to knights, pikemen and musketmen.

The Total War games are really great, they missed only two things so far: a bright AI (up to now there was a bug that made allies attack you all of a sudden even when they aren't in a good position to do so) and multiplayer campaigns. Empire should fix both, a pity it won't run on my pc.

yes, that game provided me with he kick to go out and get a new pc with a decent graphics card. the AI in the stainless steel mod is better than the vanilla game but still i wish that one of the AI factions would also try and win the game so to give the greater strategic depth

@sean: Empire comes out on 3rd of March in North America, and 4th March in Europe.

Yeah, I find once you get your campaign going with some momentum its only a matter of time before you win. In Medieval especially the starting powers were almost tedious to play because it was too easy. I had a particularily good time beating the Game as Portugal, as that is pretty weak state.

I somewhat prefer the Rome Total War games to Medieval, perhaps only because I like that age in history. If you want a real Total War challenge you should play the ragged Western Roman Empire in Barbarian invasion, you are ravaged by literally everyone, including your own generals.

How can I get my hands on this stainless steel mod you speak of Sean?

yes i agree, ancient history is more exciting for me too.

here is the wiki
http://www.twcenter.net/wiki/Stainless_Steel
stroll down to "releases" and follow the links to the DL site
ver 4.0 is for people who have just med total war
ver 5 and 6 are for people with kingdoms expansion i think.

here is all the fan mods

http://www.twcenter.net/wiki/Category:MTW2_Mods

and an article about some popular mods

http://pc.boomtown.net/en_uk/articles/art.view.php?id=16553

LOTR mod ........ oh baby!

Regarding weak AI factions:

In one game i played as England, the geographical France had England, France, Milan, spain, AND Portugal in it!!

lol

It seems like whenever i am playing, Egypt is always in the turn report section with first place in a bunch of the spots (until i go after them that is)

Qwerty:i agree

Sean: What does the LOTR mod do? (well yeah changes it to Lotr, but specifics)

i just read that the guy behind stainless steel mod was helping make a LOTR mod now, i dont know anything but that really. so yeah i guess the obvious things like change europe to middle earth,change various human factions to tolkien inspired units, chnge the graphics of the units. weapon types will be somewhat unchanged i guess. the will need to flesh out the differnet factions, can just have a load of elvish bowmen. i should imagine they will skip air units- the eagles and the nazgul mounts, thats a pretty big task to add an air layer into the game i think. they might have to make specific city/castles that resemble tolkiens drawings, like the white city and rohans capital. i wonder about underground fighting, that might be easier to mod than air level units as its just the same battlefield but the "sky" is a cave roof

Well, there is good news and bad news.
The good news is I downloaded stainless steel and it looks amazing.
The bad news is I have 4 mid terms coming up in the next ten days.
Thank you Sean,
For failing me.

Was a fan of shogun, but I -loved- the original M:TW. I can't play it on my current machine due to the hardware (and it makes me saaad). If M:TW2 is cheap enough, I may have to pick it up...

Yeah, i would definitely recommend the second medieval. I think it was better than the first one

get rome and play napoleonic total war mod

So who here hates the senate/ The Pope

Personally, I think the Mongols are more annoying than the Pope.

The Timurids too

but i will have a TON of countries, be like the most powerful person in the game, and the Pope wont want to ally with me