Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!

The year is 1152 A.D. Your knights rush into battle, swords drawn. The first one to reach the enemy smashes into the peasant-turned-fighter with a shield. As his foe falls to the ground, your soldier skewers him with his sword to finish him off, the sound of metal cutting through his stomach barely heard among the clinking of weapons striking armor nearby.

This is just some of the detail rendered in the latest version of the Total War series.

If you’ve played Total War before, you already know that there are two phases of the game: the strategy map, where you create alliances, build your armies and call Crusades. The second phase of the game is the battle map, where armies clash in epic battles of cunning and courage – and that’s where this game really earns its place on your shelf.

Starting with the good stuff, the real time combat has been improved even more over previous versions in terms of graphics and realism. Men respond and react slightly differently to the battle around them; and if you watch close enough you’ll see that the armies are no longer just performing generic spear thrusts at their enemies – they’re actually duking it out in close quarters, a ballet of grisly mayhem.

The tactics, too, have improved somewhat – units now automatically charge into battle if they come in at a straight line, regardless of whether you double click on your foe.

The battle camera, unfortunately, still suffers from its limitations of the previous games; although many features have been kept from Rome that improve playability, such as putting a group of soldiers under computer control, or selecting all archer or infantry units with a single button.

Right now the AI is still a bit wonky – sometimes it will leave its infantry standing in a barrage of arrows but doing nothing to counterattack if it doesn’t have its own archers. Also, units sometimes get “stuck” when traveling down the walls through towers during a seige, so that when you try to attack your units get confused and end up doing nothing. I’ve also seen cases where my archers or siege equipment would show “firing” status, but not do anything.

Sure, there are a few gripes, but just wait until you get to the strategy map – then there are a hundred gripes!

The graphical upgrades of Rome were both a blessing and a curse. Finally, you could move your armies more strategically, instead of just sending them Risk-style into enemy territory. You can situate your attacking armies so that one army flanks your enemy, or even leave your troops in the forest to wait in ambush for your foes.

Unfortunately, the map is sometimes difficult to interpret. Mountains and rivers get in your troops’ way, and when you click on a location to travel to, they start heading around obstacles even if it isn’t the straight path you were expecting. And, there’s no “undo” for movement.

The diplomacy, as usual, is sub-par. Granted, this is a war game, but you can have a dozen alliances with different countries which seem to have no use whatsoever. Your allies don’t offer to join you if someone attacks you, and the pope will excommunicate you for fighting back against invading Christian armies!

Crusades offer a large payoff if you can do them right – just ask the Pope to declare a Crusade to a city under Muslim (or excommunicated Christian) rule, and if you take the city you get experience bonuses and money. The only problem is that if you deviate even the slightest bit from your journey in that direction – that includes going around mountains the wrong way – you start losing troops to desertion at an alarming rate.

The noncombatant units are more plentiful but sometimes more useless than ever.

The assassins are virtually powerless when you first train them, often having a 5% chance to kill even an unarmed, inexperienced priest. You get experience bonuses as you build additional structures in your cities and castles, but it still never seems enough.

Merchants have been added to the game to increase the complexity of economics; you can send them to collect faraway resources and take over rival merchants’ assets. Like assassins, however, they cost more than they are worth. It takes about 500 florins to build one merchant, and they can, at best, collect about 10 florins per turn. Granted, finding resources further away, and improving experience, increases this, but not by enough.

Then come the Inquisitors – the most dreaded of all the pope’s forces. Like possessed madmen, they scour the board for anybody they deem unworthy and burn them at the stake if their piety rating is too low. The concept is not a bad one, as it increases the importance of religion. Like other units, though, they are unbalanced, and unpredictable. I had one Inquisitor “accuse” the same priest three turns in a row (failing each time, fortunately). And, in my first game, my faction leader was burned at the stake early in the game – with no way to raise His Majesty’s piety and prevent the attack.

On the flip side, the priests have gotten a little more interesting. As in Medieval: Total War, priests help convert your population to Catholicism (and likewise Imams do the same for Islam). They also now ward off witches and Heretics (though are prone to become Heretics themselves if not properly prepared). In a nice twist, your priests can rise to become a cardinal, and cardinals elect the new pope from among their own ranks when the old pope dies. That means you can have one of your priests eventually become head of Christianity – though he still might not show you any special favor.

The campaign now takes you up to the discovery of the “New World,” which might be a nice feature, but perhaps one better saved for a feature pack or expansion while they fixed some of the balancing issues and battle map glitches.

Overall, the game is nearly on par with other Total War games (especially considering most of the other games had the same faults with the strategic campaign). For the sheer joy of watching the action up close and personal, though, nothing comes close!