On the subject of dread: I was running a campaign as England, years ago, and the continental war with France went so badly that at my lowest point my only continental holding was Bruges. France marched on the castle with a massive army of crossbowmen, but I had two units of cav (including my general) and was able get them out of the gates ahead of the crossbowmen and launch several devastating charges. Victory for us. After the victory I attempted to ransom several important people back to France, but they refused me and they were executed. So my general picked up two skulls worth of dread and I figured, why not just go with it? He repelled half a dozen French assaults and executed everyone he captured. I eventually maxed out his dread and his mere proximity on the battlefield would cause enemy units to waver. He led the campaign to retake the continental holdings and essentially wiped France off the map.
@@SRosenberg203 haha in retrospect my comment seems meaner than intended. I was trying to paraphrase the line from the movie Snatch where Cousin Avi's like "you English invented the f'in language you should use it" (or something like that). Glad someone appreciated my humor though! 😂
The only reason we ain't as strong as the bloody archer's is 'cause you're givin' 'em all the good armor! What do those gits need it for? All they do is sit back and shoot their fancy arrows. I swear, we mercenaries get no bloody respect.
i know i'm late, but would you rather your bowmen be as squishy as the other guy's? just imagine the shock and horror of the enemy footman when they charge into the archers, only to hear a "clink" as he slashes at their armor.
The rebel city you mentioned in Spain is Zaragoza, and a nice little tidbit is that the general inside it is actually El Cid, the legendary Spanish hero. It's just a nice bit of attention to detail that was characteristic of Creative Assembly back in the day.
JON IS A TRAITOR, AND HIS FORCES OF DANISH HEATHENRY SHALL NEVER TAKE GLORIOUS ENGLAND -that was the intention, yes, but I take this as an opportunity to have some fun roleplaying-
Its a title in the game, and you can become dreadful in the game. The mongol generals have so much dread they make your troops break up just by showing up lol.
Aladin Lizalo They sure will... Imo Jon is wasting his time making his generals Chivalrous because Dread is so much better, but against thr Mongolian bastards Chivalrous generals are a lifesaver
I can't believe it's already been 6 years! I remember when Jon started this series, I caught onto it when there were only 2-3 episodes out, and I eagerly waited every week for the next episode! Looking forward to watching it through again! ❤️
I like the passion and excitement in his voice as he explains the mechanics of the game. One of the reason's I just started Rome: Total War. It was a game I haven't played before, and it genuinely looked interesting. Watching him show off the game and explain things excitedly made it fun to watch his playthrough. I'm really excited for Thursdays episode.
Thank you so much for doing this series! I've been searching for a good Medieval 2: Total War Let's Play/Tutorial for a while now, and cannot seem to find one. This video has already taught me more about how this game works than most of the other vids I've come across, and your style of narrating is excellent.
We were spoiled by hearing him pronounce Latin and Greek names properly in the last series. There was clearly going to be a price to pay, and it's hearing him try to pronounce the Danish language.
Well, I have a new toga and a new helmet... and I suppose I can't die in the intro to this one... as I'm already dead, as are everyone else. Just a shame that whole "man love being okay" thing died when I did.
So glad it's finally here! Don't know if Jon knows about it already but one of my favourite features in this game is the fact that the armour upgrades that you give your troops actually changes how the unit looks on the battlefield. It's so cool.
I'm genuinely really excited for this! Denmark made me say "NICE" and the fact that I've played about 30 minutes of this game means I won't be annoyed like I was with RTW when you made horrific mistakes like losing an entire unit of Roman Cavalry to Equites. AVE DENMARK!
They're the only faction.. there's only two factions.. there are three, three factions.. I rather expected you to just follow this up by saying, "Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!"
I may not be royalty but I will be KING OF THE SEA! When my enemies see me coming, I shall say this, 'We have the longships but you have the long faces! HA'
Ourhaus in the middle of denmark Ourhaus in the middle of our... Ourhaus it has a crowd, Theres always something happening and its usually quite loud (Because theyre vikings)
To anyone interested, Århus/Aarhus is pronounced similar to "oar-who's" but with a softer French r sound. I thought it might have had a "boathouse" connotation but it's instead derived from an old viking name, Aros, for river mouth, which remains in use in Faroe language and gives name to a number of towns across Scandinavia.
I watched this video to get a feeling of what Medieval 2: Total War is, because I considered buying it. I immediately bought the game when you chose Denmark, where I am from, and said Ourhous. Well, close enough. Great video, tho I am 8 months late.
Danes are one of the easiest campaigns. On the level with England. I mean, once you take Hamburg, Stockholm and Oslo, you have 4 VERY SOLID cities completely protected by 1 castle with very little chance of invasion. Unlike most catholic factions, your cities can train decent cav after you build cathedrals so you can just stick to cities for most of the territory and you will be swimming in money. Once developed, Stockholm is one of the highest income cities in the world too. If you want real challenge, try faction like Russia or Turkey who has to deal with huge invasions, holy crusades...etc. Like while Russia has lots of land to expand, their land only has few cities, many are 2-3 turns distance from each other which also tiny and undeveloped. So you will have to control huge territory that bring you very little income and requires lots of investment. Even Italian factions are more fun as you will have complete mess of wars due to being located in the center of competing empires. Also, try to do migration campaign, as in, take a faction like Denmark and migrate it to Egypt :) Campaigns like that are the most fun i ever had with the game. Last time i moved Russia to Iberia, it was glorious. Love that game though, good luck with your playthrough.
Ottomans actually is also a pretty easy campaign. Strong unit roster, only two quite weak enemies nearby and lots of good settlements to take. Pillaging Egypt and Byzantine gives huge cash bonus early on. But middle and late game can be fun with Crusades and Mongols at the same time =).
Russia is just masochistic to play. They get jumped by the Mongols pretty hard on top of their cities taking way too long to develop. Just not worth the trouble
I really appreciate how you explain and compare certain things to Rome total war, because that’s the only total war game I’ve ever played since I don’t have a pc, so it helps a lot to understand what’s going on, thank you.
I started this same campaign. My spy died entering the first castle, my faction leader then died randomly, 3 turns in, SOMEHOW! Then about 10 turns later my new faction heir gets assassinated and 2 generals either went rebel or joined another faction, not sure which, lost visibility of the area they were in and generic “traitors” notification
This was my first ever Total War. I was a kid, I had no idea how to play, I played on Easy and I autoresolved every battle except the tutorial. But goddamn if those weren't some of the best hours of my life...
Dread is actually incredibly powerful, possibly even overpowered. Generals with very high Dread ratings can basically cause whole enemy armies to rout on sight, especially if they don't have decently Chivalrous generals to counteract the effect. It's true they're bad in towns, but you can easily have a few dedicated warmongers on hand to lead your armies in the field and never bring them near administrative centers.
I agree, Dread is actually great when it gets really high. I had a byzantine general once that enemies refused to fight. They would break immediately and he could just run them down. Best general I ever had...except against the mongols. I hate the mongols in this game so much.
Come on man, this episode has been up less than 3 hours and most of the names are already taken, i've been King Knud since April 23 when Jon announced he was playing Denmark since the starting names are always the same.
You're understating/estimating the importance of city units. Militia are just for garrison, that's right, but if you keep your armouring facility maxed out for city size, your spearmen become war beasts. With the advantage that you can retrain them everywhere and don't have to run back to a castle every time their unit numbers get low. Retrain, never merge, and you can win your campaign without castle infantry.
Imo the 2 most important building chains are farms and city armouring. Keeping both maxed out is key. M2TW no longer has the squalor problems that ruined huge cities in RTW. Using armoured city units and only recruiting cavalry and bowmen in castles will save you a fortune in expensive castle infantry.
I was really looking forward to this. I hope in the future you keep a rotation of Total War games. You're very entertaining to watch with these games. :D
Actually dread for morale is superior to chivalry. Mathematticaly it's better for the enemy to lose morale than for your troops to gain morale as you lose less men, while chivalry really just helps in defense when you're vastly outnumbered as for offense, it doesn't matter if your troops have more morale as that just makes it harder for them to rout, while if the enemy has lower morale it's shorter. Basically it's good for governors to have chivalry and for generals to have dread so when choosing generals and governors, get dreads as generals and chivalrous as governors
Adam Gawlowski unless you’re fighting the mongols, in which case you want your men to last as long as possible against the (very often) high dread generals.
If you're trying to stay friends with HRE, stay away from Hamburg, that's always a target for them. Take Magdeburg and develop that as your main castle. It starts out smaller but building the farm tree will fix that. Also, you want to take Oslo early and convert it to city, no need for a castle that far north. The longer you leave it as a rebel castle, the smaller it will be when you eventually take it and need it to be productive.
*Arhus* is pronounced like this: *Ar* is like pirate "arrrrr" but with soft "r", and *hus* is like "jews" but it starts with the letter "h". I'm finnish but I'm studying swedish and all scandinavian languages sound same.
The moment Jon brought up the fact that Egypt had returned made me imagine the ghost of Julianus Vatinius descending from space and then going to the Holy Roman Empire and insulting the faction leader.
A few things I have always done with this game is to only build brothels for scouts and to then delete the brothels once you have the amount of scouts you need. Brothels and their building chains roll a chance for your generals and family members to get "Social Drinker" and the proceeding traits. Also, it's best to only put taxes on very high when completing buildings like mines, ports, markets, and roads. This allows you to focus on growth of the cities, which raises your population and benefits your economy in the long run. Also, this gives positive economic traits such as good farmer (bonus to pop), good taxman (bonus to income), and good miner (bonus to mining). You can also get stuff like architect retinues and good builder traits, which grant cheaper buildings. I'd also love to see a Third Age: Total War mod playthrough! Seeing you play a faction like Gondor would be epic! In the end, it's up to you though. I am excited for this LP!
The only Total War game I have ever played is Total War Shogun 2 (philistine I know) but I really like how in that game you get to watch the infantry fight hand to hand one on one. It makes for some interesting combat. Still not amazing considering it was a lot of "Throw units at them and have better equipped units" but it was always fun to attack the lowest level castle town guarded by just one unit of Samurai Retainers with about 6 Archer units and watch them just shoot over the walls in waves and watch about 50 arrows stick into the body of the last guy before you win.
