I am not a computer geek. No surprise, then, that I do not play computer games — at least I didn’t until a month ago, when I rediscovered my medieval roots.
It started when I took my 8-year-old son to an electronics store to buy yet another cartridge for his Gameboy Advance. While I waited, a box on the PC game shelf caught my eye: “Medieval: Total War.” The letters were bold above a picture of a mounted knight holding a broadsword. Then two more titles caught my eye: “Stronghold,” with a picture of a grim-faced warrior standing before a castle under siege, and “Stronghold: Crusader,” with an army of Christian knights in full assault mode.
“Rule your kingdom through four centuries of brutal Medieval warfare,” read the advertising copy. “This is no time for the faint-hearted. Lead a determined group of crusaders. Wage war against a powerful foreign invader. The enemy prepares to storm the castle walls.” And so on.
I realized that I’d read the same hype long ago in my Baby Boomer youth, when an advertisement on the back of a comic book pictured battle scenes just like those on the computer game boxes. For $1 that ad promised me all the heroism and glory of King Arthur’s knights.
False advertising
I sent off my allowance money and waited for my armies to arrive. They did, but without castles, without flame-throwing catapults. They were nothing like the ad. They were just a bunch of plastic figures, each the size of my thumb.
I left the electronics store that day empty-handed, but I couldn’t stop thinking about those games. Once again, I wanted Clydesdales in armor, chain mail and broadswords. I wanted to refight Agincourt, become Othello the Black Knight and stand triumphant upon the ruined battlements of Antioch.
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So, I got hold of those games and entered a fascinating, ever-unfolding world of medieval warfare, real-time strategy and castle-building on my PC.
Within days, I found myself squeezing in a few minutes before work, my eyes frantically jumping from the computer screen to the clock, my mind calculating whether I had enough time to lay one final siege to Antioch before I absolutely, positively had to get out the door. Early morning hours flew by as I tried to fend off the Duc de Puce, better known as The Rat.
Here’s what I found:
“Medieval: Total War” (MTW to acronym-happy computer folks) combines a complex battle system with equal portions of chesslike strategy and palace intrigue.
Battle tutorials, which are absolutely necessary to master the game’s rudiments, are run by an impatient, mean-spirited general who takes pleasure in humiliating you in a rough English accent. He’ll call you a “rat-eared whelp,” an embarrassment to your father. Then he’ll threaten you with the flat of his sword.
In touch with realities
The animated battles are incredibly vivid, noisy and involved. An army of up to 10,000 can take the field in MTW, light-years beyond the world of thumb-sized plastic knights. But the simulation can be sobering. In MTW, the dead remain on the field, giving you a real sense of the cost of your campaign. Trust me, victory feels more like defeat when only 128 of the 300 men you send into battle survive.
“Stronghold” and its newer version, “Stronghold: Crusader,” created by Gathering of Developers and Firefly combine battle action with civilization-building simulation. You have to create a medieval community, build a castle, then defend it.
The economic aspects of the “Stronghold” series are amazingly true to life. Building a castle requires resources, people and time. You can’t just put up walls. You must acquire stone or wood, keep your people fed and happy and train soldiers. You have to manipulate food stocks and consumption, not to mention tax rates.
Again, you’ll need to work through tutorials and make several run-throughs. My first Stronghold empire ended with something I can best describe as medieval urban sprawl — with no zoning.
But I did learn a couple of hints to pass on: When all else fails and people start leaving, try doubling the rations, offering bribes and buying a dancing bear. Your people will be back in no time, with their friends.
Big on battlefield action
My son picked up one of the main differences between “Medieval Total War” and the “Stronghold” series: MTW is especially strong in battlefield action. “You can just fight,” my son noted. “`On Stronghold: Crusader,’ you build things, then you fight.”
In “Stronghold,” he added, “you can run your men all over and they don’t get tired. In `Medieval Total War,’ if you run them all over, they get tired.”
That’s a huge difference.
There are individual strategy books available for all three games, not to mention an army of devotees in cyberspace who swap strategies and hints, and engage in multiplayer battles beyond my feeble skills (at least for now). But, I’ll eventually join them — as soon as I dispatch The Rat, fight beside Saladin and find out if I’m as good as Henry V at Agincourt.