Shogun Total War Trailer and mini Guide

Here is a trailer that was made for Shogun, I think it show many aspect and principle that are the core strategy concept behind the creation of this series of game. There is also many strategic advice. So I think it's a good thing for every one to watch this to learn or refresh some strategy principle.

Medieval II Total War Attila's Battle Guide

Here is my Christmas gift for the Total War Fans. It's a guide that explains and shows how to effectively win a battle in Medieval 2 Total War. It shows the strategy and principle to use to win, all commented by the adviser and showing contextual information.

For those who would have missed it, here is also the Small Siege Guide I create sometime ago, explaining siege tactic.




Also for new visitor, here are some useful link you might enjoy.

Here is the filter for the Polish Chronicles

Here is the filter for Sicilian Chronicles

Here is the Filter for the German Chronicle in Rome Total War, It's full of good advise.

I also must say, that I will now take a pause in the chronicles publishing process so that I can fully enjoy my vacation. That will allow you to check archive, learn tips and trick from old battle, ask question in comment that I plan to keep reading and answering.

So Merry Christmas! And feel free to tell me your first contact that many of you will live on the 25 December with Medieval 2 Total War.

I will be back in a couple of days. =)

Pixel Shader 1.1 problem and How to fix it.

I get lot of emails about Pixel Shader support problem. To short answer... Get a true Graphics Card if your computer has an onboard graphics card. If you have an AGP or PCI Express interface available it's the way to go! My card is an ATI X1600 512MB AGP. Amazon.com offers the newest version, the X1650 at $186.99 with Free shipping in the US. More information at ATI about the X1650. Here links to Amazon pages.

		ATI Radeon X1650 Pro 512MB AGP Graphics Card
		ATI Radeon X1650 Pro 512MB PCI-E Graphics Card

AGP vs PCI Express, confused?

More information on Wikipedia.

• Accelerated Graphics Port (AGP)
• PCI Express (also known as PCIe or PCI-E)

Recommendation:

If your board support PCI Express... Go with it. Otherwise... not much choice.

Also Keep in mind that this Graphic card is the Minimum I recommend to play medieval II Total War in an acceptable condition. But feel free to buy newer card to be sure to be able to play future game correctly.

FAQ: Question and Answers by Attila

Since many people ask me advise for their campaign where they meet many difficulty. I decieded well lets Share it with the rest of you guys. This way you might learn many small trick and my way of dealing with the Situation in the game.

Question on City

I'm having a problem with public order in Medieval 2, and I saw your Sicilian Chronicles and the public order is really good. I'm always having constant riots that prevent me from advancing my troops. You have any advice dude?

Yeah, public order is sometime a challenge. One of the first thing to build in a city is a church. The bigger the church the faster you will convert people to your religion, and the more the people will be happy in general. Also, note that cities dislike having military unit and preferring militia, they also seem to dislike mercenary.

So, when I conquer a city I either pillage it or exterminate it. That allow you to breed new population that is loyal to you and reduce the population who would like to rebel. With fortress you just have to pillage since the population is not as big.

There is also a strategy I first formulated for Medieval 1 Total War.

"You can prevent rebellion by making sure it happens."

What I mean by that is that is that if you leave your city without any troop, the rebellion will be smaller, then you take back the city you wanted to rebels and exterminate the population, this way you will have peace of mind for a long time and lots of money.

What sometime my cities make negative money?
I'm not sure but I do think that it's because it must keep order, sustain building, support troops, etc. But over all it's not a big problem since all the money you get is centralized.

Question on Guild
How do you get knight templar or knight hospitalier:

To have those special unit you must build a Guild HQ. Those guild appear as your city developpe, one city can only accept one guild, that also include merchant, spy, and assasin guild. So don't jump on the guild that offer you to join your city too fast and think if it would not be better to choose a knight kind of guild.

Also you need to know that all faction cannot have all guild, some faction are limited to one type of guild. But England actually can have both knight guild. Normaly you get with the game a large paper that show you what you faction can have or not.

Papacy Related Question
How do I kill, Destroy, the Pope, papacy faction?

Well that's the annoying thing, you can't as far as I know... You Can conquer Rome you the Pope will alway reappear somewhere. So As a Christian faction what you need to do is simply to assassinate the pope when he hate you, and leave him alone when you relation with him goes well, and use him to call crusade arround the world.

Late Gameplay Tips and Trick
How do I destroy Mongols?
Well watch The Mongols invasion video I did in the Turkish Chronicles. That will show you the path, and read the comment there are tons of trick, and also some alternate way to fight them.

What are the Victory Condition to win a campaign of Medieval II Total War.
Well you can make a short campaign, you will need 15 province and destroy one faction or two.
If you make a long campaign you will need 45 region, and to capture one of 2 city that you can see in the report tab

What is you computer hardware?
Check in the system requirement page, I give my hardware.

How Many people can you put on the Battle Field?
10 000 but in general you won't play with more then 5000

Medieval 2 Total War Siege Warfare Mini Guide

Here is a request from Chris, a Mini Guide explaining a little the strategy to addopt when you want to storm a city. The text might be a little fast so sometime might be a good idea to stop and read. Making Guide is not my specialty. ;)

Feel free to ask questions =)

Here is a very good description of the principle showed in the video that SFDean said in the totalwar.com Forum.

Some nice lessons illustrated in the video sequence.

1. Take (and defend) walls with sword units. No rank bonus for spear units, no cavalry, so sword units are the way to go. (Presumably, also consider use of heavy axe infantry vs. armored swordsmen.)

2. Combine ladders with siege towers. Your men with ladders climb the wall first, further away from the gate, and the defenders bunch there to fight them. Then the siege towers discharge their men as reinforcements CLOSER to the gate. You put a lot of men atop the wall fast and take the gate fast.

3. Use missile troops (preferably archers, not flat trajectory crossbows) to harass/distract/weaken the wall units, but shift fire immediately to another target once your units get into melee combat atop the wall.

4. After you've seized the wall top of the gate area, you can bring your battering ram and breakthrough troops forward to the gate, free of deadly fire from the wall towers in the gate area.

Very explained in my opinion

Medieval 2 Total War Principles of Strategy: Part 1

Here is a video that Vauban666 created that explain many principle of strategy very good information and can be apply in many games and Total War series are a good exemple of where you can apply those principles. So take a look it's very instructive.

System Requierment For Medieval 2 Total War and current Attila hardware

Here is
The Computer I recommend as a Minimum to play Medieval II Total War

Since many people ask me that question here is the official answer.

As stated by CA on the Medieval II section of this site:

Minimum System Requirements:

Creative Assembly recommend the Windows® 2000/XP.
With a processor Celeron 1.8GHz Pentium 4(1500MHz) or equivalent AMD® processor.
512MB RAM. (i personnaly would recommend at least a gig)
8x Speed DVD-ROM drive (note the fact that they ask for a DVD)
11.0 Gigs of uncompressed free hard disk space. (that's a lot!)
100% DirectX® 9.0c compatible 16-bit sound card and latest drivers. ( that mean probably ATI 9800 and above...)
100% Windows® 2000/XP compatible mouse, keyboard and latest drivers.
DirectX® 9.0c.
128MB Hardware Accelerated video card with Shader 1 support and the latest drivers.
Must be 100% DirectX® 9.0c compatible.
Monitor must be able to display 1024x768 resolution or above.

Multiplayer:

Internet (TCP / IP) play supported, internet play requires broadband connection and latest drivers, LaN play requires Network card.

Important Note: Some cards may not be compatible with the 3D acceleration features utilised by Medieval II: Total War. Please refer to your hardware manufacturer for 100% DirectX® 9.0c compatibility.

Now from my point of View, I Recommend an ATI Radeon x1600pro 512meg of Ram Minimum This is probably the most balanced card for the moment. It doesn't worth it to buy the best card on the market for the moment because of vista, Vista will requier new hardware, so don't waste money on over expensive 3d card for Medieval 2 Total War

Current Attila Configuration

Operating System: Windows XP Professional
System Manufacturer: IBM
BIOS: Phoenix FirstBios(tm) Desktop Pro Version 2.0 for IBM ThinkCentre.
Processor: Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 3.20GHz (2 CPUs)
Memory: 1022MB RAM

Card name: Radeon X1600 Series
Manufacturer: ATI Technologies Inc.
Chip type: Radeon X1600 Series AGP (0x71C2)
DAC type: Internal DAC(400MHz)
Display Memory: 512.0 MB

How to play custom Battle with the Medieval 2 Total War demo

This was written in November 2006, since then the mod don't seem to be available anymore.




Some people asked me how to make a custom battle with the Medieval 2 Gold demo. So here are what I found.

Here is how to play custom battle with Medieval 2 Total War Gold Demo.

First thing is to actually have the Gold demo
you can get it there:
Medieval II: Total War Gold Demo

Then, you must make sure you have the Microsoft .NET Framework Version 2.0 Redistributable Package


Then download the the mods: MTWII_GoldDemo_CustomBatt4.exe

(it's no more available, so you will need to find it by yourself, if it still exist somewhere)

With the installer

Extract MTWII_GoldDemo_CustomBattlesMod_V4.exe into the folder:
english:
C:\Program Files\SEGA\Medieval II Total War Demo Gold
german:
C:\Programme\SEGA\Medieval II Total War Demo Gold

There you have the file MedBattleSelector.exe. Start the game with it (not with the standard MTWII exe) and choose in the scenarios
- Agincourt
- Pavia
- otumba
- hastings_tutorial
the wanted battle.

The original pack file will be backuped (bak file) and the choosen battle will be inserted in the pack file.

To restore the original 3 Sega battle setup, push the restore backup file

More details about the selector in the file: MedBattleSelector.txt

Credits:
- shellshock, niko_twow_ru: medbattleselector
- agincourt: d3v, iplk, beastG33
- pavia: sinuhet, blackeyetolga
- otumba: dede_korkut
- hastings_tutorial: sinuhet, niko_twow_ru

The source of the information can be found here
in a post by Repman

I would like to thanks Deathomelet for helping me by finding those information.

Also note if it doesn't work, don't ask me for help, I'm not a modders, go on the post on the TWCenter forum

Mini Guide About How extracting Audio from Rome Total War

Lately many people have asked me for the music I put in some of my videos. So all of that music actually came from Rome Total War itself.

But you can actually extract it from Rome yourself.

So first thing you need to own Rome Total War.

Second go download Audacity. It's an open source audio editing software.Y ou can recorder, montage, and extract audio from most things.

So with Audacity you open the File: Music.dat
In the folder: C:\Program Files\Activision\Rome - Total War\Data\sounds

That file contains all the music from Rome Total War.

So you find the song you want in the doc. and extract it

To do so: copy and past it in a new audacity window. Then save it as a .wav or an .mp3 (that need a .dll for audacity)

So after that you can enjoy the song as any other of your music, and use it for great

If you want the song "what await us" (if that's the real title), Well It start at 40:59 in the document.

Small guide about how to record and put videos on Youtube like i do, Based on videos games

This guide is now available on Dateyourgame.com in the guide How To Record Gameplay