City settlements are your economic hubs. They tend to generate the most income and can have buildings specific to economic growth such as markets and trade ports both of which are geared towards increasing your tax revenue. Castle settlements on the other hand are your military strongholds, not only can you recruit more troops at a castle settlement, but they also have a greater variety of troop and siege weapons than city settlements.
This new feature adds a new strategic twist to the game. Deciding whether to upgrade your city settlements to gain economic power or upgrade your castle settlements to build military might can have a long lasting effect on your campaign since each can play a vastly different role in your empire.
Graphics & Performance
Medieval II Total War looks fantastic. The level of detail in the graphics for both the turn based campaign map and real time battles is excellent. Units not only look realistic, but their movements while in battle are spot on and at times look like a live scene from a movie.
The battle environments are huge, this coupled with thousands of units on the map at one time, creates a mess on a slower systems or graphics card. The minimum requirements of 512MB of RAM and a 128MB graphics card really doesn't cut it in my opinion. Don't expect great performance during real time battles if you're planning to play on a minimum spec'd PC. This review was conducted on a AMD 3500+, with 2 GB of RAM and a nVidia 6600 256MB graphics card and the real time battles were still bogged down at times.
Bottom Line
First and foremost, Medieval II Total War is an excellent game. The game play and graphics are top notch but there was still a feeling of expecting more. This may be due to the expectations that the folks at Creative Assembly have set for everyone with their games. Every Total War game has improved up the previous title. Medieval improved upon Shogun, Rome improved up Medieval. For those looking for another giant step forward, you're not going to find it in Medieval II Total War. What you will find however is a solid game that provides hours of enjoyment and is easily one of the top games of 2006.
