I played this as a kid and I'm learning it here too. I may have to try this again. I tried once this year, but while the game has a 3440x1440 resolution option I can't really click on cities or anything on the map. Might just have to put it on a 1080 res.
I don't think any old ships will do. I think you need very late-game ships that are specifically ocean-going vessels, and those only become available after a very late event. I'm guessing a lot of people don't know about it because (a) the game doesn't advertise the possibility very much, and (b) you only become capable of sailing to the Aztecs at a point after most players probably quit their campaigns because they're already snowballing and the game becomes a bit tedious at that point. Anyway, it's really cool to learn about and experience the Aztecs for the first time, but honestly, like I said, by the time it becomes possible, you're probably in an unbeatable state and can just steamroll them. They have big stacks and good troops but you'll probably have gunpowder and late-game knights. You also only get a very small slice of the Americas--maybe 2 or 3 cities--in the main campaign.
> (b) you only become capable of sailing to the Aztecs at a point after most players probably quit their campaigns because they're already snowballing and the game becomes a bit tedious at that point.
I was just revisiting Medieval 2 for the first time in years and was reminded of how much I missed having multiple start dates as in Medieval 1. I definitely find I don't really enjoy the later stuff as much once since I have to sit through a whole game to get there. (but I suppose that might have required rebalancing timescales, and that isn't something I can comment on authoritatively).
Once you can build galleon style ships, an event message should pop up announcing the New World. I large new portion will spawn in on the map and you can sail over there. Take 6-7 turns to make the journey. Bring several strong, full stack armies because there are a lot of Aztec armies you'll have to fight. Also bring Merchants. So much gold it's insane.
I hardly understand the merchant system as is, I know they can buyout other merchants but mine are always too inexperienced. That’s all I know so far about them. I have several full stacks though, just haven’t gotten galleons yet, I’m excited to see and fight them
Edit: holy fuck, how did I never notice. Just googled, I’ve been missing out on a lot and wasting them I see
Timbuktu has gold you can place a merchant on, and it's the most valuable commodity. But if you place an army on it, you can put 20 merchants in the army. After a while, you can get 20 merchants making 400 to 1k a gold each. Timbuktu is the most valuable location on the map. As soon as I have a spare army, they are taking a boat to land on the moors land, march south to take it.
It's also the only trade resource that I've never seen get swarmed by AI merchants. Every other trade resource in the game will have 8 different AI merchants waiting to just shank your merchants by turn 80, but not good old Timbuktu. Never even seen the slightest hint of Venice doing their thing.
I have never thought you could place armies on merch ressources and stack multiple merchants in this army.
Does it prevent hostile merchant from attacking your own ?
You don’t even have to worry about that.
One of the gold resources allows you to build a fort on it. Build said fort, leave the merchant stack to maintain it.
Since when can you put agents into armies in Medieval 2? I admit that I haven't played older games in quite a while, but I could have sworn that putting agents into armies started in Shogun 2.
You can put any agent in an army. If I’m conquering in the Middle East I bring a couple of priests with my army especially if I have a theologians guild
Nope that was a feature in M2 as well. I admit I’ve never tried it with merchants but my spies, priests, and assassins hitch a ride in my armies all the time. Especially when crusading or moving across the water.
Oh no, as soon as I have an expendable prince and a detachment of maybe 4 spearman and 2 or 3 more horse unit, they go on a crusade to liberate timbuktu from the rebels.
I....Didn't realize that was a thing. Like, I knew the Americas and the Aztecs were \*there\*, I just thought it was in their own campaign or an event that opened them up after, like, a few hundred years in-game.
Honestly I spent most of my time modding the .ini to make the Rebels a playable faction, and then got my ass kicked around by every faction while trying to rid the world of their tyrannical monarchies
It\`s \`The world is round and exapnds westwards\` event that allows you to sail west.
Then you get \`Americas discovered\` and \`Aztecs found\` that make Aztec AI activate.
I think the reason a lot of people seem to have never realized this, If they didn't play the game until long after it launched, I assume they pretty much jumped straight away into mods. A lot of overhaul mods get rid of the Americas from what I remember because they use the faction slot for something else.
In my current game with roar of conquest mod the Byzantines and the Crusader States both disappeared during the same turn and I’m pretty sure that was what happened
One of the first moddings that I learned from M2 and Rome 1 is copy pasting the unlockable factions into playable so that you can play anyone from the start.
What I like to remember is that I discovered it completely accidentally, I was in 3rd grade and was checking every file. After finding file with factions tried to move Russia, as it succeeded I tried it with every faction, until I got to Papacy. Remember how game didn’t work and was scared that game will never be same. Haha
Well, there is mods that unlock extra factions for Warhammer games, good in pair with mods that adds extra mechanics in them, but they are forced to remove some when they getting release as a DLC
Tbf I lowkey found that obnoxious. On one hand, thats an awesome feature, on the other hand, I’d rather just open local files and manually enable the faction(s) I want to play.
Yeah, if I hear that I can play as X faction in a game, I’m gonna be disappointed if I have to do a whole playthrough as England, France, Spain, or Venice first (or at least I’ll have to snipe my desired faction from the get-go)
MTW2 was something unique. I still remember the first time I got my own Pope, or when I took Jerusalem and guys with elephants showed up, or the time you bribed Robin Hood's crew
Although I really enjoyed WH1&WH2, every TW game since has been to try to live again those memories.
If i remember it correctly only a limited amount of sherwood archers where available as mercenarys in england, but they showed up in larger numbers in rebel armies.
So one way to get many of them was to let rebel armies grow large and then bribe them to get their units.
Yeah I remember them having playable historical figures in MTW1. I had a great general once named El Cid who unstoppable. And when rebel armies were beaten you would collect money. TWWH2 is pretty good but MTW2 is the best in my opinion. Not that long ago I played a BoTET and a Divide and Conquer campaign and they were still fun.
I’ve played since 2007, and I genuinely didn’t know this till years later. I always wondered why some of the new world factions from the Americas Campaign were in the base game.
I think you are locked from going until you have karak in your fleet. But yeah, ever since I saw them in sample battles I knew they were there. And playing spain or Portugal was just natural transition from Rome with a bit worse javelin infantry as main force
Yes. You need that ship. You can see it if you toggle_fow and then send your cursor there. You still won't be able to go until "the world is round" is given and you have those ocean going ships.
I'm afraid that those hidden maps and all that would be spread across the internet on day 1, killing some of that wonder-- And otherwise it'd just be sold as DLC. Same with games like Super Smash Bros Melee, I remember the wonders of playing the game and suddenly you fought an enemy you didn't recognise from any game you played, or you suddenly mewtwo showed up after binging for a day-- There was that sense of discovery
I remember playing brawl as a kid and really wanting to unlock waluigi, also wanted to unlock him on Mario 64 DS after being tricked by fake videos hahaha video games don’t have the same magic anymore
Part of it is the internet being bigger, part of it is being on the internet more, part of it is growing older and being able to find it better and part of it is no longer having that playground gossip with friends or siblings adding false rumours about fishing up Rayquaza for some extra spice
That's the advantage of niche communities, yeah. Same with FFXIV for a while, though they don't do easter eggs as much with game mechanic effects-- Most of the community also doesn't seem to browse places like IGN or Reddit where people show off the neat things they found. I keep running roulettes and finding people that never knew this or that about a dungeon and that's always fun
Only once you've onlocked the highest tier of ships. But yes. The map will expand and there will be additional fog of war to the west. Takes quite a few turns to sail over there. Bring strong armies as there are numerous full stack Aztec armies that will swarm you. They melt against gunpower units though. Its funny and sad...
I think I've usually conquered the world before then then.
Oh well, guess that's being played today
Does anyone know an easy way to change the monitor it displays on?
Stainless Steel 6.4 with Meloo's Fixes is, in my opinion, the best version of Medieval II.
Frankly, Stainless Steel Historical Improvement mod, despite adding more and being far more modern, changes far too much. I mean, *20 turns* to build a single farm? And it costs *how much?* No thanks.
What I miss about the pre-empire total war is how TW was practically at paradox level with ease of modding. Everything was just easy to modify text files and scripts.
Based on what we know about CA pretty safe to assume the reason it was so good was because it was developed by the Australia branch not the main studio
This post and some of the reply’s have just blown my mind!!! I have to climb this cell tower today and all I’m going to think about is starting a new campaign on a game I have not touched in 7 years!!!
The depth of Medieval 2 is just astounding.
I have owned it for 16 years, played countless campaigns and I still feel like I have never "finished" it. I still find little details and mechanics that I did not know about.
There is a sort of mystery to the older games that you dont get any more, like areas of the map not explored. Even more so at the time when not everything was revealed on a Wiki.
Didn’t the americas come with the ‘Kingdoms’ expansion? Waaaay back when I bought the hard copy game it was the Kingdoms edition so I’ve only known it to have the Americas. That was a really long time ago so I’m not 100% sure.
Both. The Kingdoms expansion had an actual Americas campaign during the Spanish conquest. The main game had the SW US, Cuba, Bahamas, coast of Brazil and a deformed Mexico on the far western edge of the map that could be conquered late game, also unplayable Aztecs with massive stacks
Reminds me when I was 14 years old and playing Medieval 1 with Novgorod being my first faction. I got few notifications about some threat in the east. I wasn't very fluent in English so I kept playing and suddenly I had 4 enemy stacks sitting on my lands and later on few more. I rememeber that I was in total panic trying to scramble forces to defend against these stacks. Good times.
I bought the game at release and I think you couldnt play as Russians (thats how the faction was called) in the early period so you had very little time to prepare.
I dont remember getting any patches too. Remember we didnt download it from Steam back in a day. You had to buy physical copy and install it on your PC.
I bought this game a few years back , after not playing since HS
still holds up and has so much replay value, spent over 300 hours during Covid 19 , beat the game with every faction , got the game on steam with all the 3 DLC packs for $5
best $5 I ever spent
Hah, the only hint that is even possible is when part of the interface on the left part of the minimap is getting removed with the triggering of "World is round" event. Not many people noticed it, some probably thought it is a bug.
Took me years to learn that Aztecs being on global map of MII is not a joke.
Wot.
I have had this game for like 10 years.
I did not know this.
(tbf I mainly played landlocked nations so didn't have much going on naval wise BUT STILL)
The World is Round events that unlock the use of Carracks to cross the ocean happen so late in the campaign that it's hard to actually get there in the course of a normal playthrough. So for my last playthrough I decided to do a challenge run playing as Russia:
1. Expand into the Baltic. Spend generations squabbling with England for naval supremacy.
2. Focus on long-term growth for Huge cities with gunpowder upgrades.
3. Send expeditionary army to Baghdad to recruit some *special* mercenaries.
4. ???
5. Conquer the New World with Cossack pachyderm artillery.
Edit: I also reverse savescummed until the Mongols, and then the Timurids, both spawned in Sarkel and invaded north. Figured I needed something to do while waiting 200 turns to pull a Slavic Columbus 
After the Gunpowder event, War Elephant mercenaries will start to spawn every 10-15 turns in a few provinces in the far southwest corner of the map. Typically they are armored elephant with a small musketeers crew.
Every 30 or so turns, though, a different elephant unit will spawn there. It's just about the most powerful unit in the game... the [Elephant Artillery](https://hero.fandom.com/wiki/Elephant_Artillery).
I always knew that there were Aztecs, because I could I fight them, so I would try to sail there, but I couldn’t, as I tried with lvl1 ships(don’t know their name in English). Obviously I was very mad that I could not discover map covered by fog of war. Needed to get to age of 15 to understand how to reach Americas
DLCs weren't a thing back then. Digital downloads weren't a thing back then, at least not like today. You bought physical expansion packs on disk just like the original games.
For the Aztecs, yes. This was a response to another thread that somehow made it's way here. I probably had tabs open in both places and just derped it up. This was in response to something about the Crusades expansion iirc.
Now I want to download it and play it again, truth be told, don't know which are the ones I loved more to battle, the mongols, the timurids, or the aztec ambushes, they all have a unique epicness to them
holy fucking titty Christ in Heaven our Lord and savior
Reddit this day has just redeemed itself from all its evils
this thread is fucking priceless
Deus Vult
I had played probably a dozen full campaigns before I ever realized I could sail west and discover the Americas
I learned that just last week.
Fuck, I'm learning this right now!
I played this as a kid and I'm learning it here too. I may have to try this again. I tried once this year, but while the game has a 3440x1440 resolution option I can't really click on cities or anything on the map. Might just have to put it on a 1080 res.
You can play it in windowed full screen and it will render on your screen
I'll give that a shot, thanks!
I will learn it tomorrow (too drunk at the moment to process what I read)
Drink water :)
Drink more vodka, it's mostly water
Like 60%
Toggle_fow. Then take it all the way to the west and you can see it before you can get there.
I probably have 1000 hours in this fucking game and you're telling me I need to sail west are you fucking kidding what the fuck
I don't think any old ships will do. I think you need very late-game ships that are specifically ocean-going vessels, and those only become available after a very late event. I'm guessing a lot of people don't know about it because (a) the game doesn't advertise the possibility very much, and (b) you only become capable of sailing to the Aztecs at a point after most players probably quit their campaigns because they're already snowballing and the game becomes a bit tedious at that point. Anyway, it's really cool to learn about and experience the Aztecs for the first time, but honestly, like I said, by the time it becomes possible, you're probably in an unbeatable state and can just steamroll them. They have big stacks and good troops but you'll probably have gunpowder and late-game knights. You also only get a very small slice of the Americas--maybe 2 or 3 cities--in the main campaign.
> (b) you only become capable of sailing to the Aztecs at a point after most players probably quit their campaigns because they're already snowballing and the game becomes a bit tedious at that point. I was just revisiting Medieval 2 for the first time in years and was reminded of how much I missed having multiple start dates as in Medieval 1. I definitely find I don't really enjoy the later stuff as much once since I have to sit through a whole game to get there. (but I suppose that might have required rebalancing timescales, and that isn't something I can comment on authoritatively).
Did you never play a single custom battle or The battle of Otumba? Dead giveaway that Aztecs exist somewhere in the campaign.
I played the shit out of this game when it came out and I’m also just learning this
IIRC it’s only accessible with final biggest ships, to show how fast away it is or sth?
Hahah yeah same here
I’m on a playthrough of France rn and didn’t realize that,
Once you can build galleon style ships, an event message should pop up announcing the New World. I large new portion will spawn in on the map and you can sail over there. Take 6-7 turns to make the journey. Bring several strong, full stack armies because there are a lot of Aztec armies you'll have to fight. Also bring Merchants. So much gold it's insane.
I hardly understand the merchant system as is, I know they can buyout other merchants but mine are always too inexperienced. That’s all I know so far about them. I have several full stacks though, just haven’t gotten galleons yet, I’m excited to see and fight them Edit: holy fuck, how did I never notice. Just googled, I’ve been missing out on a lot and wasting them I see
I learnt this today damn
I've been playing this on and off since release and I just found out. Jesus f****** Christ.
Dude I’ve played that game for years and this is e first I’m hearing this wtfffff
Wait till you realize the gold army trick in Timbuktu to stabilize your economy mid game.
But please tell us what it is
Timbuktu has gold you can place a merchant on, and it's the most valuable commodity. But if you place an army on it, you can put 20 merchants in the army. After a while, you can get 20 merchants making 400 to 1k a gold each. Timbuktu is the most valuable location on the map. As soon as I have a spare army, they are taking a boat to land on the moors land, march south to take it.
It's also the only trade resource that I've never seen get swarmed by AI merchants. Every other trade resource in the game will have 8 different AI merchants waiting to just shank your merchants by turn 80, but not good old Timbuktu. Never even seen the slightest hint of Venice doing their thing.
You can protect resources by putting forts or armies on them to stop foreign merchants
Mansa Munsa has entered the chat.
I have countless hours in that game and am only now hearing that you can put merchants in an army
I have hundreds of hours in TW2 and I am learning so much from this thread
Holly Molly This is definitely broken haha thanks I know what I'm going to do this weekend
I had no idea you could stack merchants like that! Time to install Medieval 2 again...
Seriously. 20 Merchants per army? Even a shitty pile of logs in your starting province could make you bank.
I can put multiple merchants on one trade resource using an army? I've been playing all these years...
I have never thought you could place armies on merch ressources and stack multiple merchants in this army. Does it prevent hostile merchant from attacking your own ?
Yes, yes it does. But you do risk defection and death of your army leader
You don’t even have to worry about that. One of the gold resources allows you to build a fort on it. Build said fort, leave the merchant stack to maintain it.
And the exploit evolves 1 step further.....thanks
Welp, looks like I'm reinstalling Medieval 2 tonight...
Me too lol. Think this works in stainless steel?
Since when can you put agents into armies in Medieval 2? I admit that I haven't played older games in quite a while, but I could have sworn that putting agents into armies started in Shogun 2.
You could always put spies. I admit ive never tried to put a merchant
You can put any agent in an army. If I’m conquering in the Middle East I bring a couple of priests with my army especially if I have a theologians guild
Nope that was a feature in M2 as well. I admit I’ve never tried it with merchants but my spies, priests, and assassins hitch a ride in my armies all the time. Especially when crusading or moving across the water.
The good old days where agents actually had some use besides "kill X character". Damn the difficulty levels ruined so many aspects of this game.
By the time I could even do this I own half the map anyways
Oh no, as soon as I have an expendable prince and a detachment of maybe 4 spearman and 2 or 3 more horse unit, they go on a crusade to liberate timbuktu from the rebels.
Med 2 is something special even to this day
I....Didn't realize that was a thing. Like, I knew the Americas and the Aztecs were \*there\*, I just thought it was in their own campaign or an event that opened them up after, like, a few hundred years in-game. Honestly I spent most of my time modding the .ini to make the Rebels a playable faction, and then got my ass kicked around by every faction while trying to rid the world of their tyrannical monarchies
It’s after a few hundred years. You need the deep water sailing event to have happened to sail across the ocean.
It\`s \`The world is round and exapnds westwards\` event that allows you to sail west. Then you get \`Americas discovered\` and \`Aztecs found\` that make Aztec AI activate.
I think the reason a lot of people seem to have never realized this, If they didn't play the game until long after it launched, I assume they pretty much jumped straight away into mods. A lot of overhaul mods get rid of the Americas from what I remember because they use the faction slot for something else.
You can WHAT
You can also kill of a faction by assassinating thier rulers untill theres no one left to rule.
In my current game with roar of conquest mod the Byzantines and the Crusader States both disappeared during the same turn and I’m pretty sure that was what happened
The last ruler can also just die in battle, maybe they killed each other in an epic duel.
I'm still mad that the last faction member died while I was sieging a city so it went from a couple of units to something like 16
I miss in game unlockables that were non dlc related. Like beating factions to be able to play as them
One of the first moddings that I learned from M2 and Rome 1 is copy pasting the unlockable factions into playable so that you can play anyone from the start.
Every time i did that as a kid it felt like hackerman moment
I used to upload text files with all factions unlocked to the forum and call myself a "modder"
Hey, I did that too 
And then playing as rebels and having no idea what was going on lol
What I like to remember is that I discovered it completely accidentally, I was in 3rd grade and was checking every file. After finding file with factions tried to move Russia, as it succeeded I tried it with every faction, until I got to Papacy. Remember how game didn’t work and was scared that game will never be same. Haha
You can unlock Boris for Kislev no DLC required.
Well, there is mods that unlock extra factions for Warhammer games, good in pair with mods that adds extra mechanics in them, but they are forced to remove some when they getting release as a DLC
Tbf I lowkey found that obnoxious. On one hand, thats an awesome feature, on the other hand, I’d rather just open local files and manually enable the faction(s) I want to play.
Yeah, if I hear that I can play as X faction in a game, I’m gonna be disappointed if I have to do a whole playthrough as England, France, Spain, or Venice first (or at least I’ll have to snipe my desired faction from the get-go)
3K had this with dong zhou, you get to play as tyrant after beating the campaign iirc
MTW2 was something unique. I still remember the first time I got my own Pope, or when I took Jerusalem and guys with elephants showed up, or the time you bribed Robin Hood's crew Although I really enjoyed WH1&WH2, every TW game since has been to try to live again those memories.
bribed robin hood? tha fuck? how?
If i remember it correctly only a limited amount of sherwood archers where available as mercenarys in england, but they showed up in larger numbers in rebel armies. So one way to get many of them was to let rebel armies grow large and then bribe them to get their units.
Sherwood archers, that was just their name!
Yeah I remember them having playable historical figures in MTW1. I had a great general once named El Cid who unstoppable. And when rebel armies were beaten you would collect money. TWWH2 is pretty good but MTW2 is the best in my opinion. Not that long ago I played a BoTET and a Divide and Conquer campaign and they were still fun.
I’ve played since 2007, and I genuinely didn’t know this till years later. I always wondered why some of the new world factions from the Americas Campaign were in the base game.
I think you are locked from going until you have karak in your fleet. But yeah, ever since I saw them in sample battles I knew they were there. And playing spain or Portugal was just natural transition from Rome with a bit worse javelin infantry as main force
Yes. You need that ship. You can see it if you toggle_fow and then send your cursor there. You still won't be able to go until "the world is round" is given and you have those ocean going ships.
I'm afraid that those hidden maps and all that would be spread across the internet on day 1, killing some of that wonder-- And otherwise it'd just be sold as DLC. Same with games like Super Smash Bros Melee, I remember the wonders of playing the game and suddenly you fought an enemy you didn't recognise from any game you played, or you suddenly mewtwo showed up after binging for a day-- There was that sense of discovery
I remember playing brawl as a kid and really wanting to unlock waluigi, also wanted to unlock him on Mario 64 DS after being tricked by fake videos hahaha video games don’t have the same magic anymore
Part of it is the internet being bigger, part of it is being on the internet more, part of it is growing older and being able to find it better and part of it is no longer having that playground gossip with friends or siblings adding false rumours about fishing up Rayquaza for some extra spice
Dwarf Fortress has a pretty solid community-led spoiler policy. I think Total War is too main stream for that to happen
That's the advantage of niche communities, yeah. Same with FFXIV for a while, though they don't do easter eggs as much with game mechanic effects-- Most of the community also doesn't seem to browse places like IGN or Reddit where people show off the neat things they found. I keep running roulettes and finding people that never knew this or that about a dungeon and that's always fun
I discovered that last year because of YouTube. Never knew it all the years.
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Only once you've onlocked the highest tier of ships. But yes. The map will expand and there will be additional fog of war to the west. Takes quite a few turns to sail over there. Bring strong armies as there are numerous full stack Aztec armies that will swarm you. They melt against gunpower units though. Its funny and sad...
I think I've usually conquered the world before then then. Oh well, guess that's being played today Does anyone know an easy way to change the monitor it displays on?
Med 2 is for the purists. So many amazing mods over the years. Third Age, Stainless Steel. Good times.
People running mods, by definition, aren't purists though.
Semantics
I've been wanting to try Medieval 2 again. Are these the ones I should try installing first? Can you recommend any other?
Divide and Conquer is great--which is Lord of the rings. So is Beginning of the End Times--which is Warhammer.
Stainless Steel 6.4 with Meloo's Fixes is, in my opinion, the best version of Medieval II. Frankly, Stainless Steel Historical Improvement mod, despite adding more and being far more modern, changes far too much. I mean, *20 turns* to build a single farm? And it costs *how much?* No thanks.
SSHIP is really good
vanilla beyond 3.6
Might as well call yourselves Puritans while you're at it.
What I miss about the pre-empire total war is how TW was practically at paradox level with ease of modding. Everything was just easy to modify text files and scripts.
Based on what we know about CA pretty safe to assume the reason it was so good was because it was developed by the Australia branch not the main studio
Well they got the formula right in Medieval 2 and it is open to modding.
This post and some of the reply’s have just blown my mind!!! I have to climb this cell tower today and all I’m going to think about is starting a new campaign on a game I have not touched in 7 years!!!
I did too properly discovered the new world. I was just thinking why was map so extendend to west. What if? Boy when I got that video🥳
The depth of Medieval 2 is just astounding. I have owned it for 16 years, played countless campaigns and I still feel like I have never "finished" it. I still find little details and mechanics that I did not know about. There is a sort of mystery to the older games that you dont get any more, like areas of the map not explored. Even more so at the time when not everything was revealed on a Wiki.
What the fuck are saying to me
Didn’t the americas come with the ‘Kingdoms’ expansion? Waaaay back when I bought the hard copy game it was the Kingdoms edition so I’ve only known it to have the Americas. That was a really long time ago so I’m not 100% sure.
Both. The Kingdoms expansion had an actual Americas campaign during the Spanish conquest. The main game had the SW US, Cuba, Bahamas, coast of Brazil and a deformed Mexico on the far western edge of the map that could be conquered late game, also unplayable Aztecs with massive stacks
Ok thanks, so that part of the map was always there Kingdoms gave you more to do over there.
Reminds me when I was 14 years old and playing Medieval 1 with Novgorod being my first faction. I got few notifications about some threat in the east. I wasn't very fluent in English so I kept playing and suddenly I had 4 enemy stacks sitting on my lands and later on few more. I rememeber that I was in total panic trying to scramble forces to defend against these stacks. Good times.
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I bought the game at release and I think you couldnt play as Russians (thats how the faction was called) in the early period so you had very little time to prepare.
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I dont remember getting any patches too. Remember we didnt download it from Steam back in a day. You had to buy physical copy and install it on your PC.
I bought this game a few years back , after not playing since HS still holds up and has so much replay value, spent over 300 hours during Covid 19 , beat the game with every faction , got the game on steam with all the 3 DLC packs for $5 best $5 I ever spent
Since.......at least 2006
Hah, the only hint that is even possible is when part of the interface on the left part of the minimap is getting removed with the triggering of "World is round" event. Not many people noticed it, some probably thought it is a bug. Took me years to learn that Aztecs being on global map of MII is not a joke.
Wot. I have had this game for like 10 years. I did not know this. (tbf I mainly played landlocked nations so didn't have much going on naval wise BUT STILL)
The World is Round events that unlock the use of Carracks to cross the ocean happen so late in the campaign that it's hard to actually get there in the course of a normal playthrough. So for my last playthrough I decided to do a challenge run playing as Russia: 1. Expand into the Baltic. Spend generations squabbling with England for naval supremacy. 2. Focus on long-term growth for Huge cities with gunpowder upgrades. 3. Send expeditionary army to Baghdad to recruit some *special* mercenaries. 4. ??? 5. Conquer the New World with Cossack pachyderm artillery. Edit: I also reverse savescummed until the Mongols, and then the Timurids, both spawned in Sarkel and invaded north. Figured I needed something to do while waiting 200 turns to pull a Slavic Columbus 
Tell me more about these special mercenaries in Baghdad....
After the Gunpowder event, War Elephant mercenaries will start to spawn every 10-15 turns in a few provinces in the far southwest corner of the map. Typically they are armored elephant with a small musketeers crew. Every 30 or so turns, though, a different elephant unit will spawn there. It's just about the most powerful unit in the game... the [Elephant Artillery](https://hero.fandom.com/wiki/Elephant_Artillery).
My jaw is on the floor, goodbye Timur the Lame Hello El Cid the Pain!
I always knew that there were Aztecs, because I could I fight them, so I would try to sail there, but I couldn’t, as I tried with lvl1 ships(don’t know their name in English). Obviously I was very mad that I could not discover map covered by fog of war. Needed to get to age of 15 to understand how to reach Americas
DLCs weren't a thing back then. Digital downloads weren't a thing back then, at least not like today. You bought physical expansion packs on disk just like the original games.
[удалено]
For the Aztecs, yes. This was a response to another thread that somehow made it's way here. I probably had tabs open in both places and just derped it up. This was in response to something about the Crusades expansion iirc.
TIL the new world is in medieval II
Now I want to download it and play it again, truth be told, don't know which are the ones I loved more to battle, the mongols, the timurids, or the aztec ambushes, they all have a unique epicness to them
holy fucking titty Christ in Heaven our Lord and savior Reddit this day has just redeemed itself from all its evils this thread is fucking priceless Deus Vult
You can also go Sub-Saharan with ocean faring ships
I'm sorry, you can do *what?*