History VideoGame / MedievalIITotalWar

* ArmourIsUseless: Averted for a while. Bullet-proof armor started with plate mail, so guns don't work as well as you would think when they first start off. However, as guns become better, they can ignore ALL armor points.

** Scotland is portrayed as essentially "Film/{{Braveheart}} Land". Scotland's special units are mostly Highlanders (medieval Scottish armies actually consisted mainly of Scots from the Lowlands and border areas) who all seem to be variants on Creator/MelGibson's William Wallace, complete with ahistorical kilt and woad, Averted by their Noble and Heavy pikemen and Swordsmen units later on and their Scots Pike Militia and non-unique units earlier on (And the Highland noble units also somewhat avert it as soon as they have their armour upgraded, trading in their kilts for heavy chainmail).

* GutturalGrowler: Spies from the Southern European factions speak like this.

* TheScrooge: A possible trait for generals, which comes into play when they're in charge of settlements.
* ScriptedEvent: ''Medieval II'' has five: the Mongol Invasion, the Black Death, the invention of gunpowder, the Timurid Invasion, and the discovery of the New World.

* TacticalRockPaperScissors: Somewhat. However, morale, experience, equipment, positioning and numbers (especially numbers) affect things.
** [[LightningBruiser Heavy cavalry]] ''completely slaughters'' light cavalry (if it can catch it), most infantry, [[GameBreaker as well as most units in the game]]. It does less brightly against spearmen and even worse against a pike wall. However, the hard counter to heavy cavalry is [[HorseArcher missile cavalry]].
** [[FragileSpeedster Light cavalry]] is best used to flank, capture routing enemies, charge archers, peasants or Siege weapons. Do not expect them to survive long against heavier troops.
** [[JackOfAllStats Spearmen]] have the edge over cavalry and can hold their own against most infantry. Pikemen, if deployed into pike walls, will completely negate cavalry charges, but are generally poor against anything else.

** Peasants [[JokeCharacter are just plain bad]]. However, they are effective at being CannonFodder, restricting your opponent's movement and harassing ranged troops mostly because they are cheap, numerous and [[WeHaveReserves expendable]]. Basically, they're made to be GoddamnedBats.

* AThicketOfSpears: Spear units of some sort are available to nearly any faction, and allow both the front and second ranks of a unit to attack.

* BurnTheWitch: Or [[TheHeretic heretic]].

* EvilPaysBetter: Instead of occupying a settlement with a minimum of fuss, you can choose to exterminate it, looting and tearing up the place while eliminating part of the troublesome population. This kills off lots of people, gives you the same amount of money as occupation and brings the settlement's public order up a lot due to fear and a large reduction in squalor. Sacking the settlement is a less extreme version of exterminating that also gives you more money. See analysis for more detailed information.

* FaceHeelTurn: Even if you max out a character's chivalry rating, you can still go the other way and max out his dread by making him perform wicked deeds.

* MoraleMechanic: The Italian factions' infantry are [[LosingTheTeamSpirit susceptible to break]] in prolonged fights, forcing them to rely on the Carroccio Standard (a wagon with a bell and a banner on it) to keep their spirit high. Unsurprisingly, expect it to be the [[ShootTheMedicFirst attention of the enemy's angry cavalry]].
** [[ButtMonkey Sicily]] doesn't even have the standard to help with her infantry's morale. Apparently, her Italian neighbors refused to share the secret of the bell wagon with her.

* RagsToRoyalty: Captains who win amazing victories can be adopted into the royal family and even inherit the crown. Even if the unit that they were in charge of was a peasant mob.

** You will need to build lots of Churches/Mosques and play nice with neighboring factions of the same faith if you intend to remain in the good graces of Catholicism/Islam. Participating in Crusades/Jihads is also MANDATORY.
** Establishing Trade Rights doesn't come without a small cost as diplomatic inactivity between you and your trading partners will slowly cause your relations to go sour with them.
** Orthodox factions don't have to worry about the Pope as he only calls for a crusade or a ceasefire among Catholic factions. They do have to worry about being the target of a Crusade/Jihad however.

** This is perhaps one of the few viable strategies you can employ with Peasants. Although they will quickly die in droves against a superior enemy, and are prone to routing at the first sign of trouble, they are extremely cheap (110 florins per unit!) and easy to spam. Intelligently used (and ideally backed with a capable Chivalrous general to raise their morale), a horde of peasants can tie up enemy units so that other peasants (or other higher quality troops) can swing around and hit them in the flanks. With enough peasants, you can literally surround, envelop, and drown your enemies in men, breaking their morale even though the peasants should have been slaughtered in a fair fight. This strategy works slightly less well in sieges due to most melee fights happening in narrow streets or on the walls, though having massive numbers of peasants can still slow down the enemy's advance and exhaust them enough for the REAL troops to finish them off.

* AerithAndBob: England suffers from this a lot; despite ostensibly starting as Norman and Plantagenet England, you can have members of your royal family with Anglo-Saxon names like Tostig, Morcar and Uhtred well into the 15th Century. It gets even worse when you have a general with a very Anglo-Saxon first name and a very Norman surname, such as [[MultiethnicName "Aelfgar Beaufort"]]. The ''Britannia'' expansion generally averts this, with the curious exception of English lords being named "Alphonso." This one at least is [[JustifiedTrope Justified]] -- during the time period in which the campaign is set, Alphonso was the name of Edward I's heir.

* MultiEthnicName: See AerithAndBob above.

* {{Mayincatec}}: Refreshingly averted in the ''Kingdoms'' expansion, where it's repeatedly shown that the Mayans and Aztecs are two very different cultures (the Incas don't appear).

* PenPushingPresident: A meta example; as the leader of a nation, the need to micromanage one's kingdom will rise with every territory gained. Building a vast empire through conquest is far simpler than keeping it running smoothly over the decades of the medieval period. That includes finding the most competent generals to govern the most valuable towns, managing and replacing agents like merchants and spies, continuing the [[HeirClubForMen royal bloodline]] and keeping it from getting RoyallyScrewedUp, and most importantly: controlling a large enough standing army and city garrisons to wage war and still prevent uprisings while maintaining a positive cashflow. The player can of course choose to ignore the VastBureaucracy needed to keep the empire standing, until they find it [[DystopiaIsHard collapsing under the weight]] of its own mis-management.

** The English longbowmen are pretty much the epitome of this. You'll be hard-pressed to find ''any'' ranged unit that can consistently cause as much damage at long range, short of extreme late-game artillery units like the culverin. Longbowmen can get into shooting matches with multiple
''artillery'' units and consistently ''win''. Taken even further in [[GameMod the ''Stainless Steel'' mod]], where the longbowmen have range comparable to most artillery units. And in that mod, [[GameBreaker Scotland can use them, too]]. Given the longbowmen's historical successes, this is pretty much TruthInTelevision.

* AnythingThatMoves: A taunt often directed at the French.

* BonusBoss: The Aztecs could count as such. Their continent shows up late in the game with several full stacks of units guarding their territory, and unlike real life, those huge armies don't crumble as soon as you get a few horses and guns on the field with them. It helps that the game doesn't simulate their forces being ravaged by European diseases.

* EvilPaysBetter: Instead of occupying a settlement with a minimum of fuss, you can choose to exterminate it, looting and tearing up the place while eliminating part of the troublesome population. This kills off lots of people, gives you the same amount of money as occupation and brings the settlement's public order up a lot due to fear and a large reduction in squalor. See analysis for more detailed information.

* PoliticallyActivePrincess: Princesses function very similarly to diplomats, though there are some important differences to note.
* PowerfulAndHelpless: You could have the strongest empire in the game with territory spanning all of Europe, a treasury packed with gold and an army that even the [[HordesFromTheEast golden horde]] fears to challenge - and none of it will matter when TheBlackDeath strikes. You will be utterly screwed. Your cities will slowly die off, producing a fraction of the gold they once did. Your armies will shrivel and die as your best soldiers are taken by the plague. You're going to need that enormous treasury, because it will be drained dry by the time the plague is finally over. Nothing can prepare you for the onslaught of [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yersinia_pestis Yersinia pestis]]. You're in the middle ages; there is no germ theory of disease and won't be one for another 700 years. There is no cure and no way to prevent the spread. All you can do is move all your generals and elite professional troops out of your towns before the plague strikes to keep them alive and wait it out while your population is slowly halved over the course of half a century. The one upside is that your enemies will be equally ruined by the plague, and you can infect your own spies and send them to enemy cities to infect them too, making them easier to conquer later.

** Ornamental Armor is good for making a General look nice to his people but it drops the morale of his troops since they know he looks silly and unprotected.
** A Princess with a Secret Lover is essentially an uncharming and cheating infidel after marriage.

* ReligionOfEvil: Paganism and Heresy are both universally intolerable religions, one being a holdout of ancient times and the other being an active and willful deviation of the local faith.

* ScrewThisImOuttaHere: Having an enemy join a crusade, but taking too long to get to your destination can cause units to start becoming disgruntled and abandoning your army. Making a crusading army abandon the cause or taking the general out of the crusade will put all your units (in the crusade) in danger of abandoning you in the next few turns if you don't reinstate their crusade status. If you are attacking a far off place, you probably should use a boat, but units can still abandon you at sea.

*** Sicily is a kingdom controlling both Naples (Southern Italy) and Palermo (Sicily) under King Roger, whose heir is Prince Simon. Roger I of Sicily was only Count of Sicily and it was his son, Roger II, who made Sicily a Kingdom in 1130. At the same time, his brother, Robert Guiscard, controlled Southern Italy, but as Duke of Apulia and Calabria[[note]]The toe and heel of the Boot[[/note]], and Naples would be part of its own small, but separate, principality that wouldn't be annexed by Roger II until 1137.

*** [[AluminumChristmasTrees Actually, a]] [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albigensian_Crusade Crusade in France]] [[RealityIsUnrealistic isn't as strange as you'd think...]]

* AnAxeToGrind: Axes are an uncommon melee weapon with the armor-piercing attribute. Denmark in particular uses these.

*** Sicily is a kingdom controlling both Naples (Southern Italy) and Palermo (Sicily) under King Roger, whose heir is Prince Simon. Roger I of Sicily was only Count of Sicily and it was his son, Roger II, who made Sicily a Kingdom in 1130. At the same time, his Robert Guiscard controlled Southern Italy, but as Duke of Apulia and Calabria[[note]]The toe and heel of the Boot[[/note]], and Naples would be part of its own small, but separate, principality that would be annexed by Roger II in 1137.

** The religion of the Mongols is Islam, even though they were practitioners of Tengriism (a Turkic religion). In fact, they only converted to Islam in the 14th century.

* ''[[https://www.moddb.com/mods/planetwar-total-war Planet War]]'': A... rather interesting mod set in a distant planet in the distant furture, and features a large scale map consisting of a myriad of dinosaur, robot, and "alien"[[labelnote:read]][[IntercontinuityCrossover Characters from several franchises]] such as ''Franchise/{{Shrek}}'', ''Series/{{Teletubbies}}'', ''Series/BarneyAndFriends'', ''Film/{{Avatar}}'', ''Franchise/{{Godzilla}}'', etc.[[/labelnote]] factions to choose from. Sadly, the mod creator seemingly fell down the alt-right pipeline and turned the mod into what could only be described as a horrifically racist mess. After a [[https://old.reddit.com/r/totalwar/comments/xprwq2/this_mod_made_me_feel_unclean/?sort=top post on the TotalWar subreddit]] brought this to light (screenshots of the mod are in the comments), the mod was deleted from ModDB.

* ''[[https://www.moddb.com/mods/planetwar-total-war Planet War]]'': A... rather interesting mod set in a distant planet in the distant furture, and features a large scale map consisting of a myriad of dinosaur, robot, and "alien"[[labelnote:read]][[IntercontinuityCrossover Characters from several franchises]] such as ''Franchise/{{Shrek}}'', ''Series/{{Teletubbies}}'', ''Series/BarneyAndFriends'', ''Film/{{Avatar}}'', ''Franchise/{{Godzilla}}'', etc.[[/labelnote]] factions to choose from.

* TheFightingIrish: Ireland is a playable nation in the ''Britannia'' expansion, noteworthy for its rather strong cavalry and skirmisher units, fierce (if unreliable) infantry, and open rebellion against English rule - most English-controlled cities on the island are already halfway to revolt by the start.