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Medieval 2: Total War Kingdoms

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ESRB: Alcohol Reference,Blood,Language - Mild,Sexual Themes,Tobacco Reference,Violence
Publisher: Sega
Genre(s): Strategy
Home Page: http://www.totalwar.com

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By: Jarno Kokko Sep 12, 2007

Visuals and hardware requirements unchanged

The expansion uses the same engine, and the requirements on the box are identical to Medieval 2: Total War. The packaging adds new "recommended hardware", which appear to be pretty close to YouGamers minimum recommendation. In any case, even a fairly old PC will run the game fine on medium settings, and if you go down to the lowest settings and drop the resolution, even the listed minimum will run the game - we just can't recommend it as the performance and the visuals will be compromised too far.

As the new campaign maps are smaller than the huge map used in Medieval 2: Total War, late game performance problems on marginal systems are not such an issue any more. The game still enjoys a healthy amount of CPU power, both in real time battles and in the strategy map, and 1GB of system RAM is strongly suggested as a practical minimum; the video card only affects the level of extra details you can turn on.

Everything minimized.

Medium settings - playable as shown with the YouGamers minimum system.

Everything set to the absolute maximum - you can get very close to this on the YouGamers recommended setup.

As Kingdoms is a strategy title, smooth frame rate is not that essential, and the game remains perfectly playable at around 20 fps. This is a good thing, as bumping up every setting to maximum causes the frame rate to hover around 15-20 fps even with a Get it! ATI Radeon HD 2900XT - so there are plenty of things to render even for the high-end cards.

This is probably the closest zoom level usable for actual play, and most of the time you are zoomed out even further, so the shiny details tend to be unimportant.

Turn-based map outside battles doesn't really need the maximum settings for play, but it sure doesn't hurt.

Now it must be said that most of the shiny details you can turn on with the top end systems don't really affect the game one bit, as the game can't be played while zoomed up so close that you could actually see the detail you get at maximum settings. While the medium settings may look a bit crude when zoomed close up, it doesn't really affect the gameplay and the YouGamers recommendations take this into account. The YouGamers minimum recommended system (a 3GHz CPU system with 128MB Get it! ATI Radeon X1600 or Get it! NVIDIA GeForce 6600) allows you to play the game with medium details, with occasional slowdowns during the biggest battles involving large cities.

Our recommended system (3.8GHz with a 256MB Get it! ATI Radeon X1950 Pro or Get it! NVIDIA GeForce 8600 GT) lets you bump up the visuals close to maximum in general play, again with the disclaimer that you may have to drop the visuals a bit during large battles in huge cities. You should also ensure you have plenty of hard drive space - the full installation (Medieval 2: Total War and all four Kingdoms campaigns) eats up a whopping 12 GB. As a compromise you can install each campaign separately if you are low on disk space, so technically you can fit the game in 9 GB when playing just one campaign.