As far as battlefield combat goes, Medieval Total War just blows away the competition. You have full size battlefields that provide unlimited area no matter where the battle moves. The interface is simple yet gives excelent control of the entire army. The combat AI is realistic, not a hacking match like Age of Empires series. It really like controling a real battle. The bad news is that the political/economic part of the game between battles is mind numbingly stupid, and pretty much ruins the game. One example is you can only move armys one country at a time for each year, so it takes you about 8 years to move your troops into combat. You seem to be spending the entire time just closing these repetitive popup windows about what happened in the last “year”. They should really have that part of the game redone. BTW, starting from Denmark, I have taken control of all western europe and northafrica until I met with armys in russia and the balkans that finally outnumbered me and started driving me back, which is when I stopped playing the game.