Here, finally, nothing seemed to go right. I donвЂ™t remember if you could hear pennants snapping in that game, but in my memory I can hear them clear as day as my depleted army of elite knights, longbowmen, and men-at-arms waited for the Egyptians to descend on our position. Clouds of sand swirled over the battlefield, and the wind and waves seemed to boom like a drum from the distant shoreline. A different soundtrack than the bombastic ones from my European battles accompanied this engagement: Instead of drums and horns, there was only a lonely, solo lament. There was the weight of in-game history behind this battle. Hell, IвЂ™d lose everything I had gained since my armies had been scrapping in the Scottish Highlands to consolidate my hold on the British Isles. My last great North African army had to hold off the Egyptians or IвЂ™d lose everything IвЂ™d gained across this campaign. In the end, everything came down to one desert battle along the Mediterranean coast.

'Medieval: Total War' screenshots courtesy of Sega And now the Egyptians were mounting a counterattack. In the meantime, my front in Poland was starting to buckle. I sank all my money into expensive upgrades for my main fortress in Cairo that would make it a kind of medieval Death Star, but which would take many, many turns to complete. Vast numbers of troops were diverted into occupation armies, tasked with putting down rebellions in newly-captured provinces ranging from southern Spain to Libya, denying reinforcements to my exhausted Egyptian expedition. I donвЂ™t remember the details of the campaign, only that it succeeded wildlyвЂ¦ and left me massively overstretched.

I would capture the Nile Delta, shatter EgyptвЂ™s strength, and then use the the Nile basin as as a launchpad for direct attacks on the Byzantine heartland. In my case, this meant a Crusade across Northern Africa against the the gameвЂ™s great Muslim power: Egypt. So I did what empires so often do, which was to open another imperial frontier in an attempt to gain new resources that I could then turn against my main rival. In one of my campaigns as the English in Medieval: Total War, I was mired in a war of attrition against the seemingly endless strength of the Byzantine Empire, on a front stretching from Poland to Italy. Nevertheless, itвЂ™s to this memory I return. A problem of aging, both for me and for Total War. None quite measures up, and sometimes I think thatвЂ™s a problem with me, sometimes I think itвЂ™s a problem with the series, and the truth is that itвЂ™s a problem of experience, expectations, and change. Every single Total War game gets compared to this one memory from one battle I fought about fifteen years ago.

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