Fans of the series will notice the update here, seeing as the graphics has been revamped, and the engine looks much better now. You can have massive battles with several thousand men on the battlefield at once, and believe me when I say that this looks all the more impressive on a new rig. The battles may be too graphics intensive for some users, but in my opinion, you could play the entire campaign from the standard map view, and still have a game that's easily worth anyone’s penny.

When it comes down to tactics, you're going to want to brush up. On anything but the easy difficulty level, the enemy will employ flanking movements, kill off your cavalry with spearmen, nail your infantry with archers, and pretty much do anything in its power to make life anything but a walk in the park for you. In real life, there are of course some units more adept at killing certain types of units, and here I've done a quick rundown of some of the unit types you'll see playing the game.

Spearmen are the guys you want to put in front. They're the guys that are meant to fend off cavalry and make sure your archers don't get their behinds whooped. You can get all kinds of spearmen, from the peasants to the pro's and I actually found having 500 farmer spearmen more useful than 250 professionals. So take that as a small tip; if you play your cards right; having two lines of peasant spearmen thickly in the front can give you more of an advantage than one thin line of the more expensive ones (if you have archers in the back, of course).

Archers are hands down, my favorite unit, and as I played as the English, I had a ball. As the English you get the longbowmen, which are archers that can shoot arrows far longer than their colleagues. This pays off well when you're slaughtering the enemy archers from distances they can only dream to reach. Archers are the guys you want to set far behind if your enemy is attacking you, because they'll rain hell down from above. If you're attacking, however, I found a very useful way to rack up the kills is to have your archers and spearmen in front. Then you push your archers in front of the spearmen and as soon as the enemy cavalry comes along to take out your archers, you move the archers behind the spearmen quickly, and the cavalry will most likely back off (earning you a couple of free kills in the process) after which you can repeat as needed. The archers also have the awesome ability to set their arrows on fire, and I want you to picture a scenario for me. Scottish highlands, 400 English longbowmen versus 100 mad Scotsmen with blue kilts. The longbowmen set their arrows on fire, and after an hour, you'll have one hundred lightly toasted Scotsmen that swear to god that the next time, they'll make sure to wear armor.

Knights are your heavy infantry. I usually put them in the middle along with whatever other infantry I have, and if you've read this far, you'll know that I'm an infantry type of guy. The knights will pretty much kill off any infantry that can be thrown at you in the right situation, and knowing the right situation to use the right unit is the most basic definition of tactical knowledge. Heavy infantry is best used to stand behind your basic lighter infantry and take out whatever they're not man enough to handle.

Siege units are units designed to take down castle walls and larger concentrations of units, as they're very inaccurate. Personally, I enjoy using catapults against infantry because there's nothing quite as fun as to watch a huge ball of fire come flying towards peasants and blow them back to last August.