I was so excited about this game, but now that I've spent my hard-earned cash on it, I feel a little short-changed. To its credit, the game looks lovely and I like the voice-acting. The AI, however, is dreadful. For example, in a pitched battle, I can send my archers to rain death on my foe and the fools just stand their ground while arrows land on them. Furthermore, diplomacy in Medieval 2 is utterly pointless. Playing France, I made alliances with the Holy Roman Empire and Denmark, only to have the swine invade my land two turns later. The Milanese then joined in the slug-fest for good measure. To add to my misery, some meddlesome inquisitors kept burning my generals at the stake, Italian merchants kept putting mine out of business and my agents were powerless to stop them. This, it should be noted, was on easy level. Not medium, not hard, easy. Consequently, Medieval 2 becomes unplayable after about 60 years' game time. Has anyone else had these problems, or am I doing something drastically wrong, here? Does anyone know if the patch will rectify these glaring inadequacies? Answers on a postcard, please.

Well if thats how you feel, have you tried messing with the AI settings to make the enemy harder. Thats what i did anyway. And its like a true battle. Shame the next game will only work on windows Vista.