Medieval: Total War is very different from AOE and the other RTS games. It's really two games put together: a strategy game and a tactical game.

The strategy game looks like a board game, much like Risk. As in a board game, there's no time pressure at all. You move armies from province to provice. You build buildings that do various things. The sea is also divided into regions, and you can build ships and control the sea to move troops and establish lucrative trade routes. There are also non-army strategy units, like assassins, spies, princesses (for politically useful marriages), and religious figures that try to convert the peasantry.

The strategy game is the slowest part of the game, especially if you have a big empire to rule. The good news is that you can turn some of the bureaucratic drudgery over to the computer.

The more exciting half is the tactical game, which is real time but pauseable. Picture a 3D rolling landscape, with trees and a farmhouse or two. The weather ranges from perfect calm to thunderstorm to sandstorm (in the desert). On this terrain you have an army of up to 960 men, and you can see each and every man in the army. There's a little figure for every man, and the combat consists of calculations in which each little man fights on an individual basis. It looks just like hundreds of men in medieval armor trying to kill each other.

You manage the men in groups of 60-100. The interface is simple: select a unit, and then either drag out a rectangle for it to assume a new position, or click on an enemy group to attack. The tactics are very historical. They depend on terrain, weather, position, and troop types. Spearmen to well against cavalry. Archers do poorly in rain. Morale is key, as usually one side will rout when they've lost about half their strength. Troops get tired and lose effectiveness, especially in bad weather or while fighting. Defenders can retreat into castles, and attackers can tear down castle walls with ballistas, catapults and trebuchets.

In short, it's a really big and complicated game, and that's without going into the history that it's wrapped in. If you're into big complicated strategy games, they don't get much better than this. But if you don't like to sit and ponder battle plans, then maybe it's not for you.