I’ve played Medieval 2: Total War. Excellent game. You can manage your own battles or automatically resolve them, whether a field battle or castle (city) siege. The view of the battle is great (3D), troops can be managed to fit your desires, split them, join them, regroup them, use different modes of attack or defense (if they have the ability). When besieging, if you don’t have any siege equipment with you, you can spend a turn or two to make them. Each city or castle has a number of turns it can hold out a siege. Before that they can decide to march out and meet you head on.
Troops on the map are represented with a figure of a knight and you can see the strength of your troops before you engage in a conflict. It’s good to have a leader in a group for morale and to rally the troops if they start fleeing from the battle. Their experience will grow and though outnumbered you may sometimes win a hard battle. Also with experience their movement is greater (they don’t do shadow walk, 
)
There are merchants that you position over certain sources and they establish trade routes, foreign merchants may challenge your merchant and take over his enterprise.
Diplomats roam the land and negotiate. They may offer a peace treaty if you are at war, they may demand tribute or single payment, offer a province to you or request yours, trade rights, map information, etc. The royal marriages are a nice move to bring two kingdoms into alliance.
Of course, alliances don’t have to hold together forever.
The game is generally played in Europe, with some parts of Africa and Asia (talking about the game map here).
There is also the Pope and you are requested to stay in good relations with papal states. He may also demand from you to go to a crusade and fight “infidels”. If you don’t oblige his demands you may be excommunicated. There are catholic priests, orthodox priests, imams, witches and heretics. Priests are also like figures that can be moved across the map to preach and to ‘fight’ the heretics and witches. They gain exp, become more powerful (cardinals) and then may become the pope themselves. It’s good to have friends in high places. The pope has inquisitors and if your leader is declared a heretic, he may be burned publicly.
And yes, if the priest doesn’t succeed in converting a heretic or denounce a witch, he may become heretic himself.
Spies will reveal the map for you, discover what force you are facing whether on the field or in the city. They have a chance of opening the gates for you in case of siege, but you need to infiltrate they before you lay siege.
Assassins do what we all know. You don’t like this diplomat, foreign war leader or someone else? Get rid of them. Assassins may get caught and executed.
With time, all the figures gain experience but also die so you have to train new ones and replace them.
Cities and castles are automatically manageable or you can do it yourself. If you turn on automatic, you may choose a mode. It is wise to control the happiness or you people or they may start rioting. For cities or castles you get different buildings to choose, suitable for castle or city needs. It is advised to have equal amount of cities and castles. You may even convert a city to a castle or vice versa. The forces in the field need not be joined to fight together, they just need to stand in adjacent spaces to engage combat. Sea battles are always automatically resolved. You can see your trade routes and ports may be blockaded and stop trade to it. Blockading is done by a war navy. War ships can also transport troops and land them in any part of the land, doesn’t have to be a port.
Okay, this has gone long already and some of you may have played it also. This was for those that didn’t.
It kind of reminds me a lot of BR. Provinces, leaders, each faction has access to different troops with their strengths and weaknesses, also you may employ mercenaries (they are region characteristic). Map is the least problem, it is those BR specific tweaks to be build in. It doesn’t have the adventure mode, but it would be nice for a young war leader, priest or rogue to go adventuring and let the AI play out the diplomatic roles. To combine this game with Icewind Dale and be able to put together a party of 6 and go fight awnsheglien…
(and the game doesn’t ship until 2010).
