Rory MacLellan, a postdoctoral research fellow for Historic Royal Palaces at the Tower of London, told LiveScience in a telephone interview, "Being a hospice, that doesn’t necessarily mean what it does today, so it’s this mixture of, almost like a youth hostel for people traveling, but it also provides medical care, like a hospital would today, and it’s also a bit like an alms house, like sheltered living for homeless people. The influx of pilgrims in the years following the First Crusade further added to its development as an important fixture in the Latin East. There’s still some errant unit activity, but we’ve seen little evidence of units sitting around waiting to be killed, or getting lost entirely.Favorable conditions in the aftermath of the First Crusade and the creation of the Crusader States resulted in the hospice being granted independence from the Benedictine monks and it was allowed control over its own affairs, according to Riley-Smith. Battles play out more convincingly than in previous games. The battlefields are vastly more detailed than ever before, especially around towns, with the smaller scale details now coming into effect in the form of battlefield defences, use of buildings by troops, and accurate cover. Here too the sheer weight of ideas produced by the Creative Assembly team is in evidence. To take the regions required for a grand campaign win condition will always result in armed conflict, and that means spending some time on the battle map, where a human mind is always better than an automated conflict. While being a great statesman is very useful, victory will ultimately be decided by war. Of course, most of those layers of government, from construction to policy, can be left to the auto-management of the game, leaving you to perform the most cursory state management and unit production, and to concentrate on the thing that truly beats at the heart of Total War: the battlefield itself. Seeing the columns of smoke rising reminds you how much work you still have to do. It’s now genuinely possible for a region to become war-torn, as enemy units occupy and torch outlying settlements – devastating your infrastructure if your armies remain safely garrisoned inside a fort or walled city. It’s on the turn-based campaign map that we see the best of it. It’s the thirst for detail – much of it historically accurate, some of it simply entertaining – that defines the entire game. Truly, this is a multi-layered game of cold-blooded strategy. Early races into particular areas of technology really do pay off, especially when you combine them with the diplomacy screen, trading technological supremacy with your friends for advantage over your enemies. Or to know your men are going to fight more effectively on the battlefield because they’ve got well-made bayonets on their muskets. It’s genuinely satisfying to see your efforts poured into agriculture result in a leap in taxation profits from farming. In fact, the tech tree and research process is one of the areas that Empire seems to have nailed down best. This means you can push industrial, military, agricultural, or social research at different levels and reap the rewards. One of the new agent types is a ‘gentleman’ and these can be installed in schools to speed up learning.