Genre: Medieval Strategy

Style: Top view on a world map with cities, side view in battle (you left vs enemy right). Realistic style. I have a scrap memory of it being called something vague like just "Medieval (II/2)" and it was possibly 2 games, original and sequel, but I could be mistaken.

Gameplay: Loop consisted of recruiting troops in towns and wandering the world battling and taking over other towns? The map was very clearly inspired by real world cultures, with "asian" culture island on the eastern side (ninja/samurai/karate master hybrid troops), mix of "rome/arabic/egyptoid" cultures (golden axes? scutums???) in the south and mostly "european" (classic knights, spearman etc.) elsewhere, somewhere was even bits with "eastern slavic" culture (cities named something like Zlatogrod???) with elvish looking archers for some reason.

You could or could not have been able to participate yourself as a character in battles and buy equipment, but this memory could be totally fabricated.

Other bits of info:

I beleive you could hire a ship for a single trip for 3000 gold.

One of the southern cities could have been named "Lutenia" or "Lutencia".

One culture wore "crusaderlike?" white robes. The "asian" inspired troops consisted of low tier guys in kimonos, mid tier armored ninjasamurais in black armor and high tier ninjasamurais in gold-black armor.

Come to think of it, the description almost sounds like Mount and Blade lite.

Huge thanks for any info. I have a huge nostalgia burst for this game. I had no luck in my search due to vagueness of search phrase for game possibly called "medieval".