ALBANY, March 28 — Gov. Eliot Spitzer brought a hard-charging style to Albany, taking on adversaries personally and directly, even lambasting lawmakers in their home districts. But the State Legislature knows how to play hardball too, and the rookie governor is having to meet them halfway on his first budget.

So after Governor Spitzer waged a lonely, bruising political battle to try to reduce Medicaid costs — and was attacked in millions of dollars of television ads paid for by the health care union and a hospitals association — he ended up agreeing to restore many proposed cuts as part of the budget deal he is hammering out.

In a news conference Wednesday afternoon, Mr. Spitzer claimed a victory of sorts, saying that the agreements he and legislative leaders had reached so far had given him much of what he wanted. But he acknowledged that he had had to alter many of his key proposals to win the support of lawmakers.

“The overall level of spending, obviously, it is a bit higher than I had initially wanted,” Governor Spitzer said. “As I’ve said to a number of you over the course of today, you do not turn a battleship inside a bathtub. It takes a bit more than one budget cycle to get us down to the spending levels we want.”

Talks are still under way as the governor and the Legislature struggle to meet the April 1 budget dealine. But both sides say the Legislature has succeeded in increasing Mr. Spitzer’s proposed budget by nearly $1 billion — about the amount it usually adds to a governor’s budget. And now lawmakers in both parties are questioning privately whether the governor’s alpha-dog style has been all that effective.

State Senator Joseph L. Bruno, the Republican majority leader, who led the main opposition to the governor’s budget and sometimes found himself at the business end of the governor’s public tongue-lashings, seemed pleased.

“You know, I’ve stated before and others have stated, when you want to talk about numbers — depends on how you count,” Mr. Bruno said at a hearing, to much laughter. “You understand that, I understand that, this governor’s learned it quickly.”

The counting was still not done on Wednesday night. While there were many areas still to be agreed on, the agreements drove total spending for next year up to more than $121.6 billion — making it the ninth-largest increase of state-financed spending in the last 40 years, according to the Empire Center for Public Policy, a conservative policy group.

Civic groups — which have been largely supportive of Governor Spitzer so far — were decidedly cool to the few details that emerged from the budget negotiations. The Citizens Budget Commission, which praised many of the governor’s proposals, called the agreed-on Medicaid cuts “modest,” and said the price for achieving them was high in terms of increased spending overall.

Numerous civic groups complained about the secrecy of the budget talks, saying that it looked as if, in the rush to make the April 1 deadline, the governor would have to waive the constitutional requirement that gives lawmakers three days to study laws before voting on them.

There were many contentious issues left to be resolved — any one of which could derail the chances of passing a budget by Sunday. These included whether to allow more charter schools in the state, whether to add a nickel deposit to cans and bottles of non-carbonated beverages, whether to give a tax break to people who send their children to private and parochial schools, and whether to give pay raises to judges.

But in a number of areas, Mr. Spitzer argued that the agreements he won would yield dividends in the future, even if they did not look significant at first.

His plan to create a new school spending formula to send more money to New York City and other high-needs districts survived, with some significant changes. But the Republican-led State Senate got him to double the amount of operating aid being sent to Long Island’s school districts, and to increase aid to other wealthy districts.

This allows the governor to boast that he has boiled the state’s many arcane formulas down to one understandable, predictable formula, and that he has broken the historic system of dividing school aid by shares — a system that always gave New York City close to 39 percent of new school aid and Long Island between 12 and 13 percent.

Senate Republicans lost their fight to change the new formula to enshrine the current share system, but were nonetheless able to win an agreement to add $420 million outside the formula to make sure Long Island gets its traditional share next year.

“In terms of operating aid, what we call above the line, I believe our share will be at least what it was in the past” said Senator Dean G. Skelos, a Long Island Republican. “Maybe a little more.”

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