Total War: Rome Two Preview

Rome total war is arguably the best rts game of it’s time and still has very active community of both players and modders. When a game as old as Rome: Total War (2004) still has as large online community as it does something had to be done right, lets see if Creative assembly can repeat it’s sucses and make a game with factions balanced in  player vs player and that has as high replay value as original Rome did.

Live action trailer.

Battles will be bigger and more detailed

According to CA the game will run on entirely new engine and will support much larger battles and more detailed units. For first time in Total War game navy will be able to participate in same battles with the land units by bringing reinforcements  and even providing covering fire to landing units or attacking walls with ships ballistas.

Archers will be able to take cover behind wooden barricades to avoid enemy fire. CA also wants you to start thinking about individual units more by giving individual stacks their own history and traits. (Do you really want to lose your legionaries that have large amount of positive traits, or will you send reinforcements to support them?) You will also be able to name your units like in the newer total war games.

According to James Russell the game will feature deep game play even with factions other than Rome. Greek city states for example will likely not be a single faction (as in Rome) but be separate factions instead. 

Diplomacy

Sure the game is called total war, but even in war it is important to maintain diplomatic relationships to avoid war on multiple fronts , to get money from trade with other factions and to ally yourself with factions that have similar interests.

Previously Total war games had separate diplomatic and campaign map AIs  According to Russell these systems will be combined. “so you might be able to spy on the AI, and see it thinking about double crossing, building up forces about to attack you. Because these systems are integrated we can explain to the player not just the stuff to do with diplomatic relations, but also give you a reason.  It’s not just it won’t do a trade agreement because you’re -83 diplomacy, but because strategically, it wants that region of yours and therefore it’s just not going to make a trade agreement with you. And it makes it more human, so that there’s real thinking going on behind it.”

The AIs will also have their own personalities “We acknowledge that AI is a key part of making the world believable and fun to play. We also want to make them more human and personality-driven; for example, those guys are vengeful, so you don’t want to piss them off because they’ll kick you back, whereas another AI might be more realpolitik and look at the bigger picture.”

Lead designer interview

Modding

Modding is certainly one of the reasons original Rome was, and still is as popular as it is. The modding will be more complicated than in original Rome because the game will be more complex and everything wont be in simple text files anymore. CA wants modders because they increase game longevity and as such makes game more desire able to players that like to use mods. They aren’t threatened of the effects mods have on dlc sales “. But I don’t think we feel threatened by that in terms of producing our own content, we’re confident about what we do and I think we make great DLC content. And there are things that we can do, because, we can change the code and so on, that the modders couldn’t do.”.

Hopefully CA manages to create a true classic as the original was.