The Creative Assembly's road to success with Total War started with feudal Japan and Shogun, and since then the developer hasn't looked back.
Its latest game, Empire: Total War, was announced at this year's Games Convention in Leipzig, revealing an 18th century-setting strategy epic. One of the key features is the introduction of 3D naval warfare to the series, which the developer says is something it's always wanted to do - and the Empire era is perfect for its debut.
But naval warfare isn't the end of the new addition story - The Creative Assembly is promising enhancements across the board and generally deeper gameplay than we've witnessed in previous titles in the series, but at the same time cutting down on micro-management to avoid overburdening players.
Studio director and co-founder Mike Simpson and lead designer James Russell tell us more.
So, tell us about Empire: Total War...
James Russell: Empire: Total War's set in the 18th century and the time of the Industrial Revolution, the American Revolution and the French Revolution.
That's alot of revolutions.
Russell: And it's a revolutionary step for the game engine as well. Medieval II was an evolution of current technology. It's an all-new engine for Empire.
The single biggest thing we're adding is naval battles. It's always something we wanted to do. Naval battles are basically the third part of the game - so you have the turn-based campaign, real-time land battles and now we have real-time sea battles as well.
Why choose this particular period for the next Total War game?
Russell: We've always been attracted to this period.
Let us guess - navels, right?
Russell: We wanted to do naval warfare, and this is the ideal era to introduce it, it's the great age of fighting sail. This is the time people think of when they think of lines of sailing ships fighting each other.
It's an interesting period for us to do. It's a way to advance the gameplay and bring some enhancements to the gameplay that there is on the battlefield.
Mike Simpson: There's also the thing that technology was changing very rapidly as well. With a Total War game you really need a period where there's some kind of technological change to drive the whole technology tree.
Russell: Having said that, we don't want to create the impression that it's just about gunpowder units and ranged warfare. Obviously there's plenty of hand-to-hand fighting in the period as well, because the weapons were quite inaccurate. You have to get up pretty close to fire effectively, which means there's all sorts of melee fighting.
How does the different Empire stuff fit into the gameplay?
Russell: In loads of different ways. Obviously on the campaign map, the turn-based part of the game, we're expanding the scope in terms of geography, so we haven't just got Europe and the Middle East.
We've got the whole of India in the east and in the west we've got the United States and the Caribbean and Central America. We've lots of exotic factions and unit types that fit with each of those areas.
There are more features on the campaign map. Every time we do a new game we look at a feature set that's appropriate to the period. So for the Empire period we've got a lot of interesting stuff to do with technological development, the Enlightenment, the government types, that kind of thing.
But we don't want to overburden the player. We want to make sure we get deeper gameplay but that it's more centralised so you're thinking about it in terms of your whole country rather than making decisions again and again and repeating them throughout different regions. So you get deeper gameplay but less micro-management.
So talk us thourgh naval combat then.
Russell: On the battle maps, obviously naval battles are a whole new area of the game. But land battles also have a whole lot of new features.
It's the age of gunpowder, so there's a lot more ranged combat. For the first time on the battlefield we've got buildings that can be occupied. And they're destructible as well so you can order units inside buildings, you can blow them up with canon.
There's a whole lot of different things that the units can do that they didn't do before in terms of firing drills, different formations, the use of cover with ranged weapons - there's a whole lot of new features for battles.
You've talked about fleshing the game out with all these new gameplay features - how have you tried to flesh out the core strategy gameplay without over-complicating it?
Simpson: On the battlefield, the core gameplay - or the core tactics and strategies of the time - are actually stronger and simpler. So you get things like infantry in a square formation which is pretty much immune to cavalry.
But a line formation firing into a square will decimate it. A cavalry against a line formation will destroy that. So the rock, paper, scissors part of the game in a way is simpler and stronger. But then you get the exceptions...
You're right in a way - it's very easy to make a very complicated game. The art of doing good design is to make something that's complicated actually something that's simple. We're capturing all the tactics and strategies and putting them in a package that isn't complicated at all.
I think perhaps in the past we're probably guilty of throwing the player in at the deep end - giving them too much to do right at the start of the game. This time we're going to introduce the player to the game a little more carefully. So you'll start off with a very small feature set and then gradually expand out rather than be dropped immediately in the deep end.
Last year was a big year for RTS games on PC. Have they influenced your design of Empire: Total War in any way, or do you stick to your own ideas?
Simpson: We're different in a way. We aren't that top-down, build up an army and throw it at the enemy type of game.
Russell: We're a very different proposition. We've got a grand strategy game, with the way you're controlling a whole country, a whole nation, and then on the battle map you've got thousands and thousands of soldiers. All sorts of things make a difference to how they perform, not just their stats but exactly how you use them.
Total War is a hardcore PC series, but a lot of developers previously known for producing PC-only franchises and games are now taking their properties multiplatform. Why haven't you guys followed suit?
Simpson: Doing a strategy game on PC, you're doing stuff that you just can't do on console, even with the next-gen stuff. If you're doing a strategy game for consoles, you have to design it for consoles. It would be very, very difficult to do anything even close to Total War on console. You'd have to change too much about it to make it work.
Can RTS games work on a console then, in your opinion?
Simpson: In theory, yeah, I don't see any particular reason why not. Very early in the history of consoles, there were a few games which people tried to port from PC onto console, and they did it really badly.
Pretty much the whole market said 'whoa - you can't do RTS games on consoles'. But it's because they were ports - bad ports. If you're going to do a strategy game for consoles, you have to design it for consoles.
I'm sure the movement into the Americas during the 18th century also has nothing at all to do with the popularity of the Pirates movies. Certainly not...
I loved the original Shogun, but never really got into the others as much. I look forward to seeing what they can do with the series now.
Well, they didn't really have anywhere else to go after medieval 2.
that's one thing I missed about medieval 2, naval battles were just so pathetic.
I would like to see more customisation within cities too, for instance I found you can't move your units on your walls, back to the second or first walls, you had to take them off the walls and move them all the way over to the gates on the ground.... Pretty randomly stupid if you ask me
Just one of the minor annoyances anyway.
Can't wait for this to come out so I can buy it and back it up!
Yeah I hated that wall thing too, it even showed like mini wall gatehouses for people to go through but you just couldn't.
I can't wait for this game, really can't.
I torrent virtually ALL games, but this I am DEFINITELY going to buy! One of the very few companies that actually deserve money for not jumping on every possible bandwagon for the extra sales.
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