Making a Bigger War in Rome 2
Creative Assembly talks about how they're building a sequel to arguably the best Total War game.
The original Rome: Total War was a high point for the
franchise and strategy games in general, a gorgeous, sublimely playable
fusion of real-time tactical battles between obscenely large armies and
turn-based empire management. It was a complete wartime experience,
letting you do everything from develop city infrastructure and manage
taxes to personally order your cavalry to charge from a flanking
position and snap the spine of your greatest enemy’s morale. At this
point for Creative Assembly, Rome 2 was the next natural step.
“It’s almost universal. Everybody wants Rome 2," said lead designer James Russell. "We want to do it, and the fans want it. We have to do it. It’s a massive project. The budget is way bigger than Shogun 2. It needs it. The Roman world is so huge and active, you’ve got so much more variety in terms of building styles, fighting styles, it’s just a lot more production. It’s such a big world. It’s a realistic goal to make these battles look like nothing you’ve ever seen in a game before.”
While some of that may be hype, he’s not exaggerating all that much about how good Rome 2 looks. Considering the chaos drummed up by thousands of units onscreen at once firing flaming arrows and disembarking from ships to climb into siege towers and assault colossal cities, alongside the staggering amount of detail in individual unit animations and armor styles, it’s easy to fear that the framerate might slow to an erratic jitter on PCs without the most powerful hardware.
“It’s a new lighting model, a new particle system so particles are casting shadows and receiving scene lighting. That’s literally twenty percent of the way there. We’ve still got nearly a year until even alpha. We really want to make sure we’re not moving the min spec [from Shogun 2]. We can’t say absolutely that the min spec will be the same, but that is our intention. We want to keep it accessible to people without the biggest rig, but at the same time, we want to push the biggest rigs and use everything they’ve got.”
The enhanced presentation will include facial animations on units, and not just for the commander units. You’ll watch soldiers react with shock as their follow soldiers get pelted by arrows and die during a battle, and these types of details will be easier to see with a unit camera that follows soldiers from an over-the-shoulder style perspective. This is all part of an effort by Creative Assembly to make it feel like you’re controlling human-ish soldiers instead of vast collections of emotionless robots.
The studio wants to integrate that same kind of human element into the campaign progression as well, adding story and motivation. “It’s interactive. We don’t want to have a fixed, scripted campaign. It’s about weaving human-level plots and archetypal ancient world storylines into the way you’re playing the campaign game. We want to render Rome with some kind of internal conflict. Do I save the Republic, or do I make myself Emperor? Some of that can be through interactive dilemmas.”
Instead of using the isolated, binary dilemmas that popped up throughout Shogun 2, Creative Assembly wants to link together decisions, meaning the choices you make in earlier dilemmas will affect later ones, making their progression better reflect how you’re playing the game.
So far Creative Assembly hasn’t shown off the campaign map, but is promising many modifications to the way you develop your armies as well as expand your territory. “It’s a bigger map than ever before, which creates some challenges. We don’t want to create hundreds of regions to micromanage but at the same time we want to create a lot of strategic depth. So we’ve got a province system where a province is made up of several different regions. That means that you don’t have to manage each individual region, you’ve got management at a province level which is maybe four regions, which reduces the management burden, but gives you more strategic depth.”
By breaking up territory into these smaller regions, you can’t effectively ‘headshot’ a massive area by knocking out a single city. Instead, provinces can be captured region by region, so even if you lose part of a province, you’ll still maintain control of it, though with resource accumulation penalties. “What that means as well is that there are more varied battlefield types, so we want to have more battle types, objectives, more varied terrain.”
For army control, it sounds like Creative Assembly is making it so entire armies will gain defining characteristics that outlast the lifespans of individual units. “The Roman Emperor is thinking, ‘where’s the 10th Legion, I need to move the 8th Legion up to support it.’ We want to create a more cohesive concept of armies. It reduces the micromanagement burden over a huge map, but at the same time you still have total control over what the makeup of your legions is. We’re actually going to create the concept of legion legacy. In other words the 10th Legion has its own character that outlives the general, it has its own history. That’s really how the Romans felt about their legions. It will create actual in-game effects. You win a great battle and that will potentially give you a trait or a concrete property.” Creative Assembly is still in the process of determining how these systems will work. Legions may even wind up with full skill trees, but that’s not a sure thing yet.
When protecting territory you’ll also need to pay special attention to your seaside borders, because in Rome 2, ships will be able to capture territory. “We want to integrate the navies better into the gameplay. Before they were basically containers to transport armies around and everything was about capturing cities in siege battles. Naval power is going to be very significant on the campaign map than it was before. I think that makes the game tactically much more interesting.”
There’s also the diplomatic side to gameplay, where you can use peaceful means to control your provinces. “We want to make the other cultures, the other people you encounter really feel human and have their agendas and desires well-reflected in the diplomacy system. You’ve got the AI for each faction that has its own agenda that’s analyzing which regions it wants to capture. Separate to that you’ve got the diplomatic relations system that says ‘you’re friendly to this guy and you’re hostile to that guy’. And those are separate entities that talk to each other. What we’re doing for Rome 2 is actually combining it, so what it thinks of you – the way you play, how you treated that faction before, whether you double-crossed it, or whether you acted in a trustworthy manner – will be right at the heart of the AI in terms of which regions it wants to attack. We’ll be able to do lots of interesting things in terms of telling the player why the AI doesn’t want to trade with them. One [AI] might be really vengeful, one might be more forgiving.”
There should also be plenty of interesting mechanics to dig into in terms of units relationships and how different types stack up against each other in battle. “You should bank on ancient world combat mechanics. You’ve got phalanxes and pikes that are very strong against cavalry. You’ve got a lot of skirmishing units, a lot of precursor weapons, we call them; melee units like the legionaries throwing pilums before they go in and charge. We’ve got some weapons that are stronger against armor and others that are very devastating against less armored troops, but not so much against armored troops. It’s very important for us to make sure there are really strong, intuitive relationships between the unit types, and there’s a huge variety of them. There’s a lot more unit variety than even in Rome. We want the campaign map to play differently if you’re a barbarian tribe versus Rome versus all these different cultures. That means different technologies, different agents. With Shogun 2 we could focus on one culture and do it really deeply, but it meant that one faction and another faction were different in terms of flavor but they weren’t radically different in the way that we want to be the case in Rome 2.”
What does that mean specifically? “A Roman unit coming into another unit is not going to break up and surround the other unit. It’s going to fight in a locked formation, the Roman meat grinder. Whereas the barbarian unit, they’ll spill around and anybody will just try to find a target. It’ll feel quite different.”
Total War: Rome 2 is still a long way out, currently scheduled for to be released in late 2013, so while we wait for more detail you can read all about the early gameplay demo in our previous coverage.
“It’s almost universal. Everybody wants Rome 2," said lead designer James Russell. "We want to do it, and the fans want it. We have to do it. It’s a massive project. The budget is way bigger than Shogun 2. It needs it. The Roman world is so huge and active, you’ve got so much more variety in terms of building styles, fighting styles, it’s just a lot more production. It’s such a big world. It’s a realistic goal to make these battles look like nothing you’ve ever seen in a game before.”
While some of that may be hype, he’s not exaggerating all that much about how good Rome 2 looks. Considering the chaos drummed up by thousands of units onscreen at once firing flaming arrows and disembarking from ships to climb into siege towers and assault colossal cities, alongside the staggering amount of detail in individual unit animations and armor styles, it’s easy to fear that the framerate might slow to an erratic jitter on PCs without the most powerful hardware.
“It’s a new lighting model, a new particle system so particles are casting shadows and receiving scene lighting. That’s literally twenty percent of the way there. We’ve still got nearly a year until even alpha. We really want to make sure we’re not moving the min spec [from Shogun 2]. We can’t say absolutely that the min spec will be the same, but that is our intention. We want to keep it accessible to people without the biggest rig, but at the same time, we want to push the biggest rigs and use everything they’ve got.”
The enhanced presentation will include facial animations on units, and not just for the commander units. You’ll watch soldiers react with shock as their follow soldiers get pelted by arrows and die during a battle, and these types of details will be easier to see with a unit camera that follows soldiers from an over-the-shoulder style perspective. This is all part of an effort by Creative Assembly to make it feel like you’re controlling human-ish soldiers instead of vast collections of emotionless robots.
The studio wants to integrate that same kind of human element into the campaign progression as well, adding story and motivation. “It’s interactive. We don’t want to have a fixed, scripted campaign. It’s about weaving human-level plots and archetypal ancient world storylines into the way you’re playing the campaign game. We want to render Rome with some kind of internal conflict. Do I save the Republic, or do I make myself Emperor? Some of that can be through interactive dilemmas.”
Instead of using the isolated, binary dilemmas that popped up throughout Shogun 2, Creative Assembly wants to link together decisions, meaning the choices you make in earlier dilemmas will affect later ones, making their progression better reflect how you’re playing the game.
So far Creative Assembly hasn’t shown off the campaign map, but is promising many modifications to the way you develop your armies as well as expand your territory. “It’s a bigger map than ever before, which creates some challenges. We don’t want to create hundreds of regions to micromanage but at the same time we want to create a lot of strategic depth. So we’ve got a province system where a province is made up of several different regions. That means that you don’t have to manage each individual region, you’ve got management at a province level which is maybe four regions, which reduces the management burden, but gives you more strategic depth.”
By breaking up territory into these smaller regions, you can’t effectively ‘headshot’ a massive area by knocking out a single city. Instead, provinces can be captured region by region, so even if you lose part of a province, you’ll still maintain control of it, though with resource accumulation penalties. “What that means as well is that there are more varied battlefield types, so we want to have more battle types, objectives, more varied terrain.”
For army control, it sounds like Creative Assembly is making it so entire armies will gain defining characteristics that outlast the lifespans of individual units. “The Roman Emperor is thinking, ‘where’s the 10th Legion, I need to move the 8th Legion up to support it.’ We want to create a more cohesive concept of armies. It reduces the micromanagement burden over a huge map, but at the same time you still have total control over what the makeup of your legions is. We’re actually going to create the concept of legion legacy. In other words the 10th Legion has its own character that outlives the general, it has its own history. That’s really how the Romans felt about their legions. It will create actual in-game effects. You win a great battle and that will potentially give you a trait or a concrete property.” Creative Assembly is still in the process of determining how these systems will work. Legions may even wind up with full skill trees, but that’s not a sure thing yet.
When protecting territory you’ll also need to pay special attention to your seaside borders, because in Rome 2, ships will be able to capture territory. “We want to integrate the navies better into the gameplay. Before they were basically containers to transport armies around and everything was about capturing cities in siege battles. Naval power is going to be very significant on the campaign map than it was before. I think that makes the game tactically much more interesting.”
There’s also the diplomatic side to gameplay, where you can use peaceful means to control your provinces. “We want to make the other cultures, the other people you encounter really feel human and have their agendas and desires well-reflected in the diplomacy system. You’ve got the AI for each faction that has its own agenda that’s analyzing which regions it wants to capture. Separate to that you’ve got the diplomatic relations system that says ‘you’re friendly to this guy and you’re hostile to that guy’. And those are separate entities that talk to each other. What we’re doing for Rome 2 is actually combining it, so what it thinks of you – the way you play, how you treated that faction before, whether you double-crossed it, or whether you acted in a trustworthy manner – will be right at the heart of the AI in terms of which regions it wants to attack. We’ll be able to do lots of interesting things in terms of telling the player why the AI doesn’t want to trade with them. One [AI] might be really vengeful, one might be more forgiving.”
There should also be plenty of interesting mechanics to dig into in terms of units relationships and how different types stack up against each other in battle. “You should bank on ancient world combat mechanics. You’ve got phalanxes and pikes that are very strong against cavalry. You’ve got a lot of skirmishing units, a lot of precursor weapons, we call them; melee units like the legionaries throwing pilums before they go in and charge. We’ve got some weapons that are stronger against armor and others that are very devastating against less armored troops, but not so much against armored troops. It’s very important for us to make sure there are really strong, intuitive relationships between the unit types, and there’s a huge variety of them. There’s a lot more unit variety than even in Rome. We want the campaign map to play differently if you’re a barbarian tribe versus Rome versus all these different cultures. That means different technologies, different agents. With Shogun 2 we could focus on one culture and do it really deeply, but it meant that one faction and another faction were different in terms of flavor but they weren’t radically different in the way that we want to be the case in Rome 2.”
What does that mean specifically? “A Roman unit coming into another unit is not going to break up and surround the other unit. It’s going to fight in a locked formation, the Roman meat grinder. Whereas the barbarian unit, they’ll spill around and anybody will just try to find a target. It’ll feel quite different.”
Total War: Rome 2 is still a long way out, currently scheduled for to be released in late 2013, so while we wait for more detail you can read all about the early gameplay demo in our previous coverage.
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