I've been praying for Total War: Warhammer 40K news since visiting Creative Assembly last year, and on Sunday (June 7), the Emperor delivered. Not only did we get our best look yet at how Total War's real-time battles will function in the sci-fi setting, but its appearance at the PC Gaming Show 2026 also confirmed that we're getting a Total War: Warhammer 40K closed beta later this year – although an exact date is yet to be confirmed.

Of all the new games heading our way, Total War: Warhammer 40K is the one I'm most excited for. Seeing it in action – and hearing I'll get the chance to play it by year's end – puts that anticipation into overdrive. I'm working through it the only way I know how: by watching the reveal again and breaking down everything in sight.

Git krumpin'

While a teaser trailer for Total War: Warhammer 40K debuted during last month's Warhammer Skulls showcase, its focus on narrative and lack of in-game footage suggested we'd be waiting a while longer to see more of the game itself. But the PC Gaming Show 2026 aired with a surprising amount of alpha build gameplay, leaving lots to get into.

30 seconds in, we're brought into a battle between the Astra Militarum and a horde of orcs. Taking place on what seems to be the outskirts of a war-torn hive city, the map is a lot more textured and urban-focused than much of what we've seen from past Total War games – with charred ruins shored against a bridge crossing, I get the sense that battles will be designed for players to dig into longer than Total War: Warhammer 3's comparatively quick clashes.

The most important detail, though, is nestled in the game's UI – revealing how Creative Assembly has made ranged combat work. Guns are prominent in the developer's Warhammer (Old World) trilogy and the likes of Total War: Napoleon and Empire have made gunpowder lines work in the past, but fans have long speculated how 40K's more advanced guns – often wielded in tandem with melee weapons – would synergize with the series' more medieval-style frontline clashes.

Here, we see that while most units do have ranged attacks as options (at least for the Astra Militarum), each has their own firepower value for light, medium, and heavy targets. Cadian Shock Troopers have 5/10 firepower effectiveness against light-class targets, for example, but that drops all the way down to 1/10 against medium and heavy foes. A tank commander, on the other hand, has 9/10 effectiveness against light targets and 10/10 against medium armor; but 6/10 against heavies. I can already see how this could encourage more fluid back-and-forth in battle – beefier units like Space Marines will be able to close in on small-arms fire without being torn to shreds, while Cadians will depend on a combined arms approach – think harder-hitting vehicles keeping melee-centric infantry from reaching their gunlines.

If anything, I'm starting to think that 40K's battles could be more fulfilling for strategy nerds. With there being so many options for melee versus ranged tactics and vice versa, real-time fights should be more strategic and slow-burn. The importance of cover should force players to spread their forces thinner and pay attention to wider battle lines, while environment destruction and having tools for fast-moving attacks (Space Marine drop pods, orbital strikes, jetpacks) will hopefully encourage more layered formations rather than one single frontline clash.

While I still have many unanswered questions about Total War: Warhammer 40K's campaign map and factions, its latest reveal has sent my imagination running wild. I've already registered for the closed beta – which you can do here – and even though it's scheduled to kick off later this year, the wait may well kill me. Although, with Total War: Warhammer 3's biggest DLC now within touching distance, there's going to be enough to keep us busy in the Old World for a long time to come.

As we wait for Total War: Warhammer 3's gigantic Lords of the End Times DLC, Creative Assembly has surprised us with the game's first character pack, fleshing out the jungles of Cathay with Tiger Warrior mercenary Bhashiva. Bhashiva's addition marks the first character pack for Total War: Warhammer 3, which are intended to offer smaller bites of DLC with a lower price reflective of its smaller scale.

Still, I've been pleasantly surprised by how much is on offer: Bhashiva offers a brilliantly thematic playthrough in which you're encouraged to support Cathayan ruler Zhao Ming whilst recovering ancient relics and escorting trade caravans. It's a promising start for Total War: Warhammer 3's character packs, so to learn more about the approach, I caught up with senior game director Richard Aldridge and designer Josh King.

Demons & tigers & bears

If you're a fan of Total War: Warhammer 3's more thematic campaigns – think Grom the Paunch's goblin tides or Markus Wulfhart's limited Empire roster – Bhashiva should be an immediate go-to. You're incentivized to build armies around Bhashiva's tier-two Tiger Warrior infantry partly because existing Cathayan units are in short supply, but largely because the campaign funnels so many buffs into the Tiger Warriors that you won't want to use anything else.

While Tiger Warriors are fast and aggressive, they aren't necessarily a flat upgrade to Cathay's sturdy Celestial Dragon Guard. It's indicative of the broader character pack, which complements the Cathayan roster with a more aggressive playstyle without making the faction out-and-out stronger.

"I really like how they [Bhashiva's faction] found their place within the wider game world," says King. "Their addition doesn't invalidate or replace anything on the Grand Cathay side, it complements it. So with Claw Speakers for example, their embedded action on the campaign side allows you to replenish your units, which Cathay desperately needed. They've also got the lore of Beasts, Shadows, and Life available to them, something that Grand Cathay never had access to."

"We've always enjoyed having a really clear focus, and she definitely gives us that vibe," Aldridge agrees. "And it's just fun [to make], right? Like, how are these tiger warriors going to behave? How are they going to move? What can they sound like? We love doing that kind of stuff. It's a great way to get something different into the game and really showcase what Grand Cathay is."

The result is a refreshingly focused campaign, and I've enjoyed playing a much smaller piece on Immortal Empires' chessboard. With this being the series' first character pack, though, I'm keen to learn how it's representative of future DLC – will the new DLC format let Creative Assembly work more niche characters or units into the game?

Bhashiva was an opportunity to "experiment a little bit more" with the trilogy's DLC output, says Aldridge. "She's obviously got a great supporting cast of characters and really plays into that tiger power fantasy, but they are limited in number – we don't have 20 or so things to go and make. So it felt appropriate."

"We know there are loads of fan-favorite characters out there," he continues. "There might not be the necessary volume of units to support it, but why wouldn't you want to get those into the game? We absolutely do. With Bhashiva, players hopefully resonate with it. That [would] give us the opportunity to go forward and try it again, but maybe in slightly different guises. Maybe there's a character that's got a bunch of really cool legendary heroes associated with them. Maybe there's some that would make sense with a wealth of Regiments of Renown, and maybe a lord or a hero [...] We want to get all these characters and creatures in!"

Bhashiva will be joined by necromancer Nagash and the Empire's Boris Todbringer, along with two more currently-unnamed lords, as part of Lords of the End Times later this year. That still leaves plenty of fan-favorites on the table ("I dare say there's some monkeys in the south," offers Aldridge, teasing Cathay's Monkey King), but after dicing up Chaos as Bhashiva, I'm convinced that character packs have the potential to keep me coming back to Immortal Empires long after Total War: Warhammer 40,000 arrives.

Total War: Warhammer 40,000 wants to be "the seminal Warhammer 40K game," says its devs, who sell me in just 8 words: "You can customize the fingers on Space Marines!"

Total War: Warhammer 40,000 has already become a permanent fixture in my subconscious, its trailer nestled somewhere between the bassline to 'Is She Weird' and an upsetting childhood memory involving The Jungle Book 2. I've already rewatched the upcoming strategy game's scant footage more than I'd care to admit, and if there is a limit to the amount of times you can watch the same poor orc get liquefied by plasma, I have not found it yet.

There's good reason to be excited. The Total War: Warhammer trilogy has long established itself as the seminal adaptation of Games Workshop's high fantasy setting, and the 40K universe offers an even vaster sandbox to play with. Creative Assembly isn't shying away from that scope, instead aiming to capture a galaxy-wide conflict in a way that no Warhammer video game has achieved before.

Painting the map

It's a fascinating level of ambition, but there are still many unanswered questions. To learn more about how Total War: Warhammer 40,000 intends to do so much, I caught up with Creative Assembly's Simon Mann (product owner – campaign design) and Andy Hall (principal narrative designer).

"You can even just play battles if you wish," adds Mann. "Even in that area there are these strike battles – very vital conflicts you need to win where you can just send in your customized troops to fight a battle. If you're the sort of person who's only got a short amount of time, we're here for you, we've got something that you can do."

"Every campaign you play, there is meaning to it," he explains. "It's not just 'I've won that campaign, that was fun'. It's 'I've won the campaign. We have this territory. We've conquered this location, we are now able to push further into this area of the galaxy and play through that way. We really think it adds an awful lot of extra feeling, and kind of internal narrative for you as a player to try these things out."

Here you can see Creative Assembly killing two birds with one stone. Total War: Warhammer 40,000's galactic layer is an effective way of capturing the vastness of its setting, but it's also a smart way to make the later stages of a campaign more important – one of the biggest challenges in strategy games.

As someone with too many stalled Total War: Warhammer 3 campaigns to count, that overarching narrative promises to be the most exciting part of Total War: Warhammer 40,000. Everything else, from tabletop-inspired customization to blowing up planets, is icing on the massive cake – I just hope we don't have to wait long to stuff our faces.

After 19 years, Total War: Medieval 3 is in development at Creative Assembly. But don’t get too excited, because there's still quite a bit to go before we'll get to play the long-awaited historical strategy game. One of the studio bosses is relatively confident it'll arrive before The Elder Scrolls 6, though, even if he'd rather be playing that first.

In a round-up post on the official forums, Roger Collum, vice president of the Total War series, speaks about the announcement of Medieval 3, and tempers expectations for a release window. "We know it's going to be a few years (I'm pretty sure we'll still beat Elder Scrolls VI to market – please Bethesda accept the challenge for all our sake – I need it!)," he says, jokingly, "and there's no amount of sugarcoating to escape that fact, but we really want to make it something worth waiting for – and with your support, it will be."

Right now, it's anyone's guess when the next Elder Scrolls will arrive. Todd Howard recently mentioned the "majority" of Bethesda devs are working on it, but gave no indication of a timeline for when we might get to see or hear more about the great return to Tamriel.

Odds certainly aren't bad that Total War: Medieval 3 wins that race, despite Collum's hopes otherwise. The sequel to Medieval 2: Total War will, like its predecessor, draw from the Middle Ages, and it's taken several false starts to get to now.

"We've tried to do it many times – but we felt we couldn't do it justice until now," Collum writes. "Bringing a game to life requires all the right things to fall perfectly in place; the right team, the right technology, the right vision to push the boundaries of our historical experience and deliver something that resonates with players worldwide."

The race is on: The Elder Scrolls 6 vs Total War: Medieval 3 vs Half-Life 3. GTA 6 is coming next November, but there's room for any one of these to be second, and I think my money's on Creative Assembly here.

Elder Scrolls 6 fans yearn for news as Skyrim turns 14, instead get Todd Howard saying it's "still a long way off" despite being announced 7 years ago: "Bethesda has had us hanging by a thread"

Depending on how much time you've clocked in at the rumor mill, Total War: Warhammer 40,000 is either the worst-kept secret in gaming or one of 2025's most mind-blowing reveals. Either way, the news is out: here is a revolutionary step into sci-fi territory for Total War, taking the strategy series into the stars with a remarkably bold vision for capturing the vastness of 40K's setting.

While visiting Creative Assembly, Total War: Warhammer 40,000 is on the tip of every developer's tongue. Those on the technical side marvel at what the studio's new Warcore engine is already achieving, from strafing units to destruction physics, while developers working on the game itself boast of being able to conquer sky-scraping hive cities and customize Space Marines' fingers.

Still, few are as animated as Simon Mann (product owner – campaign design) and Andy Hall (principal narrative designer). Sitting down to discuss all things Total War: Warhammer 40,000, the pair's enthusiasm is immediate – and as they unveil the true scope of their game's ambition, their excitement proves infectious.

What is your duty?

Since the earliest days of Total War: Warhammer, fans have wondered if Creative Assembly could tackle 40K. For my own part in those musings, I've always wondered how the physical dynamic would work. Guns in Total War are nothing new – Skaven were given miniguns and snipers as early as Total War: Warhammer 2 – but in 40K, where melee and sidearms are more commonly interchangeable, the series' traditional front-to-back battle lines are a little harder to imagine.

Creative Assembly has approached the task by blending Total War's signature formula with inspiration from 40K's tabletop game. The ranged and melee structuring is still in place, but has been changed to feel more dynamic and hybrid. Soldiers will be able to use cover on the battlefield, and individual characters within one unit can be equipped uniquely.

"Like you'd expect in the tabletop game, a unit of your warriors isn't just made up of one unit type. It's not the same person: they've got different specialists, different weapon styles," Mann explains, pointing to Space Marines as an example. "If you play the tabletop, a sergeant with an intercessor squad is armed with a chainsword and bolt pistol. They're good in both melee and ranged."

These loadouts can be changed by players, from picking their weapon loadouts to even more in-depth customization via a fully-fledged unit painter. Neither Mann or Hall seem phased by the balance of power between ranged and melee combat. The confidence brings to mind Total War: Warhammer, which prompted fears – since proven unfounded – over how flying units, godlike beings, and spellcasting would gel with the once exclusively historical series.

As the pair explain how battles will work, my own fears are put to rest. In fact, keeping Total War's battle dynamic intact seems like small beans when you look at Total War: Warhammer 40,000's broader ambitions. Rather than creating a microcosm of the universe – say, setting the game on one planet – the campaign map will take place across the galaxy.

Some elements of 40K lend themselves to Total War naturally: as Mann points out, individual tabletop sorties are similar in nature to Creative Assembly's real-time battles, moments of action within a bigger picture. But achieving a galaxy-wide campaign is something far beyond the series' usual wheelhouse. As Total War: Warhammer 40,000 took form, its scale soon became apparent.

One planet became several planets. Several planets became a solar system. A solar system became the entire galaxy.

"You're fighting across multiple planets, multiple frontlines. Engaging in battles against one another. All these things are part of the IP – really, this is an uncaring universe," says Mann. "That little battle means nothing to the grand scheme of things. So we went, let's take that a layer up. Let's go even further. Let's say this place you were fighting, this flashpoint, is part of a grander campaign. So we're now [working at a] galactic level and saying 'Yeah you won that campaign, well done, this is your territory. You own this. But there are more campaigns to fight'. There are bigger stakes at play here than just a single campaign or battle to play through."

Nailing that scope is "the only way" Creative Assembly felt it could be authentic to 40K, says Mann. That big picture lens extends beyond even Total War's traditional campaigns. "Every campaign you play, there is a meaning to it," he explains. "There's bigger context. It's not just 'I've won this campaign, that was fun'. It's 'I've won the campaign. We have this territory. We've conquered this location. We are now able to push further into this area of the galaxy and play through that way.' We really think it adds an awful lot of extra feeling, and an internal narrative for you as a player to try these things out."

Hall points to "crusade theaters," which will drive Total War: Warhammer 40,000's narrative. Players will be briefed on what's going on, which other forces are involved and why, and what's "in store" for wading into that crusade. "It's within the context of that crusade theater – who's winning, who's not – that will slowly reveal what the narrative of that is," adds Hall. "We have got a more tightly focused onboarding narrative, much like we did with Warhammer 3, that we're currently developing. That's actually going to feed into the canon of 40K, so we've got something for everyone."

No peace

Total War: Warhammer 40:000's sense of scale extends far beyond campaign size. Crusades will allow players to pick "the narratives you want to follow, the threads you wish to unravel," with the likes of "space hulks, wrecks, and abandoned stations" available to explore. The game will begin with four factions – Space Marines, Aeldari, Orcs, and Astra Militarum – although more will be added "over time," says Mann.

"We've really got a burning passion to do this justice, make it amazing, and really be the seminal Warhammer 40,000 game from the perspective of showing every part of that world," he says, as we discuss how the game will sit alongside other 40K adaptations. "You talked about the narrative, and other people's attempts. We want to be the game that tries to do all of it. We're very greedy in some regards, but we do want to try and give you that entire scope of this universe."

Much of Total War: Warhammer 40,000's depth has been achieved through Creative Assembly's new Warcore engine, which will debut here. Warcore allows for "even more diverse" factions than past offerings, explains Mann, while Hall paints a picture of the engine's Havok-enabled destruction physics in action: imagine destroying a building by calling in Space Marines via drop pod, then using the strewn debris as cover during a firefight.

For some, the most exciting flex of Warcore's muscles will be Total War: Warhammer 40,000's in-depth customization. We've already touched on how players can choose the weapons of squad members, but that's only one extension of the freedom on offer. Space Marine players will be able to design their own chapters, select their colors, and more.

"We didn't quite get to [customization] with Total War: Warhammer. We went all-out on this one. It really is next-level, probably more than any game for Warhammer we've seen," says Hall, beaming. "Just the other day, a customization guru was showing me that you can customize the fingers on Space Marines! That's the level of granularity we're going with this. Players can start with their chapter – and obviously all factions are going to have that to an extent – but I think we're going to see some really great-looking Space Marine chapters."

The more Mann and Hall talk, the more it feels like I'm manifesting my dream 40K strategy game. From units – vehicles! Walkers! Jetpacks! – to sprawling hive cities which will be "highly defended [and] difficult to take," Total War: Warhammer 40,000 is already offering tangible examples of how its scope will be achieved. Given Total War: Warhammer is the definitive representation of the franchise's Old World, it makes sense that Creative Assembly and Games Workshop are letting the good times roll.

"We've got a track record," Hall points out. "We've proven we can take the whole of a Warhammer franchise and effectively bring it to screen. That's certainly our ambition with this game."

Beneath the hype, Total War: Warhammer 40,000 – like its Old World sibling – remains an authentic passion project. In Creative Assembly's Horsham office developers have taken to making their own factions for fun, while Mann still remembers feeling awestruck the first time he saw a dreadnought rampage across a battlefield. "Being able to bring in an orbital lance strike onto a stomper," Hall offers sagely, "warms the cockles."

For those who have watched Total War: Warhammer steadily collect Legendary Lords like Pokémon for the last decade, Creative Assembly's approach here may feel familiar. Where most 40K adaptations have portrayed small slices of the universe, Creative Assembly knows – just as the developer behind Warhammer 40K: Space Marine 2 did – that 40K is defined by its dizzying sense of scale.

"We're not a magnifying glass. We're the car windscreen, to torture an analogy," says Hall. "We're trying to be the seminal, digital version of Warhammer 40,000."

Want more Total War? We've ranked the best Total War games, and spoken to Creative Assembly about how it's making Medieval 3

Total War: Warhammer 40,000 is officially on the way, and we've made sure to gather every bit of information that is currently out in the wild about it. That's right: the strategy series is grabbing a boltgun and wading into the grim darkness of the far future – where there is, of course, only war. Whether you're a strategy fan or 40K devotee, there's a staggering amount to be excited by here.

Creative Assembly has already created some of the best strategy games using Games Workshop's Old World setting, and now it's using lessons learned from the Total War: Warhammer trilogy to create the series' first sci-fi game. In this guide, we break down everything you need to know about the upcoming title. From trailer insights to our interviews with the game's devs, we've left no galactic stone unturned.

With the vastness of Games Workshop's 40K setting on offer, it's possible we'll have one of the best Total War games on our hands if Creative Assembly can pull this off. But first, let's take stock of what we already have. Read on for a complete overview of Total War: Warhammer 40,000!

Total War: Warhammer 40,000 release date speculation

A release date for Total War: Warhammer 40,000 is yet to be revealed, as its trailer at The Game Awards made no mention of when it will launch. However, it's possible we could be playing this as early as late 2026.

Barring the recent reveal of Total War: Medieval 3, Creative Assembly has traditionally revealed games on the closer end to launch, but given the scope of 40K and the studio's shift to being more transparent, it's possible we could be waiting a little longer for this one.

Speaking to GamesRadar+, lead narrative designer and writer Andy Hall says the 40K team is "at the stage of the project where we're starting to bring in the VO, and we're polishing our assets," which – fingers crossed – means we might not have to wait too much longer to see more. Ultimately, only Creative Assembly knows what its schedule looks like – which is all to say we're right there alongside you in waiting for more news.

Total War: Warhammer 40,000 platforms

Total War: Warhammer 40,000 will be coming to PC, Xbox Series X, and PS5.

That's a first for Total War, which has always made its home on PC, and has been made possible through the Warcore engine – which, as a bonus, will also be better-optimized for lower-spec PC builds thanks to its console optimization.

Total War: Warhammer 40,000 trailer

Good news! Total War: Warhammer 40,000 has its first trailer, and as is often the case with 40K trailers, it's a banger. You can check it out above!

Total War: Warhammer 40,000 gameplay

While an extensive look at gameplay is yet to be shared, we already know some of how Total War: Warhammer 40,000 will play. For instance, we know the game will launch with four playable factions: Space Marines, Orcs, Aeldari, and Astra Militarum.

For those coming in with no knowledge of 40K, Space Marines are genetically-engineered humans who serve as the Imperium's elite super-soldiers, while the Astra Militarum is where the Imperium's regular soldiers and majority of vehicle battalions fight. Meanwhile, the warlike Orcs are all about numbers and brawn, while the Aeldari – remnants of a once-proud empire of elves – are fewer in number yet boast some of the galaxy's best fighters.

As with past Total War games, players will manage territory and move armies in a turn-based campaign map, while combat involves ordering your troops in real-time on the battlefield. The formula has resulted in some of the best PC games going, but will vary slightly in that players will also be able to customize their units – right down to Space Marines' fingers – in the styling of 40K's tabletop models. However, the formula is also going to take some inspiration from the original tabletop game as well.

In our Big in 2026 Total War: Warhammer 40,000 preview, we learnt that individual characters in units can be equipped uniquely. The ranged and melee structuring is still in place, but changes have been made to make the experience in battle feel more dynamic and hybrid.

"Like you'd expect in the tabletop game, a unit of your warriors isn't just made up of one unit type. It's not the same person: they've got different specialists, different weapon styles," Simon Mann (product owner – campaign design) explains, pointing to Space Marines as an example. "If you play the tabletop, a sergeant with an intercessor squad is armed with a chainsword and bolt pistol. They're good in both melee and ranged."

There will also be more in-depth destruction thanks to Creative Assembly's new Warcore engine, while more ranged-specific features – think unit strafing and being able to take cover – have also been implemented.

Total War: Warhammer 40,000 setting

As the name suggests, the upcoming strategy game will be set in Games Workshop's Warhammer 40,000 universe. For newcomers, it's not the nicest of neighborhoods. Set in the distant future, humanity has settled across the stars under one banner – the fascist Imperium of Man, a vast war machine which worships its Emperor as a godlike being.

A number of sentient civilizations fight over the galaxy, from the Necron dynasty of androids to all-consuming Tyranid hordes. Yet the Imperium's biggest foe is typically Chaos – worshippers under the banner of four powerful gods, who fight to destroy the Empire of Man. All said, it's not the safest place to visit – but if you would like to learn more, the Lexicanum is a wonderful resource for dipping your toes in.

Total War: Warhammer 40,000 story

Total War: Warhammer 40K will feature a canon contribution to Games Workshop's 40K universe, according to Andy Hall, although exact plot details are yet to be shared. However, from our interview, we do know that much of the game's narrative will be told through crusades, which appear to be a type of campaign or sub-campaign that impacts an overarching narrative. This will involve all four factions, though it remains to be seen what they'll all be fighting over.

Can you pre-order Total War: Warhammer 40,000?

Total War: Warhammer 40,000 cannot currently be pre-ordered, but expect to see this option surface either when we have a release date or closer to launch. As with everything else we've covered, we'll update this the moment we know more. Keep checking back here for more updates, and it may also be worth keeping an eye on our new games list to see the most exciting games launching in 2026 and beyond.

For more future releases, check out our lists of all the upcoming PC games and upcoming PS5 games on the way.

After a trilogy's worth of takes on classic fantasy Warhammer, the Total War series is heading to the grimdark future for a brand-new entry. Total War: Warhammer 40,000 was announced at The Game Awards 2025. We even got an introduction from Stranger Things star David Harbour, a noted Warhammer superfan who is, himself, playing an as-yet-unrevealed character.

The trailer is mostly cinematic, but the tiny bit of gameplay footage at the end looks spectacularly chaotic. The Steam page offers a few more gameplay details, including confirmation of four playable factions: Space Marines, Orks, Aeldari, and Astra Militarum.

You'll also be able to choose from various sub-factions, or even create your own custom army. You'll be able to name your own warband, customize its colors and iconography, and outfit your soldiers with "your own unique fusion of devastating tactical abilities, signature traits, and arcane wargear."

The game itself offers the same combination of real-time tactics and turn-based strategy that the Total War series is known for, though of course this time the turn-based map is set across the galaxy. The store page also teases destructible environments, where "every impact reshapes the terrain, creating new cover and fresh tactical opportunities."

Perhaps the most notable detail is that the trailer concludes not just with a Steam logo, but branding for PS5 and Xbox Series X, as well. Creative Assembly recently teased that future Total War games might also come to PlayStation and Xbox, and it seems that promise is already paying off. Unfortunately, no release date – not even a release year – has been confirmed just yet.

The most influential Total War games, as chosen by 8 of its developers: "The team is incredibly introspective about our successes and failures."

This month, Total War fans have been spoiled. Highlights include the reveal of Total War: Warhammer 3's biggest DLC to date, confirmation that Total War: Medieval 3 is in early pre-production, and teasing over a second game that's still to be revealed at this year's Game Awards. But for the developers at Creative Assembly, the greatest gift is Warcore: a new engine that is already being used to build Total War: Medieval 3 and more.

It's been a long time coming. Few expected 2016's Total War: Warhammer to inspire such a voracious appetite in fans, with the studio's debut fantasy game spawning an armfull of DLC before getting a sequel the next year. The gap between Total War: Warhammer 2 and its finale was longer but still crammed with DLC, while 2022's Total War: Warhammer 3 continues to add fan-favorite factions and characters seemingly without end.

Beneath it all, the Warscape engine has buckled and strained under the weight. Development on Total War: Warhammer 3 has slowed due to how long it takes to work with Warscape, and changing anything now requires a game of high-stakes whack-a-mole to prevent unforeseen side-effects reaching the live build. There's no need to sugar-coat it: even Roger Collum, vice president of Total War, says Warscape has "become untenable" in its final days. "You can just update one thing, then you have to test everything, and then things will fall apart once live," he says. "It's just a total mess."

Besides being functional, what makes Warcore so exciting? Lots, as core tech director Roberto Geroli and art tech director Ellie Koorlander are keen to explain.

Siege engines

While you can see parts of Warcore demonstrated in the Total War 25th Anniversary Showcase, we'll have to wait a little longer to get our hands on it. The engine is currently being used to create Total War: Medieval 3, which is still very far from launch, along with another game which is due to be revealed at The Game Awards. As the least technically-minded person in this room, I ask the pair to give it to me straight: where will the average player see the most improvements in Warcore?

"The visuals, the lighting, the fidelity," says Koorlander, who explains that Warcore allows for " a level of complexity and world-building you've never seen before on a battle map [or] on a campaign map."

There will also be "destruction everywhere," as newly-integrated Havok software will properly simulate the likes of collapsing buildings. Dismemberment will be gratuitously accurate. Beyond violence, Warcore will transition Total War into DirectX 12 and revisit the engine's more dated elements. "The animation system was pretty old, so we've rewritten that entirely," says Geroli, allowing for "even better animations" from the team going forward.

"We've had things raised by the community in the past. Like the quality of rendering, screen space ambient inclusion, the shadowing around the units to make them feel grounded and realistic – we've had challenges with that," Koorlander explains. "Those are the things that we, first of all, definitely want to improve – that lighting and shadowing on objects, generally improving the fidelity. We really wanted to upgrade all of the visuals as much as possible in our new series of games, and that means looking foundationally at the rendering and being able to improve that fidelity without compromising on the gameplay. It's been a long-time passion and we're really excited about it."

Much of the work carried out by Koorlander and Geroli is foundational, designed to support games beyond Total War: Medieval 3 whilst leaving room to be built out even further. Koorlander says the team is "set in mind" with what it wants Warcore to achieve in its first five years, but "there's still room to grow" beyond that window. Sieges will play a "big part" in Medieval 3, Geroli offers as an example, so the team is already working on battle AI. But that work can then be carried across to other projects, creating a building block framework that allows for transferable improvements.

That philosophy extends to deeper layers. Warcore is Creative Assembly's first attempt at a console-friendly engine, with plans to launch future games on PlayStation and Xbox platforms. While Warcore itself offers flat upgrades to performance and memory, the team has had to consider how console-level memory restrictions are lower than some PCs. By accounting for that, Koorlander says they have also been able to build a "strong foundation" for lower-spec PCs.

I ask whether this work will allow Total War to run on the Steam Deck or newly-revealed Steam Machine. That's more "long-term," says Geroli, who explains that current plans are focused on staying "true to PC players" first and foremost whilst opening the door for Xbox Series and PS5 players. Warcore is "in its infancy currently," he adds. "It will keep evolving over time – we're playing long-term."

Whirring gears

As much as Warcore represents a sizable and long-term investment in Total War, it also remains a passion project for those making it. "We have a contractor who said 'Oh this looks like Unreal [Engine]' as a compliment," Geroli boasts. "Getting to that bar with our small team is quite a challenge, and something hopefully players will be able to see with Medieval 3 and modding – we want to put these tools in the hands of players."

Modding support is being built from the ground up, which Koorlander tells me is the only way to achieve the flexibility they have in mind. "We're targeting Medieval 3's release date to have the complete modding experience," says Geroli. "We're prioritizing things for the internal team now, but it's something we're keeping in mind because we knew from the start that [Warcore] needs to be a tool that can be used by people to mod the game."

Our conversation turns once more to players. Are there any long-standing complaints the pair hope to overcome with Warcore?

"Because I worked on Warhammer 3 for a long time, the things I know used to get brought up was some of the blood and gore, things weren't looking like they were impacting. You would get people raising [issues] about different types of damage, and wanting things looking more visceral. We didn't really get that melee impact," says Koorlander. "All of that stuff we had in the forefront of our minds while redesigning it, and I'm really hyped about what we've got and what we've been able to design because it's looking fantastic."

Geroli points to performance, though admits that it is a "constant" battle. "When we improve performance we want to put more things in the game," he explains. "This engine has much [better] performance than the previous one, but we want to put more things in, so the player might not see it because we've increased the quality of what goes in."

We're seeing the foundations for Total War's future being laid right now, and despite the buzz around Total War: Medieval 3 and Creative Assembly's mystery reveal at The Game Awards, Warcore is perhaps the most exciting development of them all. These are new beginnings: I'm looking forward to getting my grubby mitts all over the next generation of Total War, alongside everyone on console getting to experience it all for the first time.

We've ranked the best Total War games, but if you'd like to read about one that nobody has played yet, check out our Total War: Medieval 3 interview

Jumping into Total War: Warhammer today is a very different prospect to doing so a decade ago. The original 2016 game is now a trilogy, and the series' staple Immortal Empires campaign – a vast map of Warhammer Fantasy's entire world – is close to bursting with the amount of factions and Legendary Lords added across all three games. It's hard to stress how much variety lies within that depth. Want to play as the aristocratic Vampire Counts? Bleed 'em dry. How about building Mordor as the Chaos Dwarfs, upholding knightly chivalry with Bretonnia, or running a vast Skaven under-empire? You can do any of that, too.

Even that vastly undersells how many different campaigns there are. But if you're yet to play Warhammer 3, you can find that out for yourself, as the most up-to-date version of Immortal Empires has been added to the first two Total War: Warhammer games for free. You can play any of the characters from the games you own, while the update also allows for buying DLC from games you don't.

But where do you start? If you're me, 10 minutes of choice paralysis on the main menu before starting yet another Nurgle campaign. Luckily, you're not me. That fate is mine alone to bear, as I've got Warhammer 3's senior game director Richard Aldridge and associate design director Sean MacDonald here to sell you on their favorite Immortal Empires campaigns.

Damn fine campaign

MacDonald is quickest to make a recommendation for first-timers. "Obviously Skaven," he asserts, offering no elaboration until Aldridge prompts him to pick a specific Legendary Lord. He does: Queek Headtaker, a Skaven warlord who buffs the rat-folk's toughest frontline infantry and is best-positioned in battle fighting alongside them.

"He's a classic," says MacDonald. "Anyone can enjoy and learn the Skaven experience with Queek. He's quintessentially cowardly, but brave when he needs to be. And he's a leader that takes no backtalk from his troops – the perfect Skaven!"

"Everyone should enjoy Skaven the most because they are the most interesting race, and are the most fun to develop," he adds, grinning. "Anyone who likes Lizardmen is a fool."

Aldridge, whom that last comment was aimed at, sets aside his own fondness for Lizardmen to suggest the Empire's own Balthasar Gelt. Gelt is a powerful magician who was recently given a big shake-up in Immortal Empires, with Creative Assembly moving Gelt away from the Empire's heartland to study magic in the far-eastern nation of Cathay.

Gelt is a "good first point of contact for Warhammer 1 players," says Aldridge, pointing to how differently he now plays from the original Warhammer days. "He's now over in Grand Cathay, he's got a completely new starting position, he's got different people around him to interact with. He's now got a Colleges of Magic system that we introduced in Warhammer 3. You can do all sorts of grand things with your various wizards, so I'd recommend him."

For new players specifically, Aldridge explains that the team is pushing new players towards the likes of Gelt and High-Elf warrior Tyrion. It's a far cry from the series' original recommendation, which was to lead humanity as Emperor Karl Franz. While Franz was once one of the safest campaigns to jump into, his only threats being an upstart province of Vampire Counts and distant rumblings of Chaos, years of new additions have brought danger much closer to home. Norscan raiders pillage its coasts and a Nurgle-worshipping army now has a fortress in nearby mountains, all while Tzeentch's Changeling spreads cults within the Empire's borders.

Winning as Franz means not only surviving all of that, but reuniting the Empire proper whilst avoiding civil war. That's not even touching on elements out of your control. If the AI-controlled dwarfs to the east fall, for example, you can expect to see hordes of Skaven and Greenskins on your doorstep. The Emperor has effectively become Warhammer's Doomguy, beset on all sides by otherworldly horrors and hard-pushed to survive.

Though Franz himself would likely have a few choice words to say about his newfound challenges, the Empire's leader is a fantastic example of how the Warhammer trilogy has filled out over the years. MacDonald says Creative Assembly took a look at Franz' health during 2024's Thrones of Decay update, with the team frequently using auto-runs of the campaign to predict how any changes to Immortal Empires will affect a faction's survivability.

"There are always variations because that is the Total War sandbox, but we make sure that Franz is coming out [reasonably balanced] each time," he explains. "There are a few staple campaigns that we do try to keep tabs on as we develop more DLC. Especially someone like Karl. When we make a new experience, we have some of our QA team go 'Keep an eye on Karl, because he's Karl!'"

"He's a shining light, so it's a testament to him when he does survive," adds Aldridge. "He's not the easiest campaign to play straight-in. We have tweaked some things to try and allow for players to have that experience earlier. But this is the beauty of Warhammer. With so many characters now, there is hopefully a character for everybody and you should try and experience some different ones. The Jade Dragon's a good example of that – again, one that's maybe slightly easier to learn, a bit more protected. And I keep mentioning Gelt. Gelt's great!"

So, there you have it. Want to bring about a rat apocalypse? Play Queek Headtaker. Prefer to double-down on magic? Go Gelt. And if the thought of drowning the world in undeath as a power-tripping necromancer inspires you, seek help – but then keep an eye out for Warhammer 3's Lords of the End Times DLC, which will let you do just that in 2026.

With 25 years of Total War under its belt, the future of Creative Assembly's iconic strategy series looks brighter than ever: "We've got the best roadmap we've ever had"

The last 25 years of Total War have offered something for everyone. By everyone, I of course mean "everyone who is into painting strategy maps red and setting up intricate flanks on the battlefield" – which, presumably, is everyone. But I digress.

As Creative Assembly outlines its vision for the future of Total War, GamesRadar+ asked eight developers at the studio to name their most influential Total War game. From the directors of Total War: Medieval 3 to senior creatives and the minds behind Total War: Warhammer 3's Lords of the End Times DLC, everyone at Creative Assembly has their own definition of influential – you can read their answers below.

Total War: Medieval 3's directors weigh in

Pawel Wojs, game director: "Oh gosh. I think for me personally, there are a few. Empire comes to mind because at the time naval [warfare] was completely new. We already had a game of two halves, so we added a third, which was the naval battles. That was definitely influential. Rome 2 as well, to a certain extent. This is from my personal developer lens, but it was huge. There are parallels between Rome 2 and Medieval 3 because Rome 2 was us following Rome 1, trying to live up to the expectations fans had, so that was definitely a big one. Then Three Kingdoms, just because of how different it was, how we developed the character focus and diplomacy system. Three Kingdoms is definitely up there."

Leif Walter, creative director: "Three Kingdoms we definitely share. We worked on it together back in the day. It was a great balance of historical authenticity with interesting, compelling stories we were able to create. The depth of its campaign, I think fans really appreciate. To mention two other ones, one would be Napoleon because I think that had a great sense of simulation of the world, and the simulation of battles, with really cool angles for me as a player to step into the world and change history. And then the other one is Shogun 2 – a similar generation of games, but I think it's still such a great game that really brought everything together. The art, the gameplay, from a technical point of view, but also the immersion and storytelling. Those would be the three for me."

Total War: Warhammer 3 developers shelve their bias

Rich Aldridge, senior game director: "Warhammer's one that I've been on a very long journey for, so it means an awful lot to me. But if I was to look beyond that for the rest of the series, probably Shogun 2. Shogun 2 was a game that I think myself and many others in the studio really wanted to make, we were really excited about the nature of the setting. But also, it's very tight on design, tight on the gameplay experience, with really interesting and enjoyable battles. And then of course we introduced Fall of the Samurai and Avatar Conquest mode, which was really good fun."

Sean MacDonald, associate design director: "The most hours I've sunk in has been in the Warhammer space. But if I had to not use that cop-out answer of the thing I work on, I think Three Kingdoms had a really clear goal of what it wanted to improve, looking at the diplomacy system, and have this play out of that great climax of the realm splitting into the Three Kingdoms. That was, for me, a really well-executed vision of a great Total War in modern history. So if I'm not using my Warhammer bias, it's probably Three Kingdoms."

To fantasy and beyond

Ellie Koorlander, art tech director: "From my perspective, Warhammer has been such a massive project. We didn't realize it was going to be so big. It's the gift that keeps on giving. We're still making amazing content, but so many of our learnings from having an engine that wasn't really built for live build development has influenced what we're doing now. I think that is the greatest piece of what we've done so far, and I'm really glad we've taken those learnings into what we're doing now."

Andy Hall, lead narrative designer & writer: "I'm a Warhammer nerd. When I was headhunted to help with the Warhammer games I thought I'd be here for a couple of games. I'm here well over a decade later, so I'm part of the furniture now. So my love of Warhammer has always shone through for me. But my experience with Total War starts before that. I remember watching Time Commanders, which was a show that used the Total War engine, and that was my first introduction to Total War. I was like, 'I need that game!' So Total War: Rome was my first game, but I never had a PC good enough to run it until I actually joined and could play any Total War game in the back catalog. So I do love the history ones, but I've always got a Karl Franz campaign on the go."

Kevin McDowell, franchise content director – art: "We draw inspiration from all of the different projects that we have - constantly. I don't think there's one golden project. We can look at Shogun 2 and go 'Well that was really well delivered, very polished', et cetera, but the content scope was quite small. So then we can look at Empire as something that had a wide range of features and we can see, okay, well actually we can map big new feature sets to our new games and the players will engage with them. So in Empire, we had naval battles and the different regions. I'm not saying we'll have those in future games, but they were big new feature sets. I think we draw inspiration from all of our back catalog games, but I don't think there's any specific one where we go 'Oh, that's the one we're trying to emulate'."

Roger Collum, vice president of Total War: "What he's saying sounds almost like a cop-out, but it's true. The team is incredibly introspective about our successes and failures. We look at Warhammer 3 at launch and, like, that probably should have shipped with Immortal Empires. So immediately that seems like a big mistake in the rear view mirror. Hopefully we don't make that mistake again. Rome 2 had a very rough launch, it [needed] a bunch of bug fixing. We look at those things too like 'let's not do that'. But Three Kingdoms comes up quite a bit. Rome, Medieval 2, Shogun 2, all these games come up. Our most successful game right now, far and away, is the Warhammer series. It's an incredible IP that has a ton of legs and a huge fandom, so it's difficult to not look at that formula and decide, well, where does that formula fit? Not that exact formula, but similar – where does that formula fit? Nobody has anything to fear with Medieval 3 however, because the people working on that are hardcore history designers so it will not feel anything like Warhammer 3. But we have to ask ourselves that question: what works and what doesn't work?

We've also rounded up the best Total War games that you can play during the wait for Medieval 3, which seems to be shaping up nicely

Confession: I'm not a consistent person. My colleagues regularly have to remind me to update our schedule – refusing to simply read my mind – and I am notoriously hard to align plans with. But across years-worth of interviews with Total War developer Creative Assembly, I've asked the same question for years: Nagash when?

The legendary necromancer holds a special place in Warhammer's Old World, partly thanks to all the times he's tried to end it, and his omission from the Total War: Warhammer trilogy has been notable. Creative Assembly's hesitation to add Nagash has always been a matter of power: how do you introduce one of the strongest entities in the universe and not break… everything?

Now, the studio has an answer: let it break. The Supreme Lord of Undeath is being added as one of four Legendary Lords in Total War: Warhammer 3's Lords of the End Times DLC, which is set to launch in summer 2026. Nagash will settle for nothing less than ending all life in the Old World, and will join Warhammer 3 alongside a number of apocalyptic scenarios inspired by the End Times that destroyed Games Workshop's original fantasy Warhammer setting.

It's the game's biggest DLC to date, and no player or faction will be spared from fighting to save (or destroy) a setting Creative Assembly has spent the last decade crafting. After watching Lord of the End Times' trailer in the developer's Horsham studio (and taking a moment to compose myself because it's Nagash), I sat down with Warhammer 3's senior game director Richard Aldridge and associate design director Sean MacDonald to discuss what may well be the trilogy's most ambitious update to date.

Bone Daddy blues

As the first necromancer, Nagash will hold sway over all undead factions in Warhammer 3. Playing Nagash will involve drawing his unliving mortarch lieutenants – many of them already powerful in-game Legendary Lords in their own right – under one banner, with a roster that combines all Tomb Kings, Vampire Counts, and Vampire Pirates' units with Nagash's own unique forces. Yet Nagash is freshly-revived at the beginning of his campaign, and will need to gain strength (some mortarchs take more convincing than others) to succeed in his ultimate goal of exterminating all life.

Importantly, both Aldridge and MacDonald are keen to stress that Nagash is much more than the factions he brings together. Rather than being designed as, say, a riff on how Vampire Counts or Tomb Kings work, Nagash's faction has been created from scratch – focused entirely on the necromancer and his journey, with his united roster of undead units complementing that rather than establishing its boundaries.

"For me, it feels like going back to some of the really old army books when [all undead factions] were just 'The Undead,'" says Aldridge. "That's very much where we start his faction. We're not looking to take elements from the other three and splice them together, we're going to start fresh and clean and give him the podium that he deserves."

However, Nagash poses an interesting design question: how strong is too strong? Lords of the End Times draws inspiration from Games Workshop's own End Times narrative, which canonically brought about the end of Warhammer Fantasy's original realm. As Macdonald points out, Nagash has reached the apex of his "uber-powerfulness" by then.

"We're not saying that he's necessarily going to come in at that full level," he adds. "Part of that is from a game design perspective. You want the sense of progression – if you come in at 100, then there's nowhere to go. So we want to make sure there is room for him to grow, and obviously his fantasy is that he will be incredibly powerful himself. But how his faction plays, balanced by what his campaign mechanics require him to do [...] It's early to say where exactly he'll land in the power streak, but we'll make sure he feels like Nagash."

The end is always near

Whether Nagash starts all-powerful or has to recover his strength post-resurrection, his reveal trailer paints an inevitable conclusion: the end of the world. That comes with the territory when you're drawing on the End Times, but Aldridge is keen to point out that it's not going to be an exact re-enactment of Games Workshop's apocalypse. "We're not trying to tell the definitive narrative that setting had," he explains. "We're just taking the great moments and paying homage to the characters and what makes them special in this setting – so Nagash's principle is trying to kill the world."

As with the original End Times, there will be multiple powers competing to save the world or condemn it. But this will extend beyond the stories of individual campaigns. Other characters will have "equally appropriate motivations" to Nagash, says MacDonald, and the effects of the End Times are prominent for all factions. Some will need to fight against a grand ritual by Nagash, for example, while others may have to try and stop the moon itself being pulled down – and if that last bit's not a teaser for Skaven's ultimate middle-manager mage Thanquol, I don't know what is. While all of this is customizable, the effects of the End Times will also see entire provinces destroyed, chunks of warpstone leaving craters in continents, and lands visibly wither and die in Nagash's territory.

It's reminiscent of the first Total War: Warhammer game, in which Archeon the Everchosen – AKA the Lord of the End Times – would appear towards the end of campaigns with vast legions of Chaos troops, all intent on burning the world down. I still remember my initial experiences with Archeon, as he brought my first-ever campaign in Warhammer to a desperately apocalyptic close. Nothing has come close to that feeling since – even Warhammer 3's scenarios, which are often even more powerful than Archeon's crusade but lack the same high-stakes atmosphere.

"Scenarios today don't have that same gravitas," explains MacDonald. "That's our inspiration – to make sure the conclusion, the climax of your campaign, feels like a climax. That's the fantasy we've got here. That's kind of what we're building around. The current scenarios we have don't necessarily capture that. Some of them have strong thematics, but even the delivery, we think we can improve it."

Similarly to how Warhammer's older factions are reworked to be on par with newer additions, existing scenarios may be revisited and changed to deliver that End Times feel. "Everything is back on the table," says Aldridge. It's all to make sure Total War: Warhammer 3 is "the best possible version of itself," he adds. "It doesn't matter what it was two years ago, three years ago. As we look at all these endgame climaxes, we're going: 'Is this current representation the best representation? If it isn't, how can we make it better?"

It's a philosophy that has directed the Warhammer trilogy for the last decade: a rising tide lifts all boats, and as Creative Assembly has become more ambitious with the series' depth, the community has come to expect more. Lords of the End Times will determine whether Creative Assembly can deliver upon that. I may be biased – no, you read Nagash's Black Library omnibus because the Tomb Kings were added to Warhammer 2 – but with Creative Assembly focusing so heavily on the feel of Nagash and realizing the End Times with a sandbox twist, it's hard not to already feel confident. Nagash when? Nagash forever.

"Medieval 3 is, in some sense, our Half-Life 3" – Total War: Medieval 3 is finally in the works, and Creative Assembly is leaning on immersion to make it worth the 19-year wait

Blending real-time strategy and a strategic world map, the best Total War games have, over the last two decades, become a deeply iconic strategy format. Starting as little more than wargames, they now incorporate more political and economic angles—but always in the pursuit of that golden standard described in the series title: Total War.

They've varied wildly in quality and size over the years, from the shorter and now defunct Total War Sagas to the sprawling decade of development that has given us the runaway success Total War: Warhammer (aka one of the best strategy games of all time). They've also undergone a huge evolution in gameplay. Early games were much more like tabletop and miniatures wargames of the 1980s and 1990s, focused on specifics of maneuver, positioning, and morale before secondary concerns like armor and equipment or detailed and different statistics for every unit. Later entries in the series, especially the Warhammer games and Three Kingdoms, have combat much more driven by numbers and stats rather than an attempt at a historical simulation. Both approaches have their fans in the Total War community, and I'll not attempt to say one or the other is better.

Without further ado, let's take a look at the top 10 Total War games… so far. Because this franchise has only increased in popularity, and we also have a number of new games on the way, such as Total War: Medieval 3. Total War is not going anywhere anytime soon!

The best Total War games to play right now, starting with...

10. Total War: Pharaoh

Release: 2023
Platforms: PC

Here's what will probably be the most controversial entry on this list, because some people loved it and others hated it. I'm going to plop it at the top, spot 10, as a great introduction to what makes the Total War series interesting and fun. It was a historical return to form for Creative Assembly while still incorporating the interesting gamified elements that the series has worked on over the course of the era of Total War: Warhammer.

It's a pleasantly tactical game, forcing you to emphasize your positioning and use of terrain to get the most out of your army rather than just making a ton of top-of-the-line units—especially during its cool weather events, where some strategies might fail you entirely. Top that off with a varied economy emphasizing five different resources and a few unique mechanics for each faction—like the Egyptian royal court—and you're off to the races.

Get it now:
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9. Total War: Napoleon

Release: 2010
Platforms: PC

Tightly focused gunpowder campaigns are the real selling point of Napoleon. While somewhat controversial at the time, it provides a great counterpoint to Empire in that it really focuses on tactics in combat and army strategy rather than the grandiose conquests that let you build a vast empire. You really care about putting soldiers in column and learn where to place your cannons. It also works magic with teaching you the utility of some of the Napoleonic era's weirdo units: When you should use Cuirassiers versus Dragoons, or the profound effect that hooking your cannons up to horses has on their mobility.

The real draw for many are the historical campaigns, which let you play the predictable Grand Campaign across all of Europe as one of six factions, but also the more focused Italian and Egyptian campaigns that put you in Napoleon's shoes, as well as the Peninsular War campaign as the British, French, or Spanish. You can learn more about this one by reading our Napoleon: Total War review.

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8. Total War: Empire

Release: 2009
Platforms: PC

The most ambitiously-scaled Total War game before the later Warhammer series got huge, Empire has you take the reins of 18th-century armies of muskets, cannons, and cavalry charges. You can also play as a huge variety of groups, from the marquee British Empire to the Marathas of India. Empire also includes a controversial naval battles component that people will either tell you is awful or good or fine once you load up a few mods—but which most can agree are a bit slow.

The real standout for many (as we point out in our Empire: Total War review) is how much more complex and interesting the economy, trade, espionage, and religious aspects of Empire are. You've got to produce goods your people need, then produce excess for trade—then establish and protect your trade routes with other nations for them to really produce income. Provinces have an interesting abstract measure: Their overall wealth, rather than purely their taxable population, is what generates income. It's the first time that a Total War world map felt like it had a properly grand scale in not just warfare, but the economy too.

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Steam

7. Total War: Rome

Release: 2004
Platforms: PC

The most franchise-defining game on this list. You can firmly divide Total War games into an era before Rome and the era after. Its dozens of unit types stretched the boundaries of what people expected from a Total War game, even if they did at times stretch well past the boundaries of historical accuracy. The leather-clad Roman Arcani ninjas? Hordes of war dogs? The weirdly time-displaced ancient Egyptian factions?

But despite my historical misgivings, Total War: Rome stands out because of the interesting granularity of its simulation—like settlement population being depleted as you recruit troops from there—and the breadth of its campaign factions, sweeping from Iberia to Britain to Persia and all points in between. Plus, it's available in conveniently remastered form if you're chronically allergic to old graphics. And, if you are still unconvinced about this entry, check out our glowing Total War: Rome review for more details!

Get it now:
Steam

6. Total War: Attila

Release: 2015
Platforms: PC

The most interesting and experimental game in the Total War series, Attila is an apocalyptic game in every sense of the word. You fight not just wars against your enemies, but also the general sense that the world is in chaos and societies are collapsing left and right. The Roman Empire is doomed, clearly, and people are migrating in search of new homes or new wealth.

There are relentless hordes of barbarians at the gates for Roman players to fend off, and limitless riches to take for newcoming peoples in Europe… if you can survive very long after taking it. The mechanics for large empires and economies collapsing in the face of a chaotic world is really good stuff, something that later Total War games—let alone other strategy games—have yet to iterate on. For more, read our Total War: Attila review next.

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5. Total War: Medieval 2

Release: 2006
Platforms: PC

Medieval 2 has the heavy clash of battle lines, brutal cavalry tactics, and the fickle morale of the era it covers so well-mapped that it has become the definitive historical Total War game for many, many players. While it lacks some of the greater sophistication that emerged from Empire, Medieval 2 iterates so satisfyingly on the gameplay established by Rome just a few years earlier that it became the definitive modding platform for Total War.

Owning Medieval 2 lets you play mods that have been a decade or more in development for worlds like The Lord of the Rings, The Elder Scrolls, A Song of Ice and Fire, and many more historical periods than just the Middle Ages. Those modders have also refined the core experience, retroactively adding the kind of detail you'd find in later Total War games like Empire, Shogun 2, and Rome 2.

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4. Total War: Shogun 2

Release: 2011
Platforms: PC

Perhaps the most refined and reliable Total War game at its launch—and the tightest one ever for a reliable gameplay experience (according to our Total War: Shogun 2 review)—Shogun 2 takes a much smaller-scale look at one island nation during one period of history. The smaller roster of soldiers with more obvious jobs in combat makes this one particularly accessible to series newcomers, while the AI is actually fairly competent in both politics and warfare.

Top that off with the spectacular setpiece sieges of beautiful, unique Japanese castles, and you've got a Total War that's pretty hard to hate. Plus, its expansion pack, Fall of the Samurai, is extremely cool, if a bit uneven compared to the base Shogun 2. Why? It covers a rarely-seen historical period that includes both ironclad warships and gatling guns alongside sword-wielding cavalry and peasant levies with spears.

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3. Total War: Rome 2

Release: 2013
Platforms: PC

I'll freely admit that, like many others, I panned this game when it came out. It had a suite of weird technical problems, ran very poorly for many, and was mired in mechanics that were alternately confusing and frustrating. In the years since its release, however, Rome 2 has taken on a powerful identity of its own that really makes the most of its campaign map and ancient setting.

The battle maps are a high watermark for the series, both field, town, city, and siege maps, letting you really understand how ancient generals found uses for the huge variety of soldiers they fielded. The quality of the maps really encourages you to play to your faction's strengths: Gauls want to hit their enemies hard and break morale at close range, while Romans want to stand fast against all odds until the enemy breaks against them, and the Parthians want to tire out their enemies at range before smashing them in a cavalry charge. For more, check out our Total War: Rome 2 review!

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2. Total War: Three Kingdoms

Release: 2019
Platforms: PC

Three Kingdoms is far and away the most mechanically interesting game Creative Assembly has ever made. It shows what the future of these games, if they continue, will likely be: character-driven politics, relationships, and army composition. These historical factions aren't faceless; instead represented by individuals who form alliances and rivalries with each other, switch sides, and fight epic martial arts duels when they meet on the battlefield. There's strategic depth in Three Kingdoms that you can't find elsewhere in the series, too, pushing you to form real alliances and husband your resources rather than just mindlessly conquer the next location on the map.

It also has a UI more lovely than any Total War release before or since. Sadly, compared to its contemporary Warhammer series, development on Three Kingdoms was cut short. As such, elements like the campaign AI and starting scenarios never reached the level you'd hope for or expect. Despite those shortcomings, it's solidly one of the best Total War games ever made… and a hopeful template for the series in the future.

Get it now:
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1. Total War: Warhammer

Release: 2016, 2017, 2022
Platforms: PC

Am I combining all three Total War: Warhammer games into one entry? Games and myriad expansions developed over what is now nearly a decade, and with DLC still releasing? Yes. Yes, I am. The proper way to enjoy these is as one sprawling entry that took seven years to develop—and you can enjoy them that way, to be clear, since they're more often than not on sale in a bundle of Total Warhammers 1-3 for less than any single one of them costs new.

Set in the sprawling dark fantasy of Warhammer's Old World, TWW has an at this point comedically huge game map to battle on and a slew of epic fantasy tropes incorporated. There are literally dozens of factions: from its uniquely interesting elves and dwarves to its human gunpowder empires and knights to goofy greenskin orcs. There's even the much more bizarre: Fleets of undead pirates, geometry-worshipping lizard people, hordes of extraplanar daemons, and an underground rat-thing empire. There's something here for everyone, as long as the something they want is fantasy. If you wanted history, well, maybe back up a few entries.

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For more recommendations, check out our lists of the best 4X games and the best PC games as well.

You can't see it and you certainly can't play it just yet, but Total War: Medieval 3 is real. If you're wondering why that alone is such a big deal: Total War celebrates its 25th anniversary this month, and for nearly 20 of those years, fans have been waiting for a follow-up to 2006's Medieval 2: Total War. Now, it's in early pre-production. During a visit to Creative Assembly's Horsham studio, disbelieving developers are still getting used to calling the project Medieval 3 instead of its secretive codename. Vice president of Total War, Roger Collum, contextualizes it best: "Medieval 3 is, in some sense, our Half-Life 3."

Total War: Medieval 3 is one of very few upcoming games that can be fairly compared to the wait for Valve's notoriously absent threequel. But with that comes the weight of staggering expectations, especially when you look at what Creative Assembly has achieved in the time since Medieval 2. That's partly why Medieval 3 is being unveiled so early: the developer is working with its community to shape the upcoming sandbox strategy. "The idea is that people will be really excited by it and super stoked," says Collum, "but they'll also understand what it is when it goes out – rather than everything in their brain that it's not."

While we're still a long way off getting our grubby mitts on Total War: Medieval 3, I caught up with creative director Leif Walter and game director Pawel Wojs to get an early sense of the direction it's marching in.

Marching orders

For Creative Assembly as well as fans, the legacy of Medieval 2 is tremendous. It was the first game Wojs ever worked on at the studio, while Walter, who joined Creative Assembly in 2016, still remembers crossing his fingers and hoping for Medieval 3 whilst waiting to be told which game he'd be working on first. "I think we've all had that dream in us for a long time," says Walter.

"We've been saying 'Med 3 when?' internally as well," jokes Wojs, referencing the now-infamous rallying cry plastered in the comments of every Total War social media post. "We're always reading them, and trying to make it happen. Now's the time."

In truth, this isn't Creative Assembly's first stab at making Medieval 3. Collum admits the studio has tried on three separate occasions to get the sequel off the ground, and for Wojs, one in particular sticks out. "After [Total War] Atilla we had a proper go at some early concepting of Medieval 3, and we actually went off on a research trip – a reenactment of the Battle of Grunwald in Poland," says Wojs. "I took a small team, taking photos and doing research."

"We came back and decided to do Three Kingdoms," he continues, bursting into laughter. "It's that balance of [finding] the right time, the right team, the right ambition. And it just felt like what we wanted to do with Medieval 3, it just wasn't the right time. We wouldn't be able to do it justice."

So: why now? There are a few reasons. Chief among them is Creative Assembly's new Warcore engine, which from a technical standpoint allows the studio to achieve things it's never done before. But the "right people" are also in place thanks to shared development across future titles, and crucially, its creators have confidence in being able to pull Medieval 3 off.

"It's been a few years since the last major historical title," adds Walter. "It felt like the right moment to do a bit of a reboot, almost a reimagining of what any historical Total War should look like. So it was a great combination of [being a] new step for that part of the franchise, and what better title, what better setting to choose for that step, than Medieval?"

Yet even by today's standards, Medieval 2 remains a high bar for Creative Assembly to clear. The 19-year-old title is still one of the series' most moddable, with fans creating everything from a Lord of the Rings conversion mod to entirely different historical settings. There's also a nebulous sense of depth, at times feeling like a sandbox-style strategic RPG where the goal is to navigate medieval Europe the best you can. Creative Assembly knows all of this: "We see it as our magnum opus," Wojs surmises.

"What's really interesting about that generation of Total War games, and Medieval 2 specifically, is how the gameplay was fairly limited in comparison to modern Total War titles," says Walter. "But there's something about the world that really comes to life. The little things: the population [...] the trade ships moving across the map. There's something about how the world felt real, authentic, and almost simulated in a way. It was really inspiring to go back to these roots [and say] 'the gameplay, of course, is really important but let's really make sure the world is coming alive in a way that's really special.'"

Living in the moment

While the team is locked into recreating this feeling, Wojs points out one key difference. While Medieval 2's liveliness required some "suspension of disbelief" – imagining details and events that weren't necessarily shown explicitly in-game – Medieval 3 will show, not tell. "You fill in those gaps [in Medieval 2]," he explains. "Whereas what we're looking to do now is actually bring those things to life, and have them present within the world."

"Medieval 2 has a lot of these elements where you build your realm across Europe, going on crusades and whatnot, but a lot of it almost felt like it was in your head," agrees Walter. "If you made a lot of notes while you played, you could come up with a compelling story. But the game didn't always help you to connect the dots, or show you all the facets of how you're reshaping and rewriting history. That was a big starting point for Medieval 3: we really wanted to show more layers of how you impact the world, more layers of how you can rewrite history, and how the world responds to your actions as well."

While that feeling is harder to implement than, say, tangible mechanics, I find it incredibly promising to hear Medieval 3's team has honed into it so early in development. The pair are on the money: I've internally narrated more Total War: Rome campaigns than I'd care to admit, and although I couldn't have put my finger on it before chatting to Walter and Wojs, that absorption is something I've deeply missed in more modern games.

With the level of color we're discussing, Medieval 3 sounds more akin to the likes of grand strategies Crusader Kings and Europa Universalis. That's because its developers are working to craft that depth and sim-feel before layering the traditional Total War experience over it. "What we have is more layers of that simulation that the player can interact with, if they choose to," says Wojs. "It's peeling back those layers of engagement depending on the way the player wants to play and experience the game. On the face of it, yes, they can treat it like a Total War game and paint the map red. Or they can engage with all of these systems, all of these layers that make it so much more meaningful."

It's too early to hone in on those systems just yet, but Walter emphasizes "specifically" looking at the connection between the campaign map and battles – pointing to the way that equipment upgrades selected in Medieval 2's campaign would be reflected in what units wore in battle. Thanks to Warcore, mod support – at a campaign level – will be restored to pre-Empire days. Elsewhere, Wojs recognizes "a whole list of features fans talk about in relation to Medieval 2, from the slotless buildings and the multi-layered sieges," but notes that Creative Assembly has learned a lot in the near-20 years since Medieval 2. "When we talk about fostering the rebirth of historical Total War, we need to take the best of the best and try to build Medieval 3 with all of that in mind," he says, "not just Medieval 2."

Perfecting that formula is the reason Medieval 3 has been revealed so early in pre-production. Creative Assembly has never unveiled a game at this stage (Wojs points out that interviews like this are usually held in the six-month window before launch), nor has it made a comparable effort to involve the community in a Total War title's development like this. Some elements of Medieval 3 will even be decided by players, says Wojs, with polls and iterative feedback sessions designed to foster that collaboration.

"I'm sure we'll make mistakes along the way," says Wojs. "This is the first time we're talking about a game so early because this is the game our community wants the most. So this is why we want to talk about it: we'll be showing things we've never shown before, and talking about things we've never really engaged with before. It's super exciting."

It's fascinating to see Creative Assembly approaching Medieval 2's legacy not as an insurmountable challenge, but as a peak it wants to reach once more. Involving the community not only helps the studio climb those heights, but shows that it's learned from fans who have asked for more transparency across the last decade of Total War: Warhammer. It will presumably be a long time before any of us get to play Medieval 3, but hey – at least it's real.

Here's everything announced at the Total War 25th Anniversary Showcase - and if it's got you in the conquering mode, take a look at the best strategy games we've hand-picked

Creative Assembly and Sega have spent the last few months celebrating 25 years of Total War, a massive milestone for the iconic strategy series. To cap it all off, the developer hosted a 25th Anniversary Showcase on December 4, which it used to unveil a new game engine, a suite of new content for Total War: Warhammer 3, and the reveal of Total War: Medieval 3. But it would appear that the studio has more to share in the near future.

Alongside its work on Medieval 3 and Warhammer 3, Creative Assembly has confirmed that it has a third Total War game in development – and that it's going to be revealed at The Game Awards on December 11.

While details are still light on the ground, the studio has teased that the announcement will mark "Total War's next major release" and that it "represents one of the most ambitious projects in the franchise's history, marking the beginning of an exciting new era."

There's no word yet on what this new Total War game may be. There were rumors last year that Creative Assembly was working on a Total War: Star Wars game, although these claims were never substantiated. Thankfully, with the Game Awards little over a week away, we aren't going to be waiting long for more details of whatever this mystery project is.

Whatever's next for Total War, you'd have to expect it to be a disappointment if it's anything less than one of the best strategy games on the market. For more from the show, check out everything announced at the Total War 25th Anniversary Showcase, and dive into our big interview with the Total War devs.

Total War has been a lot of things over the last 25 years. It has certainly been iconic, reshaping the strategy genre time and time again. It's also been open to experimentation, diving into multiple eras of history and into the fantasy Warhammer sandbox. Something it has never primarily been, however, is console-friendly. Creative Assembly is ready to change that.

Announced as part of its 25th anniversary showcase on December 4, Creative Assembly announced the Warcore game engine – the next evolution of Total War's proprietary technology. The studio promises that the new game engine is "the most advanced technological foundation in the franchise’s history" and that it will empower its developers "with a suite of tools that allows for gameplay to be more immersive, dynamic and responsive than ever before."

Which is all to say, Creative Assembly is promising future Total War games will remain at the "cutting edge of strategy gaming for years to come." The part of the Warcore announcement that should excite everybody is word that the engine is designed with console gaming in mind. "In a franchise first, it also enables future games to be released on PlayStation and Xbox, welcoming a new generation of commanders to the scale, immersion, and tactical mastery that defines Total War," says a Creative Assembly spokesperson.

While the studio stopped short of announcing any Total War games for PS5 or Xbox Series X, this is a positive indication that the strategy series will finally land on consoles in the future.

The Total War series has long been among the best PC games you can play. For more, check out or big interview with the Total War devs, or find out about everything announced at the Total War 25th Anniversary Showcase.

Creative Assembly has finally confirmed that Total War: Medieval 3 is in development. This has been a long-time coming for fans of the studio's historical strategy installments, with Total War: Medieval 2 having launched almost two decades ago.

Total War: Medieval 3 was announced at the 25th Anniversary Showcase on December 4, which Creative Assembly used to unveil the future of its long-running series. This included a massive new update to Total War: Warhammer 3 set to release next summer, a new game engine designed to bring future Total War games to Playstation and Xbox, and a tease of another announcement at The Game Awards on December 11.

It was Medieval 3 that stole the spotlight though. The game has entered early pre-production, with Creative Assembly opting to unveil its "ultimate medieval strategy sandbox" early in an effort to maintain stronger dialogue with its community throughout development. The studio says that Medieval 3 will "empower players to shape realms, rewrite history, and immerse themselves in the Middle Ages like never before" as it promises a "rebirth of historical Total War."

Creative Assembly stopped short of announcing a release window or platforms, but it's good to see the series returning to an era of history that inspired some of the best Total War games.

You'll find more than one Total War title in our list of the best strategy games out there, and a return to the classic days of Medieval could take the series to even great heights than ever before. In the meantime, check out our big interview with the Total War devs and our breakdown of everything announced at the Total War 25th Anniversary Showcase.

Total War has dominated the strategy genre for 25 years, but its palace in the real-world is deceptively modest. Creative Assembly's UK studio has spent the last quarter-century perfecting its blend of real-time and turn-based strategy from an unassuming office block in Horsham, Sussex, its run of historical titles beginning with Shogun: Total War in 2000 before branching into fantasy with the Total War: Warhammer trilogy.

In that time, no developer has made a serious run at Total War's crown. Yet, peering toward the series' future – a deeply ambitious vision which includes the long-awaited Total War: Medieval 3, a bespoke new engine which will bring the series to consoles, and an apocalyptic End Times-themed DLC for Total War: Warhammer 3 – Creative Assembly paints the picture of an underdog fighting from the backfoot.

"We're definitely not sitting on our hands," says Roger Collum, vice president of Total War. Chatting to me alongside studio veteran Kevin McDowell (franchise content director – art) in one of the Horsham studio's many meeting rooms, almost all of them named after past Total War games, Collum points to record-breaking JRPG Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 as an example of an entire genre being blindsided.

"With the rate of [advancing] technology, it's changing the world," explains Collum. "We just have to expect that there are plenty of hidden competitors who are out there to try to take our lunch. So we have to continue to evolve and reinvent the formula and just try to be a step ahead of the people who are just right behind us and may be really hungry to also do something great."

Next turn

Total War: Medieval 3, revealed during Total War's 25th anniversary celebrations, is that next step to greatness. Fans have waited nearly 20 years for a follow-up to 2006's Medieval 2: Total War – a cursory glance at the series' social media channels turns up thousands of 'Medieval 3 when?' posts – but Creative Assembly has been waiting for just as long to get it right. The studio knows what's at stake: in the words of Medieval 3 game director Pawel Wojs, its creators aim for nothing less than "fostering the rebirth of historical Total War".

That's a high mantle to reach, but the vision is in place. Medieval 2 felt closer to a historical strategy sim than any Total War game since, leaning on RPG-like features to emphasize immersion whilst giving players a sense of agency within a living world. When it comes to Medieval 3, those facets – letting players "write [their] own history book" and feel like a part of the setting, as Wojs puts it – are front-and-center, alongside the likes of improved modding support and significant work on city-sieging mechanics.

"We've probably started this project three times now because the scope – everything we need it to be – all of those things were just very overwhelming. The technology had to be where it's at [now]," says Collum. With those pieces in place, the confidence is palpable. The studio is even announcing Medieval 3 while it's still early in development (this is the earliest Creative Assembly has ever announced a project), with plans to give fans a degree of authorship through polls and feedback sessions.

"Medieval 3 is in some sense our Half-Life 3," explains Collum, touching on the decision to unveil the game so early. "I think [Half-Life 3 is] one of those things in which Valve will struggle to release and hit all of player expectations, so I figure [we'll] just show it and then get people's feedback, and build upon that so when we do release it, the idea is that people will be really excited by it and be super stoked, but they'll also understand what it is when it goes out – rather than everything in their brain that it's not."

It's an approach that extends beyond Total War: Medieval 3. Amongst fans, there is a sentiment that Creative Assembly has been poor at communicating plans and schedules around the Total War: Warhammer trilogy – something it has improved on in 2025 with more frequent patches and blogs, but there is still area for improvement. Building a more transparent relationship with fans is one of the highest priorities for Collum, who surmises bluntly: "We are learning how to be good at it. We are not good at it yet."

When Collum joined the studio right after the launch of Total War: Warhammer 3, he recalls feeling a "cultural shyness of how we interact with our audience". McDowell, who has been at Creative Assembly "just shy" of 26 years, puts it drily: "[We're] British". "It's been a huge cultural undertaking internally to recognize that we've got a community of really passionate people," says Collum. "We have to learn how to speak with them. In fact, it's more than that: I want us to be a part of the community. I don't want us to be apart from the community, which I think is where CA stood for a while."

"I've been releasing an annual blog to our audience to show that from the very top of the organization down, we really care about our players," he continues. "This is received with various mixes of skepticism – they see my title like 'Who's this loser?' – but I do it very well-meaning and authentically. I genuinely want to connect and interact. We work really hard at stripping out corporate speak, because it's just so easy to default to that because it's safe. I don't want to be safe! I want us to be out there, and less risk averse. We won't always get it right. It's been a journey [...] But I think we're starting to really hit those strides, which I'm really proud of."

War machine

Many of Creative Assembly's current problems stem from the same problem: Warhammer 3's engine. The trilogy's foundations are now a decade old, and wrangling the Warscape engine is now so difficult that it takes developers much longer than it should to create new content – thereby causing delays, which in turn create many of the studio's communication issues. That's not counting the bugs and quirks known to sneak into live builds, as Warscape is now so creaky that it's near-impossible to change something without it breaking something seemingly-unrelated.

Warcore – which is a new engine, at risk of oversimplifying things – is Creative Assembly's saving grace. Warcore is already being used to develop multiple Total War games behind the scenes, cutting down development times while broadly offering a far more stable foundation for those games to come. It will also pave the way for Total War to come to PlayStation and Xbox consoles, a huge leap forward in itself.

"Doing engine rewrites, as it were, [is] very tough. I don't care what company you are, what studio – you see examples of games all over the industry in which they do an engine transition and it comes with a lot of challenges," says Collum. "But the fact is, Warhammer 3, being a 10-year-old game, had become untenable in terms of its ability to do anything. You can update one thing, then you have to test everything, and then things will fall apart once live. It's just a total mess."

One of Warcore's primary goals is to "reset us to a state where we can release things much more quickly and often," adds Collum, pointing to the delays around Warhammer 3. "My read of our fans is that the deep part of the frustration is the cadence in which we release stuff. We don't release stuff fast enough for them. We've been releasing patches once a month [or] every two weeks, for a while. But people want new, they want novelty. They want brand new toys to play with. And we've got to get far faster at being able to deliver that."

As one of those players (with frankly too many hours in Total War), there's a lot to look forward to. Finally getting Nagash in Warhammer 3's Lords of the End Times DLC – which is aiming to launch next summer – is cause enough for celebration. But to look beyond that, to see Total War: Medieval 3, a new engine, and even more yet to be announced, feels like wish fulfillment not just for fans but for Creative Assembly itself. No matter who I speak to at the studio, there's confidence – a tangible buzz – in everything they're working on.

"We've got some of the most stunning games in the pipeline [...] In my 25 years at CA, we've not had a better roadmap," says McDowell. "We've not had better opportunities than right now. The new engine, new technology, is going to really pay off for us."

The faith is bracing. Creative Assembly has taken punches over the last two years, namely the cancellation of extraction shooter Hyenas and two waves of layoffs. Within the context of Warhammer 3, which has suffered from its own DLC controversies, the studio has reeled from one crisis to another. The wider games industry continues to struggle, but for Creative Assembly, it finally seems like there is light at the end of the tunnel.

"It's hard not to look at our brothers and sisters out in the industry, and see the tumultuous nature of the studios that they're working with. Every other day you see shutdowns, you see mass firings. We see all these things, it's really tough," says Collum. "So we have to make really smart decisions internally about how to make our games [...] We work every day to try to make sure that morale on-team stays high, and that they believe in the vision. Like everything, it's nuanced. And we don't win in every corner, but we try as hard as we can in order to keep the energy up. If you see any materials for Medieval 3, it shows."

That passion radiates throughout Creative Assembly's Horsham studio, where the meeting rooms are named after Total War games and even its concrete stairwells are decorated with framed artwork from the series. "It's very difficult for games to be good if people don't also care about them," says Collum. Whether that's Total War: Medieval 3, or the number of other super secret projects in the works, for Collum it's about putting that studio DNA front and center so that hard work and care is impossible to miss: "You can see the blood, sweat, and tears."

Stick around with GamesRadar+, as our Big Preview for Total War will dive into everything you still want to know about the series' future.

The Total War 25th Anniversary Showcase has just wrapped up, and there's a lot to unpack. From confirmation that Total War: Medieval 3 is in development to Total War: Warhammer 3's vast Lords of the End Times DLC revealing the long-awaited return of Nagash, fans of the iconic strategy series have a frankly staggering amount of developments to be excited for.

Still, that hardly scratches the surface. Whether you missed the showcase or just want someone else to tell you that, yes, Medieval 3 is real, we've rounded up everything that was announced during the Total War 25th Anniversary Showcase. And if you're looking to hear more from Creative Assembly itself, check out our Total War Big Preview to hear more about the future of Total War and how Creative Assembly is learning from its past to set itself up for another 25 years of dominance in the strategy field.

Total War: Medieval 3 announced

It's been nearly 20 years since Creative Assembly released Medieval 2: Total War – a seminal strategy experience that's long been considered one of the best Total War games of all-time. Today SEGA announced the long-awaited return of the sub-series, with Total War: Medieval 3 now in early pre-production. Creative Assembly says that this new chapter will be a "rebirth of historical Total War", with the studio working to deliver "the ultimate medieval strategy sandbox" as it returns to the Middle Ages period. While Total War: Medieval 3 doesn't have a release date, the promise of "meticulous historical authenticity with unprecedented player agency" certainly sounds as if it'll be worth the wait.

There's a new Total War engine

Sometimes it can be tricky to really parse what the announcement of a brand new game engine really means. But there's one particular detail surrounding the announcement of a new Warcore engine that you really should pay attention to – it's going to enable future Total War games to be released on PlayStation and Xbox, a first for the franchise. As for what Warcore will mean for the evolution of the games themselves, Creative Assembly promises that it is the most advanced technological foundation the series has even been built with, empowering "developers with a suite of tools that allows for gameplay to be more immersive, dynamic and responsive than ever before."

New Total War: Warhammer 3 DLC

Total War: Warhammer 3 may have released back in 2022, but Creative Assembly clearly has no plans to walk away from its fantasy sandbox. Today, the studio announced that the game's biggest DLC to date, Lords of the End Times, is coming in summer 2026. Introducing four new legendary lords into the colossal Immortal Empires campaign experience, the first to be revealed is Nagash – a great necromancer who wishes to drown the world in undeath. GamesRadar+ has already spoken to Creative Assembly about its vast End Times adaptation, so stay tuned to learn more in the coming days.

Total War: Warhammer 3 is getting a free End Times update

Alongside Nagash and company, Lords of the End Times will arrive with a vast update to the base game. Total War: Warhammer 3's campaign will be transformed as vying powers fight to save (or destroy) the Old World as we know it. Expect to see entire provinces destroyed as earthquakes tear the land asunder and warpstone meteors leave craters in the map, whilst anything under the rule of Nagash withers and dies. Creative Assembly is also teasing a free Legendary Lord who is "ready to leave their mark on the cataclysm to come" – but their identity is a secret for now.

There's another announcement at The Game Awards

Are Nagash, Total War: Medieval 3, and a new engine not enough? That's alright – Creative Assembly is feeling generous, and it still has one more surprise up its sleeve. The studio has another announcement to make at The Game Awards, which is set to broadcast on December 11 at 4:30PM PT / 7:30PM ET. For UK folk, that's 12:30AM on December 12 – but given the secrecy around this, it's looking like one worth staying up for. "Here's to 25 more years," says Roger Collum, vice president of Total War – but what could match Medieval 3?

Tides of Torment for Total War: Warhammer 3

Tides of Torment, the latest DLC for Total War: Warhammer 3, is out now. The DLC, which can be bought as one whole or on a Lord-by-Lord basis, adds three new Legendary Lords: Norscan shaman Sayl the Faithless, High Elf naval expert Aislinn, and Slaanesh-corrupted daemon Dechala the Denied One. Even if you're not buying Tides of Torment, the DLC coincides with a sizable patch 7.0 which brings a host of fixes and introduces a free Legendary Lord – dancing Slaaneshi Daemonette The Masque. One more turn? Oh, go on then.

Total War: Warhammer 3 colossal Immortal Empires campaign is free

The Total War: Warhammer trilogy turns 10 next year, and the map it began with looks nothing like the sprawling Immortal Empires campaign that has come to define Total War: Warhammer 3. Now it's opening its doors to even more players, as Creative Assembly is making Immortal Empires – a stitched-together map that spans the setting of all three games – free in both Total War: Warhammer and Total War: Warhammer 2. This means you'll be able to play without owning Warhammer 3, and buy DLC from games you don't own – if you haven't played the Chaos Dwarfs yet, now is your chance.

Still looking for more? We've rounded up the best strategy games for you to play next

Baldur's Gate 3 Lae'zel actor Devora Wilde says she'd "absolutely" be open to taking on the role of a Sister of Battle in a future Warhammer video game, even if she admits she's "still very new to the universe."

At the Golden Joystick Awards, one of GamesRadar+'s resident Warhammer nerds James Daly spoke to Wilde about Space Marine 2, noting that one of the audio logs you can discover in the game, which "is delivered with a signature kind of venom and Emperor-worshipping strength," is voiced by her. Asked if she'd be open to taking on the role of a Battle Sister in a future game – like Alanah Pearce in the upcoming Warhammer 40K: Boltgun 2 – Wilde is immediately all for it.

"Absolutely," she responds. "Oh my God. All Warhammer stuff is amazing, and I'm still very new to the universe, and I don't know that much about it, but I do sort of know what a Sister of Battle is, and it sounds great."

It's not just because of her fierce performance as Lae'zel that this makes sense – earlier this month, a trailer for the upcoming official Warhammer animations shows Wilde voicing a Sister of Battle, too. Even if she's not taken on the role in a game yet, Games Workshop clearly sees her as a good fit, and that's not to mention her appearance in Warhammer 40K: Darktide as a player voice for the Arbites DLC class.

Elsewhere at The Golden Joysticks, fellow Baldur's Gate 3 star Jennifer English encouraged devs not to use generative AI in games, saying: "I get it that AI is a tool. I get it, but not to replace creativity."

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 wins 7 titles at Golden Joystick Awards, tying with Baldur's Gate 3 – and Larian boss Swen Vincke approves: "Definitely deserved."

Last year, I admitted to spending 2,379 hours in Creative Assembly's Total War: Warhammer trilogy. That dire stat now sits at 2,537 hours, thanks to my inability to separate from Total War: Warhammer 3. In the three years since it launched, I've done everything you could conceivably think of doing in a high-fantasy strategy series. Sail out to save the world with legions of High Elves? Check. Unite the disparate clans of Chaos to burn down the realm of man? Check. Lead armies of dino-riding Lizardmen in expelling hordes of minigun-wielding rats from the jungles of Lustria? Believe it or not, check.

Until now, I've never considered running out of things to do in Total War: Warhammer 3. Nearly every big name and unit from Warhammer's Old World setting has been added over the trilogy's course, but there are still a few absent celebrities (cough, Nagash) – not to mention the host of niche characters that are there for the taking if Creative Assembly wants to dig deep.

"Obviously, if we could do it all, we would do it all, but realistically, we'll try and do as much as we can," Creative Assembly told me last December. "There's some big, interesting things still out there, which hopefully we'll get the opportunity to do at some point in time."

Once, I would have been dismayed at the thought of Warhammer 3's updates coming to an end. But lately I've been revisiting my favorite campaigns feeling ready for something fresh, and as the game's DLC releases have slowed in favor of more quality-of-life updates – not to mention a recent blog post that feels like it's paving the way for a grand finale in 2026 – I can feel reluctance giving way to acceptance.

Witness true power

Pull 10 random Warhammer 3 fans off the street and ask them for a wishlist of things they'd like to see added to the game, and you'll likely get 10 different answers. My own feels pretty reasonable: Nagash and vampire queen Neferata are my must-haves for rounding out the undead factions, but I wouldn't say no to troublemaker-in-chief Thanquol or mercenary faction Dogs of War.

But beyond that (okay, and maybe Tzeentch cultist Egrimm van Horstmann), I appreciate that Total War: Warhammer 3 has to end somewhere. The game's last few years have felt a little muddled, with an unreliable release schedule and long-standing issues with AI taking some wind out of the swan song's sails. Yet while out-and-out new content is scarcer, the cadence of improvements and top-level faction reworks has vastly improved. Problems like clunky sieges and questionable AI decision-making are steadily being tackled, improving the content we already have rather than stacking more on top of it.

I think this is the right call. You only get the thrill of an all-new campaign once, but humbler race tweaks benefit factions forever. Just look at the trilogy's most effective reworks – Chaos is far and away my most-played faction since it was given another pass with tribe and fortress mechanics, and Kislev is in a much better place since recent tweaks made its theological divide less intense.

Part of my longing for Nagash – besides, you know, desperately wanting to play Number One Dad Necromancer – is the opportunity it presents for revisiting both Vampire Counts and Tomb Kings, two races which don't feel as shiny or in-line with their respective power fantasies as more touched-up factions do.

I'm currently drowning the Empire in a tide of zombies and wights as Vlad von Carstein, and while the last update's addition of sword-and-shield Blood Knights was fantastic, you can still feel that Vampire Counts were the trilogy's joint-first faction. A few other races have that barebones feel – I already mentioned Tomb Kings, but the likes of Bretonnia and Lizardmen are creaky too – and if Warhammer 3 is on the clock, it feels more meaningful in the long-run to make sure all playable factions are on parity with other, rather than widen the gap caused by power creep.

End turn

Aside from wanting the Total War: Warhammer trilogy to be left in the best state possible, the real reason I'm easing my grip on it is because I'm excited for what's next. Creative Assembly is working on a few different Total War projects right now – both historical and fantasy – and I'm itching to hear more on the latter, especially as there are rumors of it having a Star Wars or Warhammer 40K setting.

For a lot of people, the thought of Total War moving away from high fantasy – and further into gun-based combat – is worrying. I get it: if any of these rumors turns out to be true, I can't pretend to know how either would work. But I'm a lot more open-minded about the prospect, thanks to how much time I've sunk into Total War: Warhammer 3. After all, I had no Warhammer knowledge and zero interest in 2016's Total War: Warhammer until I realized it was high fantasy – now it's one of my most-played games.

Total War: Warhammer 3's sun may be setting – and who's to say when that final update will actually come – but it's no longer something to fear. After nine years of adoration, I'm ready to relive that feeling of leaving Total War: Rome 2 behind for something utterly unpredictable. Until then, I suspect I'll still be writing about the joy of Chaos long past the 3,000-hour mark.

Here are the best PC games to check out next

There's no easy way to say this, so I'm just going to come right out and admit that I've played the Total War: Warhammer trilogy for a collective 2,379 hours. That's a little over three months of playtime. Through the series' eight-year lifespan I've made vampire pirates fight hordes of dinosaurs-riding-dinosaurs, burned down civilization as a legion of stinky plague-worshippers, and righted centuries-old grudges with throngs of axe-toting dwarfs. It's this sort of high-fantasy faction diversity that's kept me playing for as long as I have, with semi-frequent DLC introducing new units, characters and playstyles every few months.

Warhammer 3's latest addition, Omens of Destruction, makes it harder than ever to put down. Ogres now feel like a real mercenary faction, the Greenskins get "tactician" orc Gorbad Ironclaw at the helm, and Khorne fans get Skulltaker – whose goal is to hunt down important characters to take their, er, skulls for a cape he's making. Sigh. Like a stubborn fish, I'm hooked again.

Big thinkin'

It's been a fantastic year for Warhammer 3 – but a year ago, the trilogy was at its lowest-ever point. Its 2023 DLC Shadows of Change was heavily criticized for its pricing and contents – it essentially asked for more while giving less, a rare miss even for me – and there were concerns that core bugs and issues weren't being addressed. The debacle led to an apology from Creative Assembly, along with promises to shape up going forward.

To the studio's credit, it's spent the entirety of 2024 delivering on that promise. Besides Omens of Destruction there have been frequent hotfixes for balance issues and bugs before they have a chance to fester, and its last DLC – Thrones of Decay – remains one of my all-time favorite additions to the game. It's been a fantastic shift, and even parent company Sega praised the game's critical and financial turnaround in its latest financial results. When I catch up with game director Rich Aldridge ahead of Omens of Destruction's launch, he's open about the progress Creative Assembly has made in 2024.

"We make this game for people to enjoy, and we just wanted to go out there and do that," says Aldridge. "It's a continuing journey. We know the job is not done. It's really lovely that people welcomed us back into those conversations, and we're able to do things like blogs and video diaries [...] that's been a really good moment in this year for us."

"But we don't rest on our laurels," he adds. "We know that there's still a lot more to do. There's still a lot more to fix and improve upon. There's many fan favorites out there, which we haven't managed to bring to life yet. But, yeah, we're all passionate about the project and about the IP, so we just want to do good, continue this journey, and keep working hard for everyone.

Speaking of fan favorites, the game's largest omission for most players is iconic necromancer Nagash, also known as Bone Daddy. Just look at Reddit user zaneprotoss, who's been drawing fanart for 181 days and counting – with no plans to stop until Nagash is added. "We've seen that," laughs Aldridge. But while the director has found the artwork "really fun," the path to actually adding Nagash – who is considerably stronger in the lore than most existing characters – is still unclear. "We know that he's well-loved, and he's definitely someone that we've considered, but he's on a completely different power level," he explains. "That's something we'll have to think about, if and when we get to that."

On my end, I've dreamed about playing Warhammer's calcium-in-chief since learning of his existence in the second game. But in his absence, Immortal Empires – a sandbox campaign that stitches all three games' maps into one cohesive whole – has steadily become full-to-bursting with playable factions. It leaves players spoiled for choice, but makes fitting in new characters a challenge – a problem that Aldridge could never have foreseen when Total War: Warhammer launched in 2016. "Whoever thought the world would become too small?"

Though it speaks to how long Creative Assembly has stuck with its trilogy, it also raises the question of whether there's an end in sight. "I think we've come a long way," says Aldridge. "We found our feet. We've learned a lot from our players – what works, what doesn't. We've got a big playground in Immortal empires available to us, and I think that's what we set out to do."

"We know there's lots of characters, lots of creatures and bits and pieces [still missing]," he continues. "Obviously, if we could do it all, we would do it all, but realistically, we'll try and do as much as we can. There's some big, interesting things still out there, which hopefully we'll get the opportunity to do at some point in time. But we've been thoroughly enjoying all the content we've been working on in recent times."

Hopefully Nagash (who is both big and interesting) falls into those plans somewhere, if only for the sake of zaneprotoss. Regardless of what comes next, though, Total War: Warhammer's future looks far brighter than it did a year ago. We are, as the kids and Bone Daddy's freshly-raised zombies say, so back.

Here are the best PC games to keep you busy until Nagash arrives

Players unhappy at Creative Assembly's decision to stop development on Total War: Three Kingdoms have begun review bombing the game on Steam.

Since May 27, 2021, 4000+ new reviews have been added to the game's Steam storefront, most of which give a "mostly negative" rating. 

The turn-based strategy game only released back in May 2019, but already developer Creative Assembly has halted development in favor of committing resources to another Romance of the Three Kingdoms project, therefore "increasing [the studio's] focus on this novel's rich cast of characters and their individual and unique narratives, taking the core of what made Total War: Three Kingdoms so special and pushing it further" (thanks, Eurogamer).

"Way to stop producing content for a game called Total War: THREE KINGDOMS without actually getting to the THREE KINGDOMS part," complained one player, who has spent 745 hours in-game. "You also mentioned multiple times that you were going to be releasing a northern expansion, guess that's down the toilet as well. Good job CA, you absolute hacks."

Another simply says: "The game has been abandoned. Thanks, CA."

"The game is good what is not good is to review bomb it just because you disagree," suggests another, which gives a thumbs up. "It's stuff like this that makes Steam reviews a bad thing. Find better things to do than to review bomb it because they stopped supporting this. Yes, it sucks, but that does not give the right not review bomb it like this it's a good game. Put your voice on other platforms."

ICYMI, Total War: Warhammer 3 is set to launch later this year in 2021.

"Embarking on a new grand campaign, you will be tasked with saving or exploiting the power of a dying god," the official blurb read at the time. "Each race offers a unique journey through the nightmarish Chaos Realm, culminating in an endgame that will determine the fate of the world."

It sounds like Total War: Warhammer 3 is going to be bigger than the previous two games before it, with the official press release from Sega touting "strategy gaming on a scale yet unseen." It also sounds as though this upcoming game will be the final entry in the ongoing trilogy, wrapping up the events of the past two games in one climactic installment.

When Total War: Warhammer 3 releases at some point later this year on PC, you'll be able to purchase it through Steam, the Epic Games Store, or directly from Sega.

To see if any of the Total War: Warhammer games made it into our list of the very best strategy games you can play on PC right now, head over to our best strategy games roundup for more. Want to know about any cheat codes? Check out this Total War: Three Kingdoms cheats guide.

If you're undertaking battles from the Three Kingdoms period of Chinese history, you'll no doubt have realised how difficult it can be to achieve victory and may be searching for some Total War: Three Kingdoms cheats to help lead your faction to success. That's totally understandable, as commanding your generals to lead infantry and cavalry units through historically accurate sieges takes a lot of knowledge and skill, and nobody wants to stare defeat in the face if there's a way to avoid it. With that in mind, let's take a look a what options are available if you want Total War: Three Kingdoms cheats.

Total War: Three Kingdoms console commands

Unfortunately, there are currently no official Total War: Three Kingdoms cheats available, either as cheat code phrases to type in or the more traditional PC console commands used to edit specific functions and variables within the game. There's always a chance that cheat codes will be revealed or discovered at a later date, or console command functionality could be patched into the game with a future update, but for now at least the only way to cheat in Total War: Three Kingdoms is through unofficial means.

Total War: Three Kingdoms mods

Ok, so Total War: Three Kingdoms mods are not really cheats per se, but if you check out the selection available over at Nexusmods you'll see that the community have put together some great mods to make the game easier. At the time of writing there are mods to give you over 100 start game items and followers, 100% guaranteed capture for generals, increased satisfaction and loyalty for your generals, and more. There are also some simple quality of life improvements to be had, such as allowing you to skip the intro or zoom in the camera further for a better view of the battlefield.

Total War: Three Kingdoms Cheat Engine

When it comes to unofficial ways to access Total War: Three Kingdoms cheats, there are several options available. Before we start, we should stress that downloading and running any third-party software is completely at your own risk, so you should apply due diligence and ensure your PC has adequate protection before proceeding with installing any cheat programs. You should also make a back up of any important game saves before proceeding, in case you need to restore them later.

The first method is Cheat Engine, an open source program which allows you to modify single player games with an extensive suite of tools. Once you have it installed, you can then download Cheat Engine Tables to load into it, which are pre-built to provide a selection of cheats for your chosen game. This Cheat Engine Table provides many options including maxing out character satisfaction, reserves, and public order, plus freezing or customising the current year and setting the ages of individual characters.

Total War: Three Kingdoms WeMod Trainer

Another option for adding Total War: Three Kingdoms cheats is to download and install the WeMod Trainer for the game. This has a slicker interface than Cheat Engine which should make it easier to use, and it also offers a few different cheat options to the previous method. It's worth trying out both programs to see which works best for you, but make sure you don't run them at the same time, otherwise you may create conflicts that either stop them from working properly or crash your game completely.

Whichever route you go down, we hope the information in this guide proves useful and helps you on your way to becoming the ultimate ruler of China. And if you feel like you need to take a break from all the faction battles, why not take a look at what other best strategy games you can play right now.

The Total War: Three Kingdoms reviews are out now, and you can start reading what the critics think while you wait for the game to arrive on May 23. You can already find a number of perspectives on Three Kingdoms' strengths both as the next Total War and as its own fresh take on a much-recounted period of Chinese history. These Total War: Three Kingdoms review snippets should illuminate some specific areas of the game, but feel free to click on each outlet's name to read the full version for yourself.

Total War: Three Kingdoms' Diplomacy is essential - PC Gamer (78/100) 

"Diplomacy is one of the most substantial and welcome areas to be changed. Where before there was so much guesswork involved that dealing with rival nations felt like passing notes in class and then waiting for an answer ('Do you want to form a defensive alliance with me, y/n'), in Three Kingdoms it's completely transparent. Whenever I ask a neighbor for something there's a button to automatically figure out what it would take to make that deal work. It just straight-up tells you how much money will guarantee this trade of territory or food or even marriage, rather than making you stab in the dark then try again when it fails [...] Diplomacy has been a weak point for Total War even as other systems have improved, so these are welcome changes. So is the quick deal button, which lets you immediately see who is open to trade or vassalhood or whatever rather than having to scroll down a list. "

Total War: Three Kingdoms' characters matter more than ever - The Guardian (4/5) 

"Whether you play in Romance mode - which gives your generals sorcerous battlefield abilities - or Records, which skews to the realistic, the characters remain at the foundation, where older Total War games treated them as secondary. Before recruiting armies, for example, you must appoint a commander, whose attributes go some way to determining which troops you'll hire and how they perform. You can also promote characters to positions at court, from town administrator all the way to prime minister, to shape the operation of your empire. Characters have their own notions of job satisfaction and a certain autonomy; overlook one for promotion or fail to supply an entourage befitting their status, and they may eventually switch sides.

These personalities age and evolve over the course of each playthrough. They don't just develop new traits - a scarred visage that sparks terror in combat, a charitable outlook that makes them popular with peasants - but they also develop friendships and grudges with other characters. With time, these relationships come to shape your decisions as heavily as economic factors such as crop production."

Total War: Three Kingdoms' Romance mode makes combat mythical - GameSpot (8/10) 

"The distinctive, much-trumpeted difference between Three Kingdoms and previous titles is the aforementioned Romance mode. This is where the fantastical merges with the historical in a way that offers you a new way to dominate opponents on the battlefield. In this mode, your generals stand head and shoulders above the rest, capable of single-handedly taking out entire squadrons on their own even as they yell out orders to the men rallying around them. In Romance mode, the strength of said generals grows in epic scale and scope over time, much in line with the fantastical deeds they perform in the source material. Generals also have the option to engage in duels with each other, which provides a spectacular, clash of the titans-style combative satisfaction. Three Kingdoms also lets you take these types of confrontations one step further in the new Battle mode, which lets you reenact famous skirmishes from Chinese history as these storied generals. It's both nicely educational and a refreshing change of pace."

Total War: Three Kingdoms' battle AI can be weak, but perhaps by design - Rock Paper Shotgun (Bestest Bests) 

"Three Kingdoms' AI armies are extremely predictable. In most other strategy games they would be infuriating. However, in a series which resembles historical war more closely than most others it's difficult to say where strategy ends and exploit begins. Commanders really have made stupid decisions about deployment and tactics in our world, and in Three Kingdoms the distinction between the 'decisions' of a character like Yuan Huan and the failure of the game are very unclear. For what it's worth, I was winning evenly matched battles at the hardest difficulty in the game's custom battle mode, and there was no great difference in the capacity of the battle AI to make good decisions regardless of difficulty. Three Kingdoms can be hard, but its difficulty comes from the campaign, which rightly places you against stronger factions and armies such as Dong Zhou's."

Total War: Three Kingdoms can get mired in subsystems - Eurogamer (Recommended) 

"I often found myself dithering and fussing over getting my nicely colour-coded, complementary systems in line, when sometimes it just isn't quite worth it for a small percentage boost to population growth. In fact often it's detrimental, the Population, Food Supply, Public Opinion trifecta always in perpetual conflict and never in equilibrium. The effect of that, in particular, being too much time in the sub-menus of the overworld map, where buildings are all economy-focused in some way now that the availability of new troop types has been shifted to the tech tree entirely. Too much Total Commandery Taxation Levy Administrator and not enough Total War.

Where that ambition oversteps, then, is where it all begins to create a sense of intellectual fog, one that will probably layer itself over much of your first campaign, even if you're a seasoned player. There's often just one too many plates to spin, one too many Administrators to re-administer on the same task they just finished, one too many layers of systemic UI to dig through."

Find more grand conflicts to play out in our list of the best strategy games. Or watch our latest Release Radar video to see what's hot in games and entertainment this week. Want to know about any cheat codes? Check out this Total War: Three Kingdoms cheats guide.

If you own a PC you should probably be playing Total War. It’s as simple as that; it doesn’t matter whether you’re a history buff looking to take command of some truly epic battles, or an inquisitive player eager to watch thousands of little soldiers smash into thousands of other little soldiers until your graphics card shatters into pieces. Total War is a strategy series that offers something for everybody; that’s in spite of how imposing or complicated it may at first seem. That's why we've put this together, everything you need to know about Total War: Three Kingdoms.

Listen, we get it. This is a niche genre, one that requires more investment than your typical action- adventure, FPS or RPG. Maybe you caught a Let’s Play on Twitch and became immeasurably terrified by the speed in which the game plays, and the way in which some players can orchestrate complex manoeuvres with thousands of troops under their command in seconds. Perhaps you tried a Total War at a friend’s house one time only to switch it off minutes later as they erupted into fits of laughter, teasing you because you dared to pull the difficulty down to easy – some wounds never heal. And hey, maybe you watched a trailer and the scale of the campaign map and the size of the armies scared the living bejesus out of you. Look, everybody has their reasons for approaching the genre with caution, but we’re here to tell you that if you’ve ever had even a passing interest in Total War that this is going to be the game to finally try it.

Three Kingdoms takes place in a fascinating period of history; it’s a story bound by love and loss, driven by heroes and villains, resulting in some of the bloodiest conflicts known to humanity. Creative Assembly is leveraging all of this to build its latest and the results are certainly impressive. With a renewed focus on characters as a way of building tension and a more immersive campaign experience, we honestly believe that Three Kingdoms will be the perfect refresher after the fantasy excursions of Total War: Warhammer and spin-off sagas found in Britannia. This is a Total War experience that’s going to surprise veteran players, though it’s also going to be accessible enough that new players will find entertainment. 

That’s a difficult line to walk and that’s why we’ve had senior game designer Leif Walter and writer Pete Stewart join us after a recent hands-on session to help walk you through everything you need to know about Total War: Three Kingdoms.

20. It’s a long time coming

It’s already been six long years since the release of Total War: Rome II. If you too have been eager to see Creative Assembly return to its historical roots after so many years of dealing in fantasy, then you’ll want to pay attention to Total War: Three Kingdoms. The studio is breaking new ground here, ushering in huge revisions to its classic formula, drawing from its recent experiments and rich legacy in the genre to deliver a Total War that feels fresh and emboldened to usher in sweeping change. Three Kingdoms is pushing the series in a new direction, taking bold strides to deliver a Total War game that could quite easily surpass what we believed it was capable of.

19. A first for the series

Three Kingdoms is the first Total War game to be set in China, with the tactical action framed around what Creative Assembly describes as, “one of the most turbulent times in Chinese history.” It’s difficult to believe that it has taken this long for the studio to get here; China is unquestionably one of the most requested locations for the studio to settle on, offering an aesthetically diverse array of battlegrounds, a roster of rich, historical characters to become acquainted with, and a host of well-storied conflicts that can be easily leveraged for Total War’s typically large-scale battles. It is, as lead writer Pete Stewart tell us, “sort of the perfect Total War setting.”

18. What’s in a location?

Three Kingdoms picks up in 190 CE, just as the notorious Han Dynasty is on the verge of collapse. Senior game designer Leif Walter describes it to us as a “very exciting period in history, where this long-lasting dynasty of almost 400 years is crumbling. And then, in the ashes of it, you basically have all of these new warlords emerging,” he says, teasing the 11 different characters we will have the opportunity to take command of across the campaign and in multiplayer. “It just made for a perfect sort of battleground for a Total War game.” In the Three Kingdoms campaign we will have the opportunity to fill the void of power quickly emerging, forged in the fires of conquest as other powerful warlords plan their own ascent to regional dominance.

17. Drawing from a mixture of sources

It might, on the surface, feel as if Creative Assembly is asking for trouble with Three Kingdoms, its story taking influence from both historical record and a work of fiction to inform its action. But Walter maintains that this actually gives the studio the flexibility to deliver a truly epic Total War game. “We have these two amazing sources to draw from. We have the historical account, which is very factual, and then we have Romance Of The Three Kingdoms, the novel where all of these personal stories of bravado, revenge and friendship are all tied together into a nice narrative. It’s not like Three Kingdoms is pure fiction, it’s historical fiction and we certainly spent a lot of time making sure that anything from the novel is presented authentically,” says Walter, with Stewart adding: “The novel mostly follows the facts, it just kind of embellishes them in a nice romantic way.”

16. It’s all about the characters

The focus is wholeheartedly on character as a driving force for the action. The large-scale, real-time combat and turn-based tactical strategy that the series is famed for is still in place, but now all of that is driven through unique personalities and the relationships that they force along the way. It’s been a challenge for Creative Assembly to find the right balance between these elements. “In a way, this is the first Total War title that is focused on very strong characters. We’ve had previous titles, like Attila and Napoleon – that have taken on a character’s defining moment in history – but Three Kingdoms is trying to bring multiple characters to life,” Stewart considers. “This whole period isn’t defined by one person; they are all competing to define it.”

15. Built on the foundation of Warhammer

Much like in the fantasy games Creative Assembly has recently been working on, you’ll be selecting just one character (and a handful of retinues) to play across the campaign rather than an entire faction. These legendary figures can die if you aren’t careful too, with the dynasty passed down to an heir of your choosing. Walter is also keen to note that any iterations made to the systems and engine through Warhammer’s development will also be utilised here. “The main engine is developed in a modular way and each project, which basically takes the torch forward,” he says, adding, “there’s an exchange of ideas and expertise [between the teams]. We’re looking at what Warhammer is doing, and building on those ideas."

14. Social dynamics are always at play

As you enter a battle you’ll be able to bring up to three hero units with you. This doesn’t just give you more options on the battlefield but will directly determine what types of units you’ll be able to field. You will, however, need to be wary of the social dynamics at play; all of the hero units won’t necessarily play nicely together and that can have consequences that spill out of the real-time battles and into the turn-based tactics across the campaign map. While it’s impossible to know how Creative Assembly plans on balancing this system – whether it will throw up too many random elements to truly be satisfying – at this stage, though we do hope that it only serves to amp up the drama.

13. The return of unit formations

Each of the generals that are available to you in Three Kingdoms are trained in the art of war and will bring their own specialities and tactical knowledge to your army. Creative Assembly is reflecting this in a very real way here, putting more work than ever into unit formations and glorious, glorious micro-management. Unlike the Total War: Warhammer games, unit formations are indeed returning to give an extra layer of tactical veracity to the gameplay, although these will need to be learned – passed down from the generals to the soldiers. The better you integrate the various hero characters into your army, then the better prepared for battle across the campaign they will soon become.

12. You’ve got to have class

Each of the 11 characters available falls into one of five distinct character classes – Commander, Champion, Sentinel, Strategist and Vanguard. Each of these effectively offers a different playstyle and therefore a different way to tackle Total War. You’ll need to utilise tactics that better suit your chosen general, keeping an eye out for unique items and mounts to make them even more powerful. Each commander has their own skill tree, letting you advance five active and five passive abilities to better shape their versatility in the field as you see fit. This will have a huge impact in the Romance campaign, where generals can be the difference between a win and a loss, though their power is mitigated in the traditional Historic campaign.

Want to know about any cheat codes? Check out this Total War: Three Kingdoms cheats guide.

11. Romance is a new way to play

“You can’t really tell the historical story of the period without the personal stories from the novel as well. The character relationships are important in both game modes, it’s important to the historical background,” Walter tells us and – wait, two game modes? That’s right, Three Kingdoms will feature two primary ways to play, Romance and Classical. Romance is where fact and fiction collide, as Creative Assembly looks to draw on the larger-than-life presence of the heroes that dominated the stories – their myth and legend shaping the way they impact the battlefield. “In Romance mode you get to know the characters,” says Walter. “They will have a big impact, whereas in Historical/Classic mode it’s more grand-scale – the focus is on big armies and manoeuvring your forces.”

10. You can strip it back if you want to

It’s worth noting that while a lot of the focus – particularly when it comes to the ways in which Creative Assembly demos the game – has been on the Romance mode, the studio is keen to stress that Classic mode is still the Total War game that you veteran players know and love. There’s still a lot of time, care and attention going into this core way to play the game. If anything, it puts more attention and focus on some of the minutiae. For example, the artificial intelligence has been overhauled, requiring a clear attention to detail and sharp reactions to fend off encroaching armies; the engine can now render out thousands of authentically designed warriors onscreen at once and there’s a day/night cycle that changes the composition of battles.

9. It’s still the Total War you know

In spite of all of these big sweeping changes to the core dynamic, Classic mode will still be the Total War you know and love. You won’t be able to rattle through dozens of enemies at a time, nor will they be as impervious to damage from regular units as they are in the Romance offering – in fact, generals will come with bodyguards in the Classic configuration to better depict how these characters were treated at the time. We’ve been told that elements of Three Kingdoms such as random events, the appearance of certain characters and the implementation of broader elements from the Romance Of The Three Kingdoms novel won’t appear in a Classic campaign. If you want your campaign to be pure, the option is certainly there for it.

8. Character is still key in historical mode 

While you’ll see characters effectively able to take on entire armies by themselves in Romance mode, the generals will be more tempered figures in the historical setup. That doesn’t mean, however, that they are to be ignored entirely. In fact, managing the generals and dealing with their relationships, the drama and the betrayal that helped define that era of conflict is still going to be a huge appeal to the campaign. “These character relationships influence other game systems. They create a lot of interesting challenges and sort of spawn interesting decision-making that you will have to do,” says Burrows. “It’s less about juggling positives and negatives or doing spreadsheets of calculations, but rather about being a really strong leader.”

7. You can duel other heroes to the death

Given the mythical nature of these generals and the power they can have over the turn of battle in Romance mode, you’ll be happy to know that there are ways to take rival generals out of play. It’s a risky manoeuvre, putting your own hero at risk, but it can so often turn the entire tide of a battle. You can challenge a rival on the battlefield to a duel as the battle rages on around them. The two characters meet and immediately engage in a fight to the death that in our preview proved to be a real spectacle to watch in action. You’ll also be able to activate abilities in the fight to try and help your hero out, though its win conditions are ultimately a blur of class, experience and morale; kill a hero’s brother, for example, and you should expect to see them launch into a near-unstoppable grief-fuelled frenzy. Duelling is one of our favourite new battle mechanics.

6. You can’t trust anybody

This period of history came to be defined by bloodshed and betrayal. Total War has the former, with its ridiculous battles that pit tens of thousands of soldiers against one another in active combat. But it now has the latter too, introducing a system that allows you to implant operatives within enemy armies to bring them down from the inside – though the same can also happen to you too. “You’ve got to constantly wrestle with the idea that someone in your faction might be a spy,” teases Stewart, who tells us that players will need to pay careful attention to who they are promoting in their ranks. “There’s an element of difficulty and challenge in that system, especially as you keep progressing through the campaign. It’s one of the big things to be excited about, it makes the characters feel like they are part of a world.”

5. Great entry point for new players

Of all of the Total War games that have arrived in the last 19 years, there’s an argument to be made that Three Kingdoms is going to perhaps be the best entry point for genre newcomers that the series has ever seen. That, we’re told, is an intentional decision on Creative Assembly’s part – it’s concerned about how easily new players can become involved with the fun.“I think often Total War is seen as this very strategic, half-historical simulation... but it is very much a personal game about characters – that’s especially true of Three Kingdoms,” muses Burrows, who notes that while a lot of work has been done to gradually introduce the systems and to scale the difficulty in a more effective manner, all of it is driven through those heroes.

4. How the difficulty scale works

Creative Assembly knows that its games can look overly complex and imposing on the surface. It too is aware of how difficult they could be to play, particularly for new players. The focus this time around has been on reworking the opening hours of the campaign – especially in Romance mode – to better bring players of all experience into the fold. “With some of the older games we had this problem where the difficulty curve is biggest at the beginning,” laughs Walter, who acknowledges that this is akin to throwing you into a burning building before teaching you how to fight the fire. “For Three Kingdoms we tried to push more towards an experience where you start in an easier environment. We want you to get to the more difficult bits organically, without forcing you to sit through tutorials. It should be an organic experience.”

3. Exploring the fun of Total War

“This is something we keep exploring and looking into, because as much fun as the Total War games are and as great as they are, they can be large, multifaceted beasts,” laughs Stewart, maintaining that if there were to be a good kind of beast, Total War would be it. But Stewart, a veteran of Creative Assembly, knows only too well what challenges the studio faces when trying to make the game more accessible to new players. That’s something it is trying to change in Three Kingdoms. “What we have focused on is that when you first start playing, if you don’t particularly have a lot of experience, is we wanna sort of help you to get used to the systems slowly, so by the time you’re 20, 30 turns down the line, you’ll actually understand what’s happening in the game,” he says, although we wonder aloud what a player should do if they are still struggling at that point... “Just turn the difficulty down, there’s no shame in it,” he laughs. “Put it on easy, no one cares.; no one’s looking.”

2. It feels fantastic

Whether you love the idea of this being such a character-driven game or are approaching it with caution, we’re pretty sure that you’re going to fall pretty hard for Three Kingdoms. The battles feel suitably epic – stressful and invigorating in equal measure. The refined control systems feel excellent, making it comfortable for us to direct large forces across the battlefield and quickly re-organise when it all goes horribly wrong. The art direction is unlike anything you’ve ever seen from the series, it’s beautiful to behold. Creative Assembly isn’t pulling any punches as it returns to the historical core of Total War. The wait to its Spring 2019 release date is going to be difficult to bear.

1. It’s left us eager for more

Getting hands-on with early preview codes can often be difficult to assess, particularly when its scope is limited. We haven’t, for example, had the opportunity to sample the turn-based tactical side of play – manoeuvring our generals and army across the huge map in an attempt to gain dominance over China. But we can say that we’re incredibly eager to. What we’ve had the opportunity to preview has left us impressed. Creative Assembly knows what it’s doing, and it rarely makes a misstep when it comes to its core historical wing of the long-running series. But if the attention to detail we’ve been able to divine from the overlapping mechanics and systems is apparent and represented throughout the rest of the game, it’s pretty clear that this is going to be one for the history books

It was the turn of the century, and real-time strategy was dying. Sure, seminal franchises like Command & Conquer were sputtering on but, like an asthmatic in an airless room, they were gasping for air and fading fast. Like World War 2 shooters, fighting games, and space simulations, their heyday had come and gone, and a bone deep fatigue had set in, even amongst the stalwarts. It was a genre that had achieved phenomenal success and enjoyed immense popularity, put studios like Blizzard and EA Tiburon on the map, and largely defined an era of PC gaming.  

But it was also a genre that attracted a huge number of imitators and hangers-on. For every Warcraft or Total Annihilation, there were a thousand Lego Rock Raiders or Colobots. By the end of the 20th century, real time strategy was on the brink of collapsing under the weight of its own success.

Enter an ambitious and hungry young studio, a developer that had spent the first 13 years of its existence porting other people’s work and helping EA bring their sports titles to PC. Creative Assembly was a studio rich in talent that had earned significant backing from the heavyweights at EA, and when Michael Simpson (a former microchip designer and the mind behind Swords and Sorcery) took the helm as studio director in 1996, it became a perfect petri dish for a strategy game revolution. 

Shogun: Total War appeared in the summer of 2000, not generally the season in which you expect a weighty, complex strategy game to be released. But that was the least of Shogun’s surprises. It took the musty mechanics of building bases, pumping out units, and smashing them together until one side ran out, and evolved them, wrapping them in a glorious shell of historical context and grand turn-based strategy. Suddenly, everything that happened when these big armies clashed had broader ramifications on a map that any board game fanatic could immediately appreciate. Even better, that map was populated by not one or two but a whole slew of other factions, all striving (as was the player) to bring a dynamic Japan to heel.  

Total War wasn’t the first franchise to present a grand, board game-esque take on historical strategy and conflict. But it was the first series to combine the intense, visceral feel of real time combat with a meta-layer of strategy and politicking. Even today, no franchise can match Total War for the rush of satisfaction derived from watching a unit of heavy cavalry stampeding into the rear of some unaware, unsuspecting swordsmen, momentum shattering their line, their lifeless bodies flung into the huddled, terrified mass of their compatriots.

And that’s just it. Total War didn’t revitalize real-time strategy just by warping and blending it into this real-time/turn-based hybrid.  It also opened doors that most gamers had never peeked behind, managing to make the chaotic and complex world of battlefield tactics simultaneously fun and accessible. It distilled the madness of armies clashing into an intuitive core that gamers used to micro-ing their troll axe-throwers could understand and enjoy without needing to consult the works of Sun Tzu or William Siborne. While they may seem intimidating on the surface, the Total War games are in fact some of the most accessible war games ever created, and they don’t sacrifice depth to achieve that accessibility.  

Importantly, Creative Assembly didn’t throw out the elements that had made real-time strategy games so appealing for so long, nor did it create a carbon copy of the games that had come before. It recognized that there was a reason games like Command and Conquer had been such a resounding success, but also that the audience for those games was craving something deeper; was maturing while the genre they loved was not. 

That same insight guided Creative Assembly as it continued to iterate on and evolve its breakout franchise. The studio continued to fold new elements, often borrowed from other genres, into what was already a (surprisingly elegant) Frankenstein’s monster of some of the best elements of previous games. It expanded on the construction progression of other real time strategies, eventually developing building trees that allowed players to tailor and customize their settlements to suit a variety of scenarios and play-styles. CA also lifted pieces from role-playing games to make heroes and leaders feel unique and powerful, and to add another aspirational level to the conquest and empire-building. The series has continually improved diplomacy, explored naval combat, and implemented systems as diverse as the papal college and the Roman senate.  

It has also managed to stay fresh by hand-picking characters and settings with unique character, from the wild expansion and violent contraction of the Roman empire to the ravenous ambition of Napoleon’s France and Attila’s hordes. Total War’s latest entry reaches even further, to the grim fantasy world of Warhammer, the Old World, a dark mirror of medieval Europe where the barbarians and marauders have been replaced by savage Orcs and the mutated demons of Chaos.  

So did Creative Assembly save real-time strategy, or did it just pick its bones clean and build something new from the scraps? The reality is a bit of both. The team saved a dying genre by smothering it, recycling it, and then building a legacy on the hybrid masterpiece that resulted. It may seem counter-intuitive, but sometimes the process of saving something begins with killing it, and the phoenix that climbed out of this particular ash-pile has been well worth all the slashing and burning.

Attila the Hun was a badass of the highest order. What else can you say about a man who conquered an empire that stretched from Kazakhstan to Germany? Pressure from the Hunnic invasions forced the Franks into France, the Angles into England, and led to the first sacking of Rome in more than 800 years. So if you’re going to create a game centered on a mighty warrior of late antiquity... there’s really only one option, isn’t there?

In the tradition of its forefathers, Total War: Attila mixes a turn-based strategic campaign with thrilling real-time tactical battles. It’s been a winning formula for nearly 15 years, but in this latest installment, Creative Assembly adds a few wrinkles that create one of the better Total War campaigns in recent memory. The most intriguing change rehashes an idea from an expansion to the original Rome: Total War - barbarian cultures can abandon their settlements to form nomadic hordes. In horde mode, armies become mobile towns, gaining the ability to recruit troops on hostile ground at the cost of economic security. Converting your settlements into hordes is a great option if you’re fighting a losing war and need to find greener pastures, but without careful management hordes are likely to splinter into rebellions.

Another addition seems yanked straight out of Crusader Kings 2: a heavy emphasis on political machinations. With Total War: Attila, Creative Assembly offers what is probably the most robust political system in any Total War yet. Individual characters develop over time, and while all share an identical progression tree, each is also given a set of unique personality traits, such as mercantile contacts or bonus morale when in command of an attacking army. Managing these different characters is surprisingly enjoyable, but your leader must strike a balance when intervening in politics - meddle too much, you’ll find yourself with no political influence; leave your underlings to their own devices and they spark a rebellion. The political system can add quite a lot of fun to a game, which is why it’s a damn shame that the interface leaves something to be desired. Creative Assembly doesn’t go out of its way to teach the system to new players, and the interface often leaves out crucial information, meaning players are going to flounder for the first few hours. I got the hang of it eventually, but only after my inept leadership sparked two civil wars.

The rest of the strategic gameplay is about what you’d expect from a Total War game: satisfying, but nowhere near as tight or well balanced as a ‘real’ 4X title like Civilization 5. To give credit where it’s due, it does look like Creative Assembly has put some work into the AI, meaning computer controlled enemies attack with large armies instead of letting you chop them up piecemeal. Diplomatic AI seems improved as well, with clans suing for peace, negotiating trade agreements, and even marshalling armies to defend their allies’ settlements (something I’ve never seen in a Total War game before). AI has been a rough spot for previous Total War games (looking at you, Empire), and Attila seems like a real improvement.

As enjoyable as the new content and AI are, there are two big issues with Attila’s campaign that need to be mentioned. First, the review build is buggy as hell. At least once an hour, I’d end up staring at a locked screen with no option but giving my PC the three-fingered salute. Second, the turn times are excruciating. I’ve spent as much as three or four minutes watching the AI turn rotate through the long list of clan badges. The average was closer to 2 minutes, but that still feels like an eternity - especially when you’re not sure whether the game will crash before you get to play again. Thankfully, both of these issues are problems that Creative Assembly has traditionally fixed post-launch.

If strategic gameplay is serviceable, the tactical battles are outstanding. Battle speed has been ratcheted back, meaning units no longer break after a few seconds of combat. This is crucial, because it gives commanders enough time to experiment with special abilities or move units into flanking positions. The UI has also received an extensive overhaul, and the new look is a solid compromise between form and function. The changes are far too numerous to list here, but the return of proper unit portraits will delight anyone unhappy with Rome 2’s stylish-but-confusing pottery-art unit cards. It’s actually fairly difficult to find major problems with the tactical battles, except to point out that the review build was just a bit unbalanced. Higher level units never felt much better than their cheaper counterparts, and you’ll find that the rock-paper-scissors of spearmen-swordsmen-cavalry trumps any individual unit’s strength.

If strategic gameplay is serviceable, the tactical battles are outstanding. Battle speed has been ratcheted back, meaning units no longer break after a few seconds of combat. This is crucial, because it gives commanders enough time to experiment with special abilities or move units into flanking positions. The UI has also received an extensive overhaul, and the new look is a solid compromise between form and function. The changes are far too numerous to list here, but the return of proper unit portraits will delight anyone unhappy with Rome 2’s stylish-but-confusing pottery-art unit cards. It’s actually fairly difficult to find major problems with the tactical battles, except to point out that the review build was just a bit unbalanced. Higher level units never felt much better than their cheaper counterparts, and you’ll find that the rock-paper-scissors of spearmen-swordsmen-cavalry trumps any individual unit’s strength.

Normally this is where I’d mention the graphics, but lets be honest: this is a Total War game - the graphics are spectacular if you’ve got a PC that can handle the higher settings. So let’s talk about the brilliant audio design instead. There are many wonderful little touches- a general giving a pre-battle speech, unit actions being signalled by horn blasts - but its the music that really strikes home. Each culture-group has it’s own soundtrack, and each is tailored to that culture’s traditions - germanic factions hear drumming and chanting while steppe cultures are treated to the morin khuur (a type of fiddle) and throat singing. It’s all fantastic, mixing just the right amounts of mystery and aggression to become one of the few game soundtracks I plan to listen to in my spare time. Of course, the voice acting is terrible, but that’s practically a Total War tradition, so I won’t hold it against Attila.

Now then, let’s finally address the war elephant in the room: Is Attila better than Rome 2 was at launch? Absolutely. In fact, many of the additions to Attila seem to be direct responses to the Rome 2 backlash. The AI is smarter. The UI is better. Battles are slow enough that an active commander has time to try effective flanking or misdirection tactics. The list could go on and on, but here’s the thing: Total War: Attila is a damn fine strategy game in its own right, without having to compare it to its oft-lamented predecessor.

Total War games are released often enough that a new one isn't usually what you'd call an event, but Rome II is a special case. While the series has been consistently great, the original Rome was the breakout model for The Creative Assembly's unique blend of 4X and real-time strategy, and an updated return to the franchise's most apt setting--the classical era--is overdue. Whether you've been keeping up with Total War or not, revisiting the Mediterranean with improved camera controls and richer options for diplomacy is a welcome endeavor. And while it still sports a few usual quirks, Rome II does a great job expanding on the series' massive scope.

The user interface is much sharper and more colorful than it has ever been, but it's also extremely reliant on simple icons over text. Total War veterans will find that the commands for recruiting units, ordering city expansions and so forth are all where they should be, but anyone who's new to the series or must simply reacquaint with the massive array of options may lean heavily on tooltips for the first few hours of play. Thankfully, the mild menu clutter is only really an issue in the world map, where you can take as much time as you need. When engaging enemies, things are kept relatively simple--at least, as simple as a battle involving tens of thousands of soldiers could possibly be.

One of the big draws of the Total War series has, of course, been its often breathtaking scale, and The Creative Assembly continues to find ways to raise the bar in that regard. A decade ago, seeing armies of countless well-rendered soldiers roughing it out across miles of terrain was enough to wow us. Now, battles unfold on both land and sea simultaneously. Transporting units across water is easier than ever, and attacking by sea is now just as viable and exciting an option as striking from land.

Ships are heavier in movement than infantry are, and the dynamic between navies is far more individualized than it used to be, with the actual positioning of each unit playing a vital role in your ability to efficiently fire upon, board, and physically ram enemy vessels. The latter is a slow process, but the sense of accomplishment is great--if there's anything more gratifying than leading a charge that sends an opposing battalion fleeing in terror, it's watching one of your ships smash its hull into an adversary's, sending its crew sinking to the bottom of the ocean.

Because many of the biggest cities on Rome II's world map are accessible from water, you can storm the gates of a settlement with siege weapons while simultaneously invading from the shore. A successful, multipronged attack in Rome II is both invigorating and a stunning sight to behold, particularly if you're running on a PC powerful enough to render everything in the exquisite detail that the game is capable of displaying.

Equally as impressive is Rome II's real-time tactical element. The relatively clean interface masks overwhelming complexity--this is not a series in which you can simply group all of your units together and go on a map-wide raid, at least if you're evenly matched. Winning any battle requires constant attention to unit formations and a keen understanding of how well one type of infantry performs against another. Factors like morale, fatigue, and weather conditions also play a major role in the outcome of any conflict. The tactical segments are easy to control, but there's a lot to pay attention to.

That's only half of the game, though, and the turn-based, empire-building element of Total War has also come a long way since the first Rome. While the interface gives the game an even steeper learning curve, it's also much more intuitive once you actually get the hang of it. You'll particularly appreciate that all of the buildings within a province can be controlled from any city in the area, which speeds up micromanagement considerably once your domain eventually stretches across multiple continents.

Another change is the stance system, which allows armies navigating the world map to automatically raid for resources, stage ambushes, or set up defenses. Battles are never static and are always the result of careful behind-the-scenes planning, which makes for the most unified Total War experience to date. The series has always combined elements of various strategy subgenres into a unique whole, and the blend of economy, diplomacy, and tactics gets smoother with each entry.

Everything affects everything else. Vital war expenses can cripple your finances, poverty can cause civil unrest, and efforts to control both your own people and your enemies--by enslaving captives, spreading religious culture, and establishing trade routes--can impact how the dozens of rival factions in the game perceive you. It's an environment in which a sudden peace offering from a nation you're at war with can be just as exciting as a successful siege against a capital city.

That ambitiousness has always been a selling point for Total War, and with each new entry, the series grows in scope and offers even more options. That also means that it's still an intimidating play, even with Rome II sporting the series' most extensive tutorial to date. It's a game that requires patience and immense commitment. If you know what you're getting into, or are at least patient enough to figure out everything on offer, Rome II is a worthy continuation of the franchise and an overdue update to one of the greatest strategy games of all time. It's every bit as vast and absorbing as you've come to expect.

This game was reviewed on PC.

The first teaser trailer from Sega for Rome 2: Total War is a live-action look at the evils of Roman society and the awesome assassinations that result. If you missed the original announcement, you can check out the few details we know about the game in our first-look preview.

Seriously, that guy with the mole on his face better be in the final game, because we want to get him back so bad. We'd love to raise a single smug eyebrow at him while he's dragged away to a dungeon. Then free that older guy. He seemed cool.

The creators of the famous Total War series of grand strategy games have announced that their next project will in fact be a sequel to Rome: Total War, one of the most highly lauded strategy games ever made.

Speaking to Joystiq, Creative Assembly's communications manager Al Bickham showed off the siege of Carthage, which featured one of Rome 2's big hooks: seamless land-to-sea transitions. That is to say, Roman soldiers landed on the beach on ships, then scrambled up the beach to set up siege towers to begin the assault.

Total War: Rome 2 is still fairly early in development, and Creative Assembly is currently aiming for a 2013 release. Few details about the project are known at-present, but Bickham did say that the game wants to show the value of the individual soldier, along with a more cinematic presentation.

As expected, Total War: Rome 2 has so far only been announced for PC.

The image below was taken by a reader of PCPowerPlay magazine, and it seems to tease at a reveal of Rome 2: Total War coming in the next issue of the magazine and spotted onNeoGAFbyCVG.

Unfortunately, we don't have anything else to go on besides this single, relatively uncertain image. Then again, we're having trouble coming up with any other realistic ideas about what this might be.

Sure, there are some possibilities like Pompeii 2, Grand Ages: Rome 2, Gods and Heroes 2, History Channel Great Battles of Rome 2, The Republic of Rome 2 (for all we know it's a remake of Ceasar 2) but we can't see those games being teased on the back page of a magazine.

It's much more likely that we're getting a sequel to one of the most highly rated strategy games ever made. Which is awesome. July 18 can't come soon enough.

Total War developer The Creative Assembly has announced a new expansion for Shogun: Total War 2, entitled Fall of the Samurai. Containing enough new content to warrant a standalone release, the title documents the clash between the Shogunate and a Japanese Imperial throne backed by Western military tactics and technology. If you remember 2003 movie The Last Samurai – or this expansion's own title, way back there in the first sentence – you'll know this doesn't go too well for the Samurai.

Set in the mid-1800s, 400 years after the events of Shogun 2, the title offers six playable clans: three rebellious and three loyal to the Emperor. Clans' relationship to British, American and French power-brokers will play a central role in the game over time, with the clash between foreign technology and traditional Samurai methods and weaponry forming much of the game's military drama. The game's map is also expanded and altered to reflect the state of Japan in the 19^th Century, with railways making their first appearance in the Total War series.

A stack of other additional units, improvements and multiplayer options will be added to the standalone game, due in March. Browse Sega's own announcement page and see if you can ascertain whether this game could possibly provide a more accurate depiction of the war between Samurai tradition and foreign expansionism than the conflict's most faithful contemporary representation in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 3: Turtles in Time.

"We never stop, so yes," said Simpson when asked by Eurogamer if The Creative Assembly had plans for another Total War game.

Studio director Tim Heaton also confirmed the impending release, saying a Total War sequel has been in the works ever since Total War: Shogun 2 shipped back in March. Asked if the next chapter would take place before or after Shogun 2, both Heaton and Simpson replied: "Yes." Thanks guys, that really clears things up.

AlthoughSimpsonwas lessthan helpful with sequel details,he didspeak tothedeveloper'sstrategy for the franchise going forward. Specifically, when asked if The Creative Assembly's willingess to make sequels for Total War's Medieval and Shogun brands meant fans preferred playing with less technically savvy armies, Simpson noted, "We've actually done work with our hardcore fanbase looking at different eras and which ones they prefer, and it's really flat. As in, it's really quite evenly split across more or less every proposition we put in front of them."

Speaking to which era sells more, Simpsonnoted the team is stilldebating what time period is more appealing to wide audiences, adding, "My personal view is that there's a trade-off. The more mass media your period then the easier it is to get people into it. But the less really interesting stuff, the more obscure you go, then the harder it is to get people interested. But once you're in there, there's all sorts of stuff no one has heard of before....There's a balance between those two."

Guys with swords or guys with spears? Where would you like the next Total War game to go?

[Source:Eurogamer]

May 17, 2011

Sega's The Creative Assembly taking a go at Fox franchise

Total War: Shogun 2 review
Beauty and violence clash on a massive scale in this excellent entry in the series

In all its many incarnations, the Total War series has never been known to have much of a gentle learning curve. Micromanaging entire civilizations and conducting massive armies comprising a few thousand warriors in staggering real-time battles always seems a daunting task until you spend enough time in the fray to sort all the little details out. What’s cool about Total War: Shogun 2 is the way it simultaneously brings the series back to its roots and streamlines some of the game’s inane complexities without sacrificing all the depth hardcore strategy geeks get all hot and sexy for.

Set in the turbulent Sengoku period of Japan’s history, the game’s campaign mode opens in a time of great unrest. The current shogun has grown weak and the rival clans scattered across the land are all poised to make a grab for power. As the daimyo of one such clan, you must bolster your forces, capture nearby provinces, and seize control of Kyoto to claim the shogunate before your rivals do. It’s a perfect setup for some serious warmongering, yet there are also plenty of opportunities to frolic in the ripe fields of civic duty as well.

Shogun 2’s core mix of turn-based strategy and real-time combat is still intact, though lots of subtle changes and updates give the formula better balance and make it more digestible to newcomers. The turn-based civilization management portion of the game plays out across a beautiful world map of Japan that’s expansive without being overwhelmingly huge. Playing as a clan of your choosing – which in turn comes with a unique set of perks depending on your selection – you start off with a small army, a meager settlement, and perhaps a farm or two to lord over.

In the early stretch of the game, you’ll need to lay down a solid foundation to springboard your war efforts later on. This involves raising money through taxes each season in order to build new structures, boost your budding empire, and rally a solid force of troops. While you’ll still have to worry about stuff like juggling tax rates, managing town growth, marrying off your offspring, upgrading your infrastructure, fostering (albeit temporary) diplomatic alliances, and soliciting trade, most of these tasks are explained gradually over the few seasons by verbose advisors who chime in at regular intervals.

The game’s simplified interface makes it a lot easier to keep track of everything without having your nose planted in dull menus for long stretches at a time, and if you really get hung-up, there’s always the extensive in-game encyclopedia to consult. Researching new technologies, assigning skills to your leveled-up generals, and tracking your clan’s overall progress can all be done from a few key menus. There’s still a lot of moving parts to contend with to keep your clan running smoothly, but the good strategic portion of the game is a lot more manageable than other recent Total War titles. It also doesn’t take very long before you have to flex some military muscle if you want to progress, which is where Shogun 2’s epic real-time battles come into play.

This time around, Creative Assembly pared down the overwhelming number of unit options to a more manageable selection of core troops. There’s a mix of archers, swordsmen, mounted troops, spearmen, and even more exotic units like fire bombers. Each comes in two flavors: lighter Ashigaru units are cheaper and more expendable, while the pricier Samurai variants offer more power. Expanding your stronghold infrastructure unlocks new troop types to purchase, though you’ll also benefit from hiring specialty troops like ninjas, geisha, and monks, who can serve as spies, conduct sabotage, and help wreak havoc among your enemies.

When full-on war breaks out on the battlefield, it’s truly a sight to behold. These real-time encounters have you herding large armies of troops across diverse and beautiful terrain in massive clashes against opposing forces. Certain troop types have clear advantages over others (for example swordsmen are strong against spearmen, while spearmen are extremely effective against mounted riders). This blends perfectly with the streamlined unit types to paint a much clearer picture of how to best utilize your forces in combat. Storming strongholds makes for some intense strategizing, and naval combat has also been simplified and improved for the better. The AI has been updated - computer-controlled armies will draw from a broad bag of tactics to use terrain features against you, even if they sometimes stand around while under fire.

Shogun 2 is an all-around great looking game if you have powerful enough hardware to keep it running at a smooth clip. It’s still quite pretty on lower graphical settings too, but you’ll want to have a pretty rugged machine to tackle this beast on its highest visual settings. The presentation expertly captures Japan’s majestic beauty as a culture and its fierceness on the battlefield. From the detailed landscapes and excellent musical score to the changing seasons and minor nuances of the updated graphical interface, the game really nails the authenticity. Other nice touches like short videos that pop-up during the turn-based portion of the game to punctuate interesting events (when your ninja sneaks in to raze a stronghold, for example) and gorgeous cutscenes that play out at the start of battle really step things up a notch. The actual combat animations in battle are equally impressive, whether viewed from a distance or right down in the thick of the fray.

The game’s multiplayer component is also brimming with options for those who seek out the thrill of massive battles against other human opponents. The Avatar Conquest mode does away with the turn-based portion of the game in favor of a board-game style map interface that has you engaging in individual battles with online players to capture chunks of Japan. You start by creating your own custom general who grows more powerful over time as you rack up wins in battles and conquer provinces. There’s a ton of unlockables to earn too (gear, skills, and custom armor, etc.), and upgrading your general allows you to recruit stronger forces to wield in battle. A separate Multiplayer Campaign mode also lets you team up with another player to conquer Japan cooperatively, with the option to save your progress and return to finish a game in more than one sitting.

Creative Assembly trimmed some of the fat while boosting the flavor to make Total War: Shogun 2 one of the tastiest entries in the franchise yet. It’s much more accessible than the last few Total War games without sacrificing any depth or strategy. If you’ve been holding off on the series due to its complexity, Shogun 2 is a great place to jump right in. Simply put: it’s an awesome game.

Mar 28, 2011

Win the Ultimate Sega Napoleon: Total War gaming experience including a PC with the new Intel Core I Processor

When Grenadier Francois-Joseph Jacquin, writer of Carnet De Route D’un Grognard, returned from the wars in 1815, his father and brothers hadn’t a clue who he was. When he walked into the kitchen and embraced his mother, they pounced on him shouting “Let go soldier! What are you doing?” A decade of Napoleonic conflict had changed him beyond all recognition.

We mention this scene because we were expecting Napoleonic conflict to have had a similar effect on gaming’s favourite historical strategy series. Having heard talk of supply lines, attrition modelling and two-week turns, we hadn’t expected Napoleon: Total War to feel quite so close to its 18th century forerunner.

Of course, both titles share the same superstructure so there was always going to be plenty of common ground. Like Empire, NTW is all about taking things that don’t belong to you. You march armies around a handsome 3D strategy map, snaffling territories like a starving soldier snaffles roadside turnips. When armies meet, the turn-based malarkey makes way for stirring real-time carnage. If you’ve never tried it before, the perfect blend of the managerial and the martial will knock your socks off.

The problem is that many of us have tried it before. We hazard a guess that a fair portion of you reading this will have been Total Warring since Roman times (2004). A few will probably remember the spritely surprise that was Shogun (2000). To impress us – the old hands – NTW needed two things: novelty and refinement. Alas, it offers precious little of the latter and only a flawed form of the former.

But let’s get the cannonball rolling with some positivity. Even the weariest, most critical warmongers are going to find it hard to resist the lure of the new theatres. The three consecutive campaigns all boast bespoke strat maps and all take their goals from a different phase of Boney’s blood-spattered career. Once the tutorial has outlined his formative years, you find yourself in Nice, City of Biscuits, gazing east at a patchwork of Northern Italian states ripe for conquest, comradeship and coercion.

Developers Creative Assembly know how intimidating their traditional grand campaigns can be. This dainty hors d’oeuvre is deliberately compact, focused and short. Which isn’t to say it’s easy. Having persuaded Piedmont-Sardinia to become our gimp – sorry, protectorate, – and ‘liberated’ various minors from Austrian oppression, we were happily pushing the Habsburgs back across the Alps when a message popped-up reminding us there were only six turns left in which to capture distant Klagenfurt. Merde! We’d forgotten about the 40-turn time limit and the Klagenfurt clause. Horses weren’t spared, stragglers were left behind, but it was all to no avail. We’d tarried in Tuscany, lingered in Liguria, and pratted around in Parma too long.

The tight timetable, hard and fast victory conditions, and limited room for manoeuvre mean the Italian Campaign has shorter legs than Boney himself. The Middle Eastern adventure that follows it has much greater replay potential. Napoleon spent two and a half years trying to gain a foothold in Egypt and the Levant. We get exactly the same length of time (60 turns) to succeed where he failed. Non-negotiable victory locations include Cairo and Damascus. Opposition comes in the beturbaned shape of Mamelukes, Bedouins and Ottomans. Oh yes, the Brits also make amphibious appearances now and again.

It’s here that NTW really gets into its stride. Before you know it you’re dangerously overstretched and impaled on the horns of multiple dilemmas. While some optional side missions nudge you in the direction of victory locations, others are more mischievous. Can you afford to spend valuable time, cash, and manpower kicking John Bull out of Cyprus? Success will mean extra troops from the motherland. How about that business with the Bedouin? Travelling deep into the western desert to destroy their base will bring rewards, but it’s expansion in precisely the wrong direction.

Partly due to a bloated military and partly due to the fact the CA have inexplicably chosen to disable diplomacy and manual tax tweaking in this campaign, we ran into severe cash flow problems while still some distance from Syria. Response 1: abandon vulnerable outposts and disband their garrisons; turned out to be counter-productive. Response 2: run amok in Lebanon and the Holy Lands looting like a Vandal; worked like a charm. By the time our suntanned soldiery barged their way into Damascus we must have been the most hated man in the Middle East.

As enjoyable as this brigandage was, and as diverting as the decisions had been that led up to it, it was hard to shake the feeling of deja vu. We’d been playing and thinking exactly as we had in previous Total Wars. Features supposed to breathe fresh air into the game, such as attrition and supply posts, had impacted our march of mayhem scarcely at all.

Nappy’s third outing is the grandest and potentially the most pleasing. Commencing in 1805 it runs for 192 turns and encompasses all Europe. What’s a megalomaniac supposed to do with all that space and time? Well, if he wants to triumph he’ll need to build an empire of at least 35 regions and claim the capitals of Austria, Prussia and Russia – something that even Dictator Monthly’s Man of the Year 1934-45 didn’t manage.

With the added logistics angle, taking Moscow should be one of those gaming achievements you remember forever. It will stay with us, but for all the wrong reasons. The first time we set out for the land of Muscovy, we had no realistic expectation of reaching it. We were playing on hard difficulty; we were at war with four of Europe’s five superpowers. Napoleon was convalescing in Paris after a battlefield injury (he never dies - just respawns in the capital) and we controlled almost nothing east of Hanover.

For turn after turn our brave band of no-name, no-hope Frenchies trudged along. For turn after turn we expected them to be wiped out by force of arms or the same combination of disease, cold and starvation that ravaged the real 1812 invasion force. Incredibly, the coup de grace never came. Apart from a brief scuffle at Minsk there were no incidents of note on the long trek east. Our army was never challenged and never troubled by lack of supplies. On arriving at Moscow they overpowered the modest garrison with relative ease.

Don’t assume from this account that the strategic AI in the European Grand Campaign is hopelessly broken. It’s not. Capturing the capitals of major powers is improbably easy but holding them can be hard. While Strikeforce Moscow was busy doing its thing, Austrian rebels were evicting us from Vienna and the Prussians, backed by ship-delivered redcoats, were doing their darnedest to acquire Hanover.

What we think can be concluded from our experience is that NTW’s strat AI struggles to produce plausible play, and the new logistics element has been so timidly implemented it’s barely worth having. We’d pictured supply working something like the current trade routes system – a network of lines snaking over the country that could be disrupted with crafty interdiction. What we’ve ended up with is a big slab of full-cream fudge.

Depleted armies will automatically replenish just about anywhere as long as they’ve got a general. Supply posts can only be built in economic satellite towns, and are far from essential. Attrition – which should have been a major pain in the rump – only occurs in midwinter and desert conditions. Elite units are immune. In short, Creative Assembly have bottled it. The enhancement that should have prevented that classic and increasingly tiresome TW phenomena, the rampaging MegaKill Army, barely impacts it.

In our second Grand Campaign experience, playing as Blighty (it’s possible to play as any of the four Coalition majors) we thought we’d start by kicking the Little Corporal where it would hurt most. A 20-unit expeditionary force was loaded onto transports and floated across the Channel. After a short stroll through Normandy, Paris was reached and fell with a single click of the auto-resolve button. We scrawled a big red ‘WTF!’ into our notes. A few months later, a combination of rebels and Grande Armee troops took back the city, but not before we’d looted the place mercilessly and turned every significant building into a pile of ash.

Part two of our plan to test Boney’s temper was to disband the entire British army along with Nelson’s navy and sit back and wait for the inevitable(?) Napocalypse. After a year in which the French did nothing but a spot of port and trade-node raiding, we’d almost given up when an invasion force sailed up the Forth. Huzzah! But no. The attackers turned out to be Battavians. A tinpot one-state nation, locked in a war with its massive Prussian neighbour, had decided it would be a good idea to mount a naval invasion of Scotland. We scrawled an even bigger ‘WTF!’ into our notes.

Nothing we’ve seen so far gives use much confidence in the silicon brain pulling NTW’s grand-strategic levers. It reacts to city capture well enough, uses spies aggressively, and knows how to raid, but it seems unable to formulate or execute a coherent grand strategy. Its diplomatic performance is also patchy. A worst-case example: we once forged an alliance with the Turks only to see it dissolved for no obvious reason two turns later. No problem. The moody sultans obviously got cold feet. Except they didn’t. Two turns later they were back offering us a substantial sum of money to form – you’ve guessed it – an alliance.

With the high-level AI so shambolic, it’s nice to be able to seek solace in Nap’s splendid battle layer. While you still see stuff that boggles the mind (idiotic generals, ludicrous cannons, bizarre fortress assaults...) the majority of scraps are thoroughly engaging. A few are downright sublime. Last night we had a run in with Wellesley near Hanover that made us proud to be French.

We were evenly matched numbers-wise, but the Brits had the quality, and half our army was arriving as reinforcements (rarely good). As it turned out, that split probably saved the day. Approaching from front and rear our men made a bloody beef sandwich of the redcoats. All credit to the foe though, they behaved admirably, forming an ad-hoc defensive triangle that spat musket balls at a fearful rate. At times the smoke was so thick you could cut it with a sabre.

For a while the battle might have gone either way. We rushed our general hither and thither to steady the nerves of wavering formations (generals have new manually-triggered ‘rally and ‘inspire’ powers). We targeted weak enemy regiments with darting cavalry charges. It was heart-pounding, atmospheric and totally believable. The second the ‘Close Victory!’ message appeared, we dashed off to the replay area to watch our triumph all over again.

Some of the best combat comes via the historical battle mode. Making up for the lack of single scenarios in Empire, NTW boasts a ten-tussle sequence ending logically with Waterloo. Resist the Mameluke surge at Embabeh, rush to Saint-Cyr’s aid at Dresden, negotiate the treacherous marshes at Arcole... what the engagements lack in historicism they more than make up for in spectacle, tension, and drama. And they do lack historicism. In the coming weeks expect a rash of official forum posts with titles like ‘Snow at Austerlitz????’ and ‘Only 4,000 at Borodino!!!!’ Like many a Nap wargame, NTW doesn’t do a great job of communicating the scale of the period’s bloodbaths. Most of the time the massed ranks you see on screen represent less than 10% of historical headcounts.

More importantly, the game also does a poor job of communicating why Napoleon and his marshals enjoyed such astonishing success for so long. The Grande Armee was grande, sure, but it was also flexible, ready to abandon traditional linear tactics when the need arose. Facing Napoleon should mean facing his party-pieces – column and echelon attacks, ‘Egyptian squares’... At the very least CA should have given him huge deployment advantages.

The only time you’re likely to see Boney’s forces fighting in an authentic fashion is in multiplayer. One of the few areas where NTW is significantly superior to its predecessor, the choices available are now dizzying. There are historical engagements, naturally (how does an eight-handed Battle of Waterloo sound?) and pick-your-own-army skirmishes, but it’s the multiplayer campaigns and ‘drop in’ battles that really catch the eye. Frustratingly, we haven’t had a chance to test either properly but assuming there are no technical problems, both have the potential to banish series fatigue in the blink of an eye. Tick the ‘drop in’ box at any point during a solo campaign and prior to every evenly balanced battle, the game will zip off in search of a live opponent. No more steamrollering the AI. No more cheap tricks with cavalry. Now when you look across the valley and see enemy infantry moving in three directions at once you’ll have good reason to gulp.

We’re not going to insult your intelligence by claiming improved multiplayer campaigns excuse the dodgy strategic AI. They don’t. If you’re going to make a game about one of the greatest military geniuses of all time, it’s vital you give him some worthy sparring partners. By delivering dunderheaded opponents and a half-hearted supply system Creative Assembly haven’t done themselves or Boney justice.

Everyone knows all about the Total War series and its globe-spanning campaigns and battles, but one of the things lacking has been a real focus on the actual historical conflicts that took place. Often, a disappointing handful of token battles were cobbled together quickly to be played maybe once or twice and then discarded in favour of create-your-own scenarios.

The Alexander add-on for Rome: Total War bucked that trend, giving us a superb-yet-short set of narrative-linked battles plucked directly from history. From Issus through Gaugamela to Hydaspes, we were placed in Alexander’s sandals and given the task of succeeding where he had, er, succeeded. This is the expansion that Napoleon: Total War most closely resembles, except bigger and, hopefully, better.

The proof of a battle’s pudding is in the playing, of course. At Creative Assembly’s Horsham studios we got the chance to envelop ourselves in historical battle loveliness. The battles on display were Lodi and the Pyramids, the former played against the AI and the latter a head-to-head against the deputy editor of a games mag who shall remain nameless.

Map 1: Battle of Lodi

With Napoleon’s forces chasing the Austrian defenders up along the south bank of Po River, the time came to make a stand. When the battle was joined, as you can see, the French units are tightly bunched, while the Austrians are scattered about the place.

Each side have their own advantages: the French have the ability to move and fire as one big unit, concentrating fire on a smaller front and having strength in numbers, while the Austrians will be less vulnerable to cannon fire while they remain spread out.

The Austrian AI immediately set about strengthening its position in the centre of the town, moving units in from the west and reinforcing the eastern bank of the Po, over the Lodi Bridge itself. The objective for the French, other than killing a load of Austrians, is to prevent Feldzeugmeister Johann Beaulieu (the enemy general) from retiring from the battlefield. No mean task, as he’s safely tucked away on the other side of the bridge with, naturally, the bulk of his army protecting him. The French, as in me, need to move quickly and decisively in order to prevent this from happening. French cannons unlimber and begin to fire on the Austrian positions, while we make the decision to detach a small chunk of our army to intercept some of the Austrians moving to reinforce the town. Battle is joined on the western road and two Austrian cavalry units are driven from the field. The rest of the French force moves inexorably towards the town.

The detachment that saw off the two Austrian cavalry units remains poised on the western side of the battlefield. The AI reacts to the danger and moves a substantial clump of men towards them. As the main bulk of the French army is now approaching the town, it is easy to reinforce the western position and battle is properly joined in the field outside of town. The French fight defensively, holding their positions while the two cavalry units harass the flanks of the Austrian infantry, causing them to panic. Sure enough, the Austrians have had it, dropping arms and pegging it back across the field. Half of the Austrian army is now running for the hills and we wheel our left flank around, partially encircling the town. Vicious street fighting begins and both armies whittle away at each other.

The Austrian commander decides it’s time to leave, but we won’t let the swine get away. As he meanders along the eastern path to safety, the cavalry, that have already secured our victory for me, ford the river to the north and intercept him. Mere seconds before he leaves the scene, they catch him, slaughtering his unit and claiming victory for the French.

The rest of the Austrian forces, stranded in the centre of town, fight on until a handful remain, their morale broken and, eventually, their bodies strewn around the town streets. A sound ‘defensive attack’ strategy won the day here, with the Australians unable to break Napoleon’s advance.

Map 2: Battle of the Pyramids

One of Napoleon’s most famous victories was earned against a combined Ottoman and Mamluk force, which entered the field a few miles from the Pyramids. Again, both armies had advantages over the other: the French had superior troops and cannon, while the Mamluks were used to fighting in deserts. They also had units of fearsome cavalry, which they’d have to use effectively to win.

This time it would be a human opponent that faced off against us. His cocky swagger didn’t put us off our game and our men steeled themselves for his brash onslaught. As you can see on the map, our initial movements were minor at best, mainly straightening out the line and allowing ourselves to bring more men forward to fire when necessary. My thin lines would be easily broken if engaged by cavalry, but the plan was to make sure the enemy horses didn’t get anywhere near them.

Sitting in our defensive position, we watched as the Mamluks advanced, noticing that our small collection of units defending the nearby village was being approached by Mamluk cavalry. Two infantry units lined along an impassable slope, meaning the enemy had to funnel through a narrow gap if they wanted to engage. A volley of musket fire took out a surprising number and the charge faltered. The unit defending the gap swiftly reordered itself into a square formation and the reckless Mamluk charge was easily seen off. This was the key moment in the battle.

With his left flank broken, we seized the opportunity, sending a lone cavalry unit around behind the enemy lines. My opponent was too busy focusing on the joining of battle between our main lines to notice, and our cavalry came smashing into his limbered cannons, moving swiftly between each unit and destroying them with minimal casualties suffered.

Amazingly, we were able to take out every one of our opponent’s cannons before he noticed. Without their support, our front line, backed up sufficiently by their own cannons, stood firm. The battle looked to be going our way for a crushing victory, but the Ottoman’s and Mamluk’s advantage in terms of troop numbers proved important on our left flank. Sheer weight of numbers finally destroyed it and some swift reorganisation was necessary to prevent a disaster.

Anticipating the collapse, we had begun to wheel the rest of our line around, reorganising them into a smaller, more compact fighting force. No longer worried about cannon fire, we could reduce the length of the line and not worry about cannonballs thudding into our packed ranks.

Fierce fighting on our left flank had weakened his advancing infantry, who were further disadvantaged by having a number of melee-only units in their ranks. My muskets whittled their numbers down, before a final flanking cavalry charge burst through their line from the side and sent them packing.

In the end, a dominant victory had been prevented by the vast numbers of the opposing force, but our opponent’s failure to protect his cannons meant his men were just too beleaguered by the time final battle was joined to see us off. It just shows: failing to pay attention to aspects of a battle is a fatal mistake.

Dec 24, 2009

Who’d have thought that, just 200 years ago, it was fashionable to hate the French? It’s one of the great burdens of having an empire. Poor Napoleon: before declaring himself the Emperor of France, he probably thought back to the time when he was the plucky revolutionary underdog, and all the blokes said “way to go, Naps,” and the girls were so keen to make an impression on him that they’d shove their tongues into their cheeks to give the slightly unconvincing impression of oral sex.

But his delusions of divinity grew – Napoleon came to believe that he was guided by God’s hand. And when you start believing that success is pre-ordained by a deity, you’re on the fast train to whoopsville. While Empire focused on the development of American Independence, over in Europe the story of a military genius was unfolding. But don’t start with that "Napoleon, the European bogeyman" stuff.

Long before the cartoonists of enemy states began to draw Napoleon as a physically tiny man in a massive bicorn hat, he was a revolutionary soldier, quickly adjusting to his position in the new world by claiming to be the Emperor of it. Fans ofhistory will know that he was physically pretty average. When whole countries start spreading childish rumours about you, you know you’re doing something right.

In bringing the exploits of Napoleon to the Total War series, Creative Assembly have dealt with it in the same way they’ve always dealt with reality. Military history is the Plasticine from which they roll out alternative time-snakes. So, Napoleon starts out as he was – a fully-trained artillery commander, commanding an army of artillery-strong, but badly trained soldiers. The new units are true to the time – all 351 of them, created just for this sequel. But what you do with them is up to you. Napoleon, after all, made mistakes.

This standalone title is, to use Creative Assembly’s own words, “Empire under a microscope.” It takes the same narrative form as Empire’s Road to Independence campaignwhich formed the tutorial-esque segment of Empire. Whilst not a tutorial as such, the rise of Napoleon does give CA a chance to introduce you gently, again, to the classic Total War blend of turn-based world map strategy and huge real-time battles.

The first campaign sees Napoleon as a General in 1796, commanding a post-revolution French Army. On the border of Italy and France, the Austrians were the chief enemy of the French, and Napoleon had been sent to distract them. He did better than that: he won the war for his country. That’s what you’re aspiring to here. And before you claim supreme political power, you get to focus on the combat rather than the minutiae of running an empire.

One of Napoleon’s most famous quotes, which conjures a lovely image of breakdancing soldiers invading a country by doing The Caterpillar, is that an army marches on its stomach. That’s the new aspect of Napoleon, which brings something to Total War that’s never been fully acknowledged: the effects of starvation, plague and general attrition on a troop. On the world map, the further your troops are away from home and supplies, and the more hostile the environment, the more their morale and numbers will be whittled away before they’ve even had a chance to run away, morale shattered, from a battle.

This means scorched earth tactics become a real and occasionally sensible option, depriving anyone who follows you of the resources you’ve enjoyed. The Russians have used this tactic to great success in the past: under Stalin in the 1940s they fought Hitler by moving their factories east and burning down their own houses. They poisoned their own wells to wear Napoleon down in 1812. Now you can do similarly in Napoleon: Total War.

Or you can be slightly more proactive and take advantage of an over-extended army by cutting their supply chain. If they’re a long way from home and haven’t planned their advance properly, this could cripple them – just as it crippled Napoleon in 1812. The thoughtful introduction of attrition is a tactical game-changer for the series.

If the idea of fighting a campaign in Total War along the border of two countries seems claustrophobic, that’s just one reason this is being described as “Empire under a microscope” by CA. The other reason is that the turn time has been reduced from six months to two weeks. This change isn’t so trite as to simply mean the calendar moves more slowly – it affects your turn-to-turn considerations. You can’t just stack up your troops and send them half-way across the planet: now you have to consider the effects of hunger and supplies, and if you decide to take challenging terrain, morale.

The second campaign takes place in Egypt and the Holy Lands. Napoleon’s intention here was to disrupt the British trade routes, but his options were limited. He was far from France, with no way of setting up a recruitment queue in Paris and jetting them over to his location in a couple of six-month turns. So here, you’re forced to survive locally, build supply depots, and recruit from the residents, using their camel-riders and other units to your advantage.

A camel has two advantages over a horse, we’re told: first, riding from the back lets you use the hump as a shield. Secondly, they’re a bit more stupid, and don’t mind running into square formation pikemen so much. How that helps, we’re not sure.

From a screenshot, the graphics will look virtually identical to Empire. But there have been improvements. On the desert level, a heat shimmer warps the screen gently. It’s not purely cosmetic – it’s a visual reminder that you’re in a hostile environment, and likely to be suffering from fatigue and thirst. A renovated particle engine throws dust into the air: a wind direction that has been set at the beginning of the level carries it slowly over the map. If you remember the build up to Empire, there was a lot of fuss about every bullet being individually calculated – every naval cannonball causing individual damage.

That perfectionist fuss is continued here – the dust kicked up may look like a cosmetic effect, but it will affect the visibility of troops. If something looks like it would have an effect on the battle, it almost certainly will. Even the new individual troop animations aren’t entirely functionless. Not only do they break up the uniformity of the battle, making it tempting to zoom infully and follow an individual on the battlefield, they also give you feedback. When cavalrymen rear up against pikemen in the square formation, they’re giving you the important message that horses hate approaching geometric arrangements of spikes.

Often, you’ll see a dead cavalryman, an ankle snagged in his stirrup, getting dragged across the ground. That one’s fairly pointless, admittedly, but it’s understated. CA are keen to make their game make visual sense, and use as much as possible to show, not tell, the player what’s going on. But they’re far from mirthless – the joy that’s expressed at a dead man getting dragged by a terrified horse across a battlefield speaks volumes.

This is a period in which Napoleon suffered a defeat – giving you the chance to prove that you’re only one massive army away from world domination. Another visual improvement is the deformable terrain – cannonballs now leave marks in the ground. It’s not a battlefield tactic – artillery wasn’t big enough to leave huge craters – but along with the particle effects, it all adds up to make the battle feel that much more real.

A UI tweak now displays a blue ring thatshows the area of effect for commander abilities such as Inspiration and Rally, which can boost troop morale. Rally can even bring your troops back from Empire’s new shattered rating.

However well you finish the campaign, though, the next one will snap your progress to the historical timeline. Allowing your bonus world tour to persist would imbalance the campaign and eliminate any attempt to seriously recreate Napoleon’s rise to power.

Over in the AI department, the renovations made in Empire have been built upon. Avid readers with steel-trap memories will recall the move from a chess-based consideration of possible moves to a to-do list. The computer keeps in mind a prioritised set of goals, with every action ranked on how likely it was to achieve any of them.

The refinements are minor, but interesting in a bookwormish kind of way. For instance, now the AI will consider how a goal’s coming along. If it’s finding itself unable to achieve something, and the goal isn’t something as fundamental as a victory condition, the electronic brain will reprioritise it and focus on something more likely to bear fruit. If the idea of putting human thought into code gives you a tremor in that secret part of you that you prefer to keep hidden from the cool kids, then you’d probablylaunch yourself into space if you saw the numbers at work behind the scenes.

Because that’s what the third and final campaign is about: the crash zoom out to the world map, the blue empire squatting over the chest of Europe, with more than a couple of fingers in Africa. Now you’re playing a more familiar game. Not as global as Empire, but with all the old concerns of taxes, the containment of unrest, and the movement of agents. If that’s not to your taste, you can always automate the micromanagement for a small cut in efficiency.

The stylish Rake has gone, so there’s no point building bawdy houses – but the age of the true Gentleman appears to have ended: he now takes on more Rake-like behaviour. During one duel cutscene, a gentleman flees, only to be gunned down by his opponent. Meanwhile, to fulfill those covert pursuits, the Spy makes a return.

This affects the settlements – there’s no point dropping brothels everywhere when they don’t attract Rakes – and the supply depots are vital, of course. This means a growing responsibility, in terms of setting taxes, to keeping the rabble happy. But as usual with Total War, you can limit your involvement in these money-minded matters and suffer the slightly (and deliberately) inefficient decisions of the AI to keep your game simple and streamlined. You’ll lose around 5% of your optimal income, but that’s the price of an easy life.

Napoleon’s charismatic and legendary life ran from 1769 to 1821, making it a perfect way to extend Empire’s remit of the 18th Century. The change in zoom level and the narrative of the campaign make it yet another Total War game that gives you a feel for an era, without ever going so far as to educate you. The amount of military knowledge knocking around in the Horsham HQ is formidable, but Creative Assembly aren’t history teachers – they’re game-makers.

With a deeper attention to the ways in which soldiers find themselves dying, the more intimate, up-close Napoleon campaign looks set to be the most realistic yet. It’s not like Total War was ever the most whimsical, throwaway series – but if they keep getting closer to the real experience of war, they might as well sell the game with a post-traumatic stress disorder counseling course.

Nov 12, 2009

Something about this Empire adjunct has been bothering us since we installed it, and we think we’ve just figured out what that something is. The campaign premise is complete buffalo balls.

It’s 1787, and here we are, chief of the lowly Iroquois, trying to figure out the best way to conquer half of the vast wilderness that is North America. If we’d chosen to play as the Plains or Pueblo Indians, the Cherokee or the Huron, we’d be doing exactly the same ludicrous thing. By focusing this download-only expansion pack on five Native American tribes and building ambitious expansionist targets into the victory conditions, Creative Assembly have created an add-on that piddles on the buckskin moccasins of history.

Fortunately, this is more or less Warpath’s only flaw. The campaign we’ve just finished (1783 to 1813, hard difficulty, Plains Indians) has to be our most enjoyable Empire experience yet. It was tight and it was turbulent – even the diplomatic cut-and-thrust felt right.

By forcing us to play as Indian nations squeezed by the coastal colonies of four territory-hungry, CPU-controlled colonial powers, Creative Assembly create instant tension. On the battlefield your hatchet-waving, bow-wielding braves are often mixing it up with musket-armed palefaces. Even with a significant numerical advantage, victories can be elusive until you start playing to the strengths of the stealthy, speedy, easily broken Indian troops. The chief who understands that every wood, hollow and patch of prairie grass is a potential hiding place, and every cluster of whooping war-bonneted horsemen the potential bait in a cunning Little Big Horn-style scalp-fest, is the chief who will live to see his empire burgeon.

Sensible Sitting Bulls also pay close attention to trade, alliances, and Warpath’s bespoke tech tree. It has its fair share of eyebrow-elevating branches (surely, in 1783 most tribes knew all there was to know about hunting, fishing, ambushes, and the ‘Spirit of the Forest’?) but it does add flavor and freshness, and provides the means for unlocking the wealth of new structures and units.

Every side has at least a couple of troop types to itself. The Huron have their Petun Wolf Warriors – crazed axemen whose wolf-skin headdresses strike fear into their foes. The Plains have Cheyenne Dog Soldiers: musket marksman who can mount-up and melt away in the blink of an eye. Late in a campaign a Pueblo player can expect to field Crow Horseman – one of the coolest cucumbers in the game – while the Iroquois may call upon Winnebago Warriors: fearsome fighters who, between skirmishes, rest up in large luxurious caravans.

At the very top of the tech tree is a foundry, meaning progressive chiefs eventually have access to artillery batteries. Lame? No lamer than many of the other historical compromises that have made it into the game. Drilled formations of medicine men, native chiefs overseeing road-building programs and struggling to control settler unrest in ex-colonial settlements... there are moments when Warpath’s theme-abuse is almost comical. If you stop to think that you, the nomadic Plains Indians, are spending 2,000 tax-earned gold pieces on a Spiritual Circle so that you can start researching ‘Spirit Medicine’, the whole elaborate facade starts to crumble.

Obviously, the answer is not to think about such things. Consider instead that an add-on offering weeks of absorbing hatchet-rich hurly-burly can be yours for the price of a movie ticket. In a climate where top strategy game makers often ask three times as much for similarly sized supplements, Warpath has to go down as an incredible bargain.

Nov 4, 2009

Some people, after reading our review of Empire: Total War, wanted to string us up and splice our main brace. We can’t help it if the bugs other people experienced didn’t happen to us. Still, it’s safe to say that there were some problems that perhaps could and should have been sorted out before release – specifically the AI’s total lack of ability to perform invasions over a stretch of water.

Of course, that and other issues have been fixed, tweaked and patched over since release. It’s safe to say it’s a more stable release than it was originally, even if some of us still haven’t had any issues of note. And now comes Napoleon: Total War, the first ‘expandalone’ in the franchise’s history. This English-mangling corporate buzzword means that you don’t need the original Empire to play Napoleon, but if you do own it, some of Napoleon’s whiz-bang new features will integrate into Empire. The stunted Corsican with delusions of grandeur won’t have any restrictions imposed upon his quest for glory, then.

Napoleon will be much more story-driven than Empire, akin to the Alexander expansion for Rome: Total War. The first of the three different campaigns will focus on Italy (1796), detailing the small general’s rise to prominence. The setting then shifts to the Middle East (1798), before moving to the Grand European theatre (1805-1812), where he invites everyone to rumble.

Creative Assembly say they are drawing inspiration, especially for the first two campaigns, from the Road to Independence bit of Empire, while retaining a lot of the core concepts from the main chunk of the game.

Turns have been chopped down to two-week periods in a bid to reflect the more micro-historical aspect of the events in question. This also applies to the way the campaign maps have been drawn up, focusing not so much on large regions with a big city plonked in the middle, but on smaller areas, villages and towns. Three different types of settlement will be available, focusing on either economic, industrial or intellectual pursuits. As you might have guessed, this will also necessitate the introduction of new technology research trees, both to reflect this change in the infrastructure and to cater to inventions and advances that had been made at the beginning of the 19th Century.

There’ll be up to 322 unique units in the game, although some of these will only be usable when playing certain historical scenarios. Interestingly, for those of you who are interested in military history, you might also notice some real-life regiments that are still around dotted about the place. To accommodate so many different varieties of unit, there’ll be an increase in the number of soldiers visible on screen during the battles.

Speaking of the battles, Creative Assembly have been stressing how they’ve wanted to make the battles feel and look more realistic. Smoke, rain and different environmental effects will all have more of a part to play this time round. For example, fight in the rain and there’s the chance that your gunpowder will become sodden, leading to the odd misfire that could have a big impact on the battle. Position the camera near cannons or cavalry charges and you might just seeyour viewjuddering about, adding to the cinematic feel of the battles.

As for the units on the field itself, the generals will have been buffed with new abilities. However, Creative Assembly have contradicted themselves a little with this.

The PR folks told us these new abilities will make us want to get the generals involved in combat a lot more frequently, instead of employing the usual tactic of hiding them at the back to make sure they don’t snuff it. However, they also tell us that the method of recruiting generals will be different, as they’ll be drawn from a finite pool instead of just created out of any unit you like.

This indicates that instead of risking him on the frontline, as the developers claim you’ll want to do, you’ll be even less keen to get him stuck in, because losing a general now would impactyour chances in the long term far more than it used to. A curious idea this is, so we’ll have to see how this develops and works out in practice.

One of the biggest tactical additions to Napoleon will be supplies. You can’t just advance swiftly over the entire map as you feel like it now. You’ve got to consider the chain of supply, a vital theme that has never really been touched upon properly in the Total War series. This time out, it was absolutely essential to include it, for one main reason: Russia.

The primary reason for Napoleon’s first failure to force all Europeans to wear a big string of onions round their necks and constantly consume snails was, of course, the disastrous attempt to conquer Tsarist Russia. The sheer scale of the country stretched the French supply lines to the breaking point, until his soldiers started freezing to death in the hollowed out corpses of their horses.

In previous Total War games, the only hindrance said expanses would provide was to slow your progress. Now, you’ll have to set up a supply system to stop your guys from dying of hunger. To do this, you can build supply depots as you move along. It isn’t perhaps the most sophisticated way of handling the issue, but it should suffice. It’ll also provide a method for the defending armies to stave off advancing forces by going guerrilla on the supply depots. Cut off the supply and it doesn’t matter how big the enemy’s army is, they’ll soon be whittled down to nothing.

Diplomacy will be trickier, as you can imagine. Play as France and everyone will almost certainly hate you, being that you’re the most powerful, and to win you basically have to bump them all off. Luckily, you’ll be able to play as other factions as well, so it’s not all Francophilia.

A new AI Director system should make the campaign flow better than before, with a substantial raft of improvements to the AI. For example, computer-controlled factions will have more short-term campaign objectives, not just “Kill the player at all costs.” Hopefully, this will mean some of the quirks of Empire’s diplomacy will also be ironed out, like certain factions refusing to trade with you, despite you being on the best possible terms with them.

Civilian units will also change. Gone are the wandering preachers, unrealistic in this particular timeframe, while the Rake has morphed into the Spy, who’s able to slip into enemy camps for purposes of sabotage. Gentlemen are still around, and will be able to distribute pamphlets for propaganda and political destabilisation purposes.

Strangely, naval combat seems to have less emphasis placed on it than in Empire. Whether this is true or not, only time will tell. It would be a strange decision, given the importance navies played in the Napoleonic Wars: Trafalgar, anyone? Some improvements will be made, like the new ability to repair ships while at sea. Again, whether this means completely repaired or just patched up a bit, we don’t know just yet.

Creative Assembly are claiming that Napoleon will appeal to a broader base than any other game in the Total War franchise. The focus on smaller-scale campaigns instead of distant grand strategy will, they say, make it more appealing to regular strategy players. Ones who like to micro- rather than macro-manage, perhaps. This is the sort of thing we can only determine after playing the game first-hand, so we won’t comment on the validity of these claims just yet.

Having said that, it does make sense that people put off by the sheer scale of the grand campaign will be more likely to embrace a cut-down version. Those who weren’t enamouredwith Empire won’t find this expansionchanging their minds. However, the smaller scale, extra development, and tweaks made to the engine might be enough to convince you that it isn’t a wreck after all.

Creative Assembly have a history of making good expansions for their games, so we can’t see any reason this won’t follow in that grand tradition. And if you’re wondering where Waterloo is, you’ll be able to play that as a historical scenario. The main campaign finishes in 1812, so Napoleon’s final bow will be taken elsewhere.

Oct 15, 2009

This is the grandest, most spectacular work of strategy gaming on the PC. If you’ve not tackled a Total War game before, or assume that they’re not for you, we challenge you to play Empire and not be impressed, or even fundamentally changed by the experience. This is one of the most playable, and therefore important and accomplished strategygames ever created.

Total War occupies its own territory between Civ, classic RTSes, and the hex-based wargames armchair generals get all excited about. It is both a vast turn-based historical escapade and a gritty real-time battlefield engine that delivers the most cogent picture of mass conflict we’ve yet seen. The field of conflict in Empire, most global of the Total War games, is the 18th century. Assuming you’re going to play the gigantic Grand Campaign, you’ll start in 1700 and have a turn every six months until 1799. At the back of your mind, you’re always aware of that clock, ticking down toward victory or defeat.

If you’re playing as Britain, as we did, victory means controlling Egypt and a chunk of both India and North America. This is a game in itself. And when you’re done there, you’ll want to try a different nation, and its different victory conditions. Whatever you do, this game is a colossal undertaking. Completing a campaign is one of those gaming exploits that you know will be with you for the rest of your life, simply because it will consume so much time. Even when you’re not playing, you’re thinking about it. Planning, plotting your colonial ambitions.

Yes, colonial. Unlike the Medieval and Roman-era empire building, these are very much colonial enterprises. Empire takes a great deal of its design philosophy from the events and trends of its era, and that real history is reflected in the core challenges different nations face, and in the smaller tasks you’ll have to deal with to grasp the upper hand in war. Playing as the European powers, for example, places you in a fascinating position – one that seems astonishingly close to how the real colonial powers must have played their real world game. Your fortune lies across oceans, but you cannot lose your foothold in Europe. As Great Britain our fate was closely tied to that of the Thirteen Colonies in North America, and only by being a remarkably strong international power were we going to keep them as a protectorate.

What’s more, we knew that we could not afford a land or sea war with local European powers, and spent many early years butteringup France and Spain with gifts to reduce the pressure that hostilities might place on our shipping. Empire for Great Britain means a powerful Royal Navy – in the game, just as in real life. Play as land-locked Poland, on the other hand, and you face a different challenge. You’ll want to pick off all the smaller one-state nations,one at a time, before facing down the Russian Bear.

There had been rumblings about Total War being simplified for the US market, especially with its introductory mini-campaign ‘The Road to Independence’. This may indeed have been included to guide newcomers, but don’t think the complexity of the main game has been sacrificed. Empire: Total War is more, and better, than we’ve ever had before. The Creative Assembly do not seem to have shirked their responsibility, or ever stepped back from including more features, or more detail. Empire is the opposite of dumbed down. It has a superabundance of smart gaming.

And while it feels familiar, Empire manages to deliver more nuance on the campaign map than ever before. What’s most immediately obvious is the effect of international trade. While some trade does occur between trade partners over land, it’s the maritime trade routes that really print money.

The trade routes arc around the huge main map, which is itself divided into two principle sections: North America and Eurasia. The core map stretches from Iceland on the top left to Sri Lanka on the bottom right. Scrolling across an empire that spans this vast distance is a pleasure indeed. Red, yellow and green status marks materialise to show who you’re sharing that sea-route with and how threatened you are. Pirates camping the route will need to be physically removed.

The trade routes then snake off into the rest of the world, including the four ‘trade regions’ – South America, the Ivory Coast, the straits of Madagascar, and the East Indies. These are purely coastal regions, in which fleets can be placed to generate money. It’s then down to your diplomacy, and the grit of your admirals, to keep those trade routes open, and to keep your nation rich. Once at war with the Ottoman Empire, our Great Britain campaign saw us bottling up the Ottoman fleet in the Mediterranean, keeping our Atlantic traders safe from attack. Had we picked a fight with Portugal or Spain, with their Atlantic-facing coastlines, things would have been very different.

Inevitably, the real action still goes down in the main, land-based conquerable regions of the campaign map. These are far more detailed than anything we’ve seen previously. Each region still has a capital, but there are now separate ports, towns, and farms. All of these can be built upon and upgraded, bringing you farming estates, ports for military or trade use, mines, schools, centres for religious learning, or even defensive forts.

How all this infrastructure builds up will depend largely on your schools, which allow you to research different streams of technology. An empire can have up to four educational establishments and use them to research many different technologies at once. Balancing the flow of your funds is a constant challenge. Putting all of your money into industry and military research might give you an edge on the battlefield, but it will leave your populace undeveloped and result in negative sentiment in the electorate. If you don’t let your academics develop democracy, you might have a domestic revolution on your hands.

One of the new agent types is a ‘gentleman’ and these can be installed in schools to speed up learning. This means you can push industrial, military, agricultural, or social research at different levels and reap the rewards. In fact, the tech tree and research process is one of the areas that Empire seems to have nailed down best. It’s genuinely satisfying to see your efforts poured into agriculture result in a leap in taxation profits from farming. Or to know your men are going to fight more effectively on the battlefield because they’ve got well-made bayonets on their muskets. Early races into particular areas of technology really do pay off, especially when you combine them with the diplomacy screen, trading technological supremacy with your friends for advantage over your enemies. Truly, this is a multi-layered game of cold-blooded strategy.

It’s the thirst for detail – much of it historically accurate, some of it simply entertaining – that defines the entire game. It’s on the turn-based campaign map that we see the best of it. It’s now genuinely possible for a region to become war-torn, as enemy units occupy and torch outlying settlements – devastating your infrastructure if your armies remain safely garrisoned inside a fort or walled city. Seeing the columns of smoke rising reminds you how much work you still have to do.

With new depth-of-field effects and wispy clouds floating above it, the campaign map is visually arresting. But it’s imaginatively arresting too, as you zoom out and witness the scale of the thing: from the Mid West of North America to the Far East. Then zoom back in and look at the little details, such as the single faction nations: the Knights of St John occupying Malta, for example, or even a pirate outpost on the Windward Isles of the Caribbean. It’s exquisite.

What is even more thrilling, although currently unseen and untested, is that Creative Assembly intend to make the campaign map multiplayer. This feature won’t ship with the release version of the game, but within a couple of months you and a friend could be taking on the AI nations in a battle for 18th-century dominance. We can’t score a game on what it’s going to contain in the future, of course, but it’s worth mentioning, because hey, it’s exciting.

Of course, most of those layers of government, from construction to policy, can be left to the auto-management of the game, leaving you to perform the most cursory state management and unit production, and to concentrate on the thing that truly beats at the heart of Total War: the battlefield itself. While being a great statesman is very useful, victory will ultimately be decided by war. To take the regions required for a grand campaign win condition will always result in armed conflict, and that means spending some time on the battle map, where a human mind is always better than an automated conflict.

Here too the sheer weight of ideas produced by the Creative Assembly team is in evidence. The battlefields are vastly more detailed than ever before, especially around towns, with the smaller scale details now coming into effect in the form of battlefield defences, use of buildings by troops, and accurate cover. Battles play out more convincingly than in previous games. There’s still some errant unit activity, but we’ve seen little evidence of units sitting around waiting to be killed, or getting lost entirely.

Not perfect, perhaps, but certainly more robust. The harder AI has been an absolute bastard to take on toe-to-toe. Enemy generals work to split your ranks, or to funnel you into the firing line of cannons, or to avoid your flanking tactics. They’ll drive through your lines and then fan back around, attempting to split and isolate your troops. When they’re heavily entrenched, firing from the windows of buildings and harrying your troops with veteran skirmishers, it starts to feel like a more mature game.

The nature of war has changed with Empire’s 18th century setting. Firearms are now standard on the battlefield, and only a few units – certain cavalry, pikemen, some of the foot-soldiers on undeveloped nations – go without gunpowder weapons. Line infantry, the staple unit of European armies, now form a huge part of your army. This is no longer a game of massed cavalry charges. It’s about judging firing arcs and reloading times, and coaxing enemies into a killing field. Yes, a good cavalry charge will solve all kinds of problems, but the tactics are there to counter them. Bayonet-armed infantry forming defensive squares will make short work of a cavalry unit. It’s the mobile artillery -horse-drawn cannons -that can completely throw the balance of any given battle- particularly when you’re faced with sieges. The possibility for battlefield variation is more wide open than ever, and consequently even more engaging.

However, we’re not going to be uncritical. The most crucial problem for us is that the new real-time naval battles, although spectacular, are somewhat unconvincing. Naval combat is a major new addition to the series, which previously featured no real-time ship-to-ship conflict. In Empire you can produce fleets in your ports and then direct them into skirmishes on the high seas. From tiny sloops to ornate high-end flagship galleons, the full range of 18th century naval technology is afloat. The detail on these ships is astonishing: you can zoom right in to watch sailors taking pot-shots at the crew of nearby enemy ships, or see the many decks of guns frenziedly reloading between volleys.

Frustratingly, however, you never feel as if you’re actually fighting a major fleet engagement. The ships do not feel like sailing ships, and although the principles of broadsides, tacking against wind and ship-boarding are all in place, they never coalesce into strategy. The potential for micromanagement just seems to cause the battles to descend into a chaos, and it’s comparatively laborious alongside a land battle. Additionally, fighting a battle with more than just a handful of ships is ludicrously daunting, and rapidly becomes a chore.

In exactly the way that suspension of disbelief is absolute in the land battles, it disappears at sea. It feels as if these sea battles needed to be more like simulations, with the battles playing out and allowing you to make minor adjustments, rather than the peculiar battle-map remixing they’ve turned out as. We spent two long evenings trying to master the art of large-scale fleet combat, but it became clear it was never going to be digestible. While the land battles have been honed to the point of being unmissable, we found ourselves rapidly defaulting to auto-resolve fleet conflicts. If the rest of the game wasn’t quite so triumphant in its execution then this maritime misstep might have genuinely impacted on our verdict. As it is, we think there’s a reason why there are so few naval combat sims, and evenfewer successful ones. It’s a deeply difficult task, and Creative Assembly have done the best that their game template would allow.

Nor could we really be without this new facet, because the high seas are so utterly integral to this new game. Leaving the ship battles unseen would not be acceptable, especially when naval engagements are crucial to your economic prowess. This is a game that allows you to play your own hand in all things – and that had to include the naval battles too. We’re glad of this new aspect of the game, but even more pleased we are usually able to skip it. There are other troubles too – the AI turns remain achingly slow, and the micromanagement of things such as regional taxes still isn’t quite clear or flexible enough to make fiddling around down there truly satisfying.

Nevertheless we cannot do anything other than play Empire, compulsively, obsessively. It’s not even a period of history we’ve previously taken much interest in, and we’ve still been overwhelmed with desire to keep on spreading our flag across this glorious, beautifully detailed map. Hell, you’re lucky to get a review at all. If we had our way we’d have been getting on with that land-invasion of India right now, which was well overdue. We’ve only just got around to dealing with that particular situation, thanks to getting caught up in Baghdad for the best part of a decade.

A game could be a high scoring instance of a ludicrously niche genre that only a handful of people will ever get a kick out of, and therefore would not earn the Must Buy. Occasionally though, we give a high score to an instance of a ludicrously niche genre that everyone will get a kick out of. That’s precisely why Empire: Total War gets a Must Buy award.

Mar 6, 2009

War shouldn’t be this much fun. War should be hell and suffering, the debasement of mankind. It should be scooping beans from a can with the rib of a dead comrade and then swallowing it into your dysenteric stomach. But not fun. Only Empire, Creative Assembly’s most ambitious and epic Total War game to date, is just that. Fun. How do we know this? Because we’ve just spent two hours playing the latest code, and as our fingers fumble to strike the correct keys to type these words, we can’t help feel that Empire has the potential to utterly eclipse its illustrious predecessors.

During our playtest, we sampled Empire’s Road to Independence campaign: a series of bite-sized, story-driven episodes based on the American War of Independence. Divided into four chapters, The Road to Independence is likely to offer a more focused experience for newcomers daunted by the prospect of diving straight into the largest Total War turn-based campaign to date. Episode one begins circa 1607, with you marshalling the British as they try to gain a foothold in the US and hold off the natives, who’ve impertinently lived there for many thousands of years without a letter of permission from His Royal Highness.

Chapter two sees the natives on the back foot, but augmented by the military might of the French. (Stop snickering. The French were quite the military power back then.) As the Brits you must defeat this unlikely alliance in short order. Chapter three tasks you with leading the Americans to victory over the Brits in the War of Independence, and it was this episode that provided the setting forour session.

Unlike the main campaign, The Road to Independence isn’t just an open sandbox, as each chapter is punctuated by CGI cutscenes detailing the birth of the modern-day US. While purists may scoff, the cutscenes we witnessed were adequate proof that the plot should add an extra layer of depth and meaning to your actions. Also readily apparent was the more focused nature of these episodes, making them ideal for newcomers before they’re thrown into the main campaign in the final fourth chapter.

Chapter three kicked off with a real-time 3D recreation of the Battle of Bunker Hill, an epic clash between the Brits and Americans on an undulating battlefield dotted with patches of forest. Playing as the sovereignty-seeking Yanks, our heavily outnumbered forces began atop a hill. The interface, familiar yet distinctively different from Medieval II, took just seconds to learn, allowing hostilities to quickly commence.

Calling upon nearly a decade of Total War experience, we arrayed our troops at the hill summit, though one fundamental difference forced us to reassess our tried and tested tactics. While cannons and muskets featured in Medieval II, they were so wayward as to verge on useless. Empire’s gunpowder weapons now have accuracy to match their power, creating a new set of variables when outlining your battle plan.

Horse-drawn cannons allow for the rapid deployment and movement of your artillery. Whereas shifting artillery was previously akin to pushing a bear up a downward escalator, cannons can now be moved to a new location in seconds. Placing them intelligently is also paramount. This became painfully apparent when we sent a cannonball scything through the spines of dozens of our own troops standing directly in front of our artillery. It was a flash of military genius to rival even Field Marshal Haig’s brilliant WWI strategy of marching thousands of men towards German machine-guns.

With the Brits advancing up the steep gradient from three directions, we wheeled our cavalry around their left flank in a bid to drive a wedge through the heart of their forces. Our men bayed a war cry that mingled with the stampeding hooves of their mounts, charging for glory with swords outstretched, racing past an abandoned farm before collapsing en masse as a group of garrisoned enemy snipers parted them from their brains as they rode past. This was going to be tougher than we thought.

Moments like these proved Creative Assembly’s commitment to ensuring that Empire’s AI is a marked improvement over the irritatingly predictable and moronically static opposition tactics we often witnessed in Medieval II. Where troops once attacked in a single tide they now spread out and probe, searching for gaps in our lines to divideour forces.

Still smarting from the loss of half our cavalry and with the advancing Brits tenderized by some well-placed cannon balls, we ordered our troops to open fire. A cloud of smoke formed from 500 musket puffs as balls of lead cut into the enemy ranks. Scores of Redcoats dropped. The bombardment continued, each volley reducing the enemy’s forces by 10 and sometimes 20 men. The two armies traded salvos as they closed, each volley more devastating than the last. With a single mouse click we changed our troops’ attack orders to melee and sent a sea of blue uniforms sweeping down the hill at the enemy.

Zooming into the action revealed a previously unmatched level of battlefield realism and detail, with each motion captured soldier actively seeking out an opponent before engaging in a mortal shoving and stabbing match. Men toppled into the mud, squirming with terror before receiving a deft bayonet jab to the windpipe. After a titanic, 20-minute struggle the tide turned our way with the enemy hightailing it thanks in no small part to a bullet to the British general’s head that broke his men’s morale. With the real-time battle ended, it was time to test out the campaign map. Once again, while initially familiar to any Total War veteran, the first impressions proved deceptive with further probing revealing some subtle nuances.

One of the most fundamental transformations was how regions were pocked with settlements. While the capital city remains the heart of each one, a series of smaller towns also make up your holdings. A region can still only be captured by conquering the capital, but you now have other options too. With the Battle of Bunker Hill successfully navigated, we advanced our troops into enemy territory, only to find the Brits firmly entrenched inside the towering walls of the region’s key city. But with the outlying towns only lightly defended, we channeled all our efforts into attacking them instead, strangling the region’s income and forcing the hiding enemy into the open for a face-to-face confrontation.

In a clear attempt to provide greater flexibility, Creative Assembly have expended a great deal of effort in fleshing out Empire’s non-combat features. The developers even claim that you’ll be able to play the whole game with minimal amount of conflict if you’re canny enough, though sadly our playtest wasn’t long enough to test this theory.

Empire’s diplomacy system has been greatly streamlined, with a single diplomatic interface negating the tedium of micromanaging individual diplomats on the campaign map. Alliances have become far more complex affairs, and you can even try to manipulate other nations to do the fighting for you. Attack an enemy and your allies will be reluctant to come to your aid, but goad your foe into an invasion and your allies will send reinforcements without hesitating. Ally with a faction sandwiched between you and your enemy, and the opposition will have to come through them, before they can get to you.

One of the best ways of needling the enemy is to use a new unit called the Gentleman. This loveable rogue can be sent into enemy territory to duel opposition commanders or assassinate dignitaries, allowing high rankers to be eliminated without the need for battlefield confrontation. Wipe out a number of a faction’s generals and they’ll declare war. The Gentleman also has several other key skills. Ensconce him in an enemy’s university and he’ll steal their research, or if he’s placed in one of yours, speed your discovery of new technologies. The Rake is another debuting unit that acts as an all-in-one spy, diplomat and saboteur, making for a far more streamlined approach to subterfuge.

As our playtest drew to its inevitable close and with both the land battles and campaign map exuding the kind of potential that should have every strategy gamer palpitating, there was just enough time to sample Empire’s all-new naval battles. These watery conflicts proved far slower, more considered affairs than their terra firma equivalents. Wind speed and direction were major factors in determining the maneuverability of vessels, with ships battling the elements while exchanging cannon fire with a British fleet.

Turning each ship so that enemy vessels came into a hull’s shooting range proved the greatest challenge, one made all the more difficult by the need to manually reload cannons after firing at the enemy. A secondary challenge was gauging which of the three shot types to use. Besides the basic cannonball, you’ve got chain-shot – half-cannonballs linked together by thick chains. These take down enemy masts and leave ships sitting ducks for barrages by standard cannonballs that knock gaping holes in enemy hulls. Finally, there is grapeshot. This is a canvas bag full of metal balls turns a ship’s crew into hunks of flesh, softening up the enemy in preparation for boarding.

While these battles were certainly tense and tactical, it’s still too early to make any concrete judgments on them. We’ll save that for the review. Make no mistake, Empire: Total War is shaping up to be one the most ambitious war simulations around. Not only is its scope superior to its predecessors, it’s also promising to scale previously uncharted heights of accessibility. With land battles bolstered by some radically improved AI and the added tactical dimension provided by gunpowder weapons and the ability to garrison troops, along with a highly promising first attempt at real-time 3D naval warfare, Empire: Total War has the tools to take strategy gaming to the next level.

If the polish can match the vision then Empire won’t just be another war simulation, it’ll be pure, unadulterated strategy entertainment of the very highest caliber. Or in a word, fun.

Jan 13, 2009

Talk about a journalistic conflict of interest: We’re the British. Across a thin stretch of oceanic blue sits the American fleet. I’m a Brit, but I’m writing for an American magazine. There’s not even time to wonder about how the Americans got hold of a proper fleet of their own. With allegiances torn, how does one proceed in such a situation? There’s only one answer: as swiftly as possible. For any fan of Creative Assembly’s magisterial strategy series, hands-on time with the long-awaited addition of real-time fleet combat to a Total War game overwhelms petty colonial alliances.

Naval combat works and feels absolutely like a logical extension of Total War’s maximalist mandate. Ships’ destinations are charted with a mouse click, with the goal of manipulating fields-of-fire to line up much-desired broadsides (directing the cannon-laden flanks of your ship toward the enemy). In an improvement to the grouping systems of previous games, ships can be set not only to group, but to maintain a formation in group. I watch as my British fleets manage to trap the Americans between them, shredding sails and bringing down masts with chain-shot, thinning out the crew with grapeshot, and punching great dirty holes through timbers with dependable solid shot.

It brings to mind Sid Meier’s Pirates! as a strategy game, but with much more realism: the primary goal is to line up as many of your cannons as possible to fire at the right moment. While automatic firing and circling options allow you simply to set a target and step back as your ships engage, you can choose to get more hands-on, such as turning off autofire to unleash a storm of cannonballs at the perfect moment. But I’m not bothering with that on this first playthrough - for now, concentrating on positioning my ships is enough to worry about without forgetting to fire my cannons or some other embarrassing newbie-admiral mistake.

That positioning is crucial, first, because my big ships flanking the Americans allow for a series of devastating volleys, and second, because one of my smaller vessels is about to be rammed by one of the American galleons. Luckily, the wind is with her and she manages to dodge the collision, just barely. This would have been the time to experiment with boarding an enemy vessel, but I decide that beating a speedy retreat is a little wiser. It’s not possible to put boarding planks down between ships of vastly different sizes, so only a limited number of my troops would be able get over via ropes. A handful of men from a tiny ship trying to take over the hulking thing that almost crushed them isn’t exactly tactically sound.

It’s also clear from their morale rating that the British troops would rather do anything than board that enemy ship - and that’s the hallmark of a Total War game. These ships are not robotic vehicles happy to circle and bombard one another into splinters and shark-bait - as in the series’ land battles, the concept of morale is fully implemented here. As their ships are battered and their crew killed, the troops are perfectly capable of turning tail, breaking from the line of battle, and heading toward the horizon.

Luckily, it looks like the British can stay put in their own vessels. A glance at the American fleet reveals it’s in severe trouble - and I don’t just mean its ships. The health-bar representation of the ship’s state is only an approximation of the actual harm suffered by the vessel. While the meters above one ship were informing me that its guns on one side were mostly disabled, when I zoomed in - and this is a Total War game, so zooming in is half the point - I could observe individually destroyed cannons and decks strewn with corpses. Yup. That’s a disabled ship. The watery battlefield rapidly filled as the American Man-of-Wars started to sink. Sailors jumped ship into the ocean, bobbing with realistic buoyancy (alas, the sharks aren’t in yet). Victory to the British! To salve the slighted American spirit, you should be aware that when the same conflict was demoed earlier, the (British) Associate Producer, Mark Sutherns, was sunk with embarrassing haste.

Not that he cared; though the British lost, it felt a lot like a victory. While Empire: Total War pushes the series forward in a number of ways - a setting in the 18th century, a refinement of the diplomatic model, a representation of the effects of gunpowder and politics, to name a few - Creative Assembly seems particularly proud of its ships. Designer Jamie Ferguson recalls when the team managed to get the first LAN-skirmish working, and he and fellow Designer Ian Roxburgh did battle in front of a genuine crowd. “Everybody was gathered around our desks, just staring at it,” he says. Does he remember who won? “It didn’t matter who won. It was just great fun.” We can presume that translates as, “Ian.”

That the ships have been so long in the making seems natural, given Creative Assembly’s tendency to leverage deeper warfare simulations from technological improvements. The original Shogun emerged as the result of 3D engine technology that rendered realistic terrain, and thus allowed for a game based on realistic tactical decisions. Rome’s more advanced sieges were only possible because of the game’s beefier engine. And now, Empire’s ships, complete with crews and total destructibility, are the team’s latest technological love letter to PC gaming.

“In a land battle, you can see if a unit is half-destroyed, because 50 are dead and there are 50 left,” says Ferguson. “With a ship, it’s a little more subtle. If we’d tried to do this eight years ago, we’d have been in trouble. The fidelity of graphics nowadays allows you to see which mast has collapsed. These are the spectacles of naval warfare - without them, you can still make an interesting game, but it won’t necessarily be a visual feast.”

All that power under the hood has meant grappling to find the right level of complexity, though - the team even played with the concept of individual deck control, and direct control of boarding parties and fire crews. Turns out it could all work, “if you were [only] controlling one ship,” grins Lead Designer, James Russell. As it is, the team approached the ship as if it were analogous to a unit on the battlefield, where you’re managing up to 20 individuals in a conflict. Luckily, autofire and units moving in formation relative to one another make things relatively painless, and leave you free to micromanage areas you think need to be tweaked, like timing specific volleys from specific ships.

Another area where total realism took a hit: tacking (i.e., zig-zagging your ship) to move into the wind, which isn’t as simple as just sailing at an angle. “It sounds like a good idea,” Ferguson says, “but what it means is that if you click somewhere, the ship goes off in a completely different direction." After attempting to make the mechanic mandatory, the team eventually chose to make things simpler: Wind greatly affects a battle in terms of the ships’ speed and direction - a “North Sea in winter” battle will be fought at least as much against the elements as against your opponents - but tacking won’t ever be necessary. Instead, those who choose to give it a whirl will be rewarded with a speed bonus.

Empire is the first Creative Assembly game set on a truly global scale, with conflict spanning multiple theaters, so it does much to sidestep the perils of realism. A separate campaign, “The Road To Independence,” covers the era spanning the initial colonization of the Americas through the point where the colonies decided they wanted to keep their tea, thankyouverymuch. You’ll flex your military might in three main theaters - Europe, America, and the Near East, each with its own map - but to minimize donkey work, you can choose to set tax rates at the upper level, rather than for individual regions within each theater. Then there are the trade theaters - such as the Caribbean, East Africa, and the East Indies - to which you’re unable to send land forces, and so must dominate by naval power alone. The more ships you send - and the fewer enemy ships cutting your supply lines - the greater your profits. The desired effect is whole-world scale without a whole world of meaningless clicking and map-scrolling.

Land battles, while less of a radical departure than sea battles, are considerably changed from previous Total War games. Hand-to-hand combat was hardly obsolete during the period, but increased ranged combat and the addition of gunpowder have led to changes, such as the option to order units to take cover and man buildings. Seeing all of this in action was impressive enough that it’s easy to have faith Creative Assembly can pull together a digital Waterloo - though whether the devs can manage a digital Napoleon has actually been the bigger question, given the ongoing criticism of AI in previous Total War efforts.

These are primarily single-player games, so tactical deficiencies are more obvious and painful - as anyone who’s watched an enemy king throw his life away in a meaningless charge will attest. Creative Assembly is sensitive to this, and is making clear efforts to counter the weakness. How? On the Rome: Barbarian Invasion team, just one coder focused on AI, and only part-time. This time around, three coders focus on AI full-time, with others contributing. “We can always say that we’re working really hard on the AI - which we are - and that we think it’s going to be better than before - which we do - but the objective fact is that compared with Rome, we have a lot more staff on it,” says James Russell.

We suspect they’d better - with Empire, the team is promising a game strikingly more advanced than anything a Total War general has seen before. The primary difference: rather than two completely separate AI parts governing the strategic and tactical levels of your opponent’s gameplay, they now feed information to one another, so the enemy general will be aware of the stakes. If defeat is immaterial, they’ll maximize casualties against the opposition, then retreat. If they simply must triumph in this battle in order to win the war, expect a to-the-last-man encounter. The series has always strived to achieve a combined grand-scale view of war. If it succeeds here, it’ll be a welcome difference.

Equally, though, Empire is a game about history and color, and to that end, the devs are working to make each side tactically distinctive. “Are they like the Russians, with lots of infantry and cavalry who keep pushing forward and hope to win? Or are they like the French, who advance in column and use the Grand Battery to lay down covering fire?” asks Jamie Ferguson. “You should feel you’re fighting somebody rather than a machine.” This works on the commander level as well as the faction level, and you may learn that some generals are more prone to certain tactical approaches than others. On a more basic level, the team has concentrated on bolstering traditionally weak areas of the series. “One of the first things Richard [Bull, lead battle AI programmer] did was to look at some of the exploit tactics people used in our previous games and say, ‘I’m going to make sure none of them work anymore,’” says Mark Sutherns. The period itself already minimizes some of this - camping a corner is less effective when it makes you a perfect target for cannon fire.

Similar enhancements are seen in the diplomacy between governments, as you’re capable of offering a much greater variety of deals. There’s also increased transparency of an opposing nation’s feelings, so you should no longer be surprised by allies who become foes over something you didn’t realize they were touchy about - like, say, invasions. Similar innovations in government include democracies that swap their cabinet members with a shadow cabinet as their popularity wanes. These ministers replace the governors of individual regions - though there are still theater-wide-governors - and give bonuses in different areas. Since the shadow government has different strengths from the elected officials, you’ll find yourself in the novel situation of deliberately getting your government booted in order to seat people in power who are more suitable for your current predicament.

These sorts of political power games strongly tie into revolutions. They can be prompted for all sorts of reasons, and doing so gives you the option of choosing to fight for the status quo or for the would-be status quo - if you want to run a Republic, you may need to play to alienate your people to begin with. Or, you can play more considerately, spending your research resources on the sorts of enlightened strides in thinking that characterized the age. Of course, this will give the lower classes funny ideas about “rights." In Empire, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing to the established order. Creative Assembly promises a true research tech-tree for the first time in a Total War game, along with upper and lower social classes that are clearly modeled separately.

In other words, things happen for many reasons in this game. It’s a product of the team’s philosophy: “We like to think we’re a historical game, even though we don’t keep to history at every turn. The entire idea of the game is to create a counter-factual story... but at the same time, we want people to have some understanding that things aren’t independent of each other,” says Ferguson. “There are co-dependencies. To say that the French Revolution only occurred because of one thing is to grossly misunderstand the driving factors.” It’s telling that this, rather than the simple conquest method of winning an empire, is the basis for Empire’s concept of “prestige,” and whoever has the most - gained via research, economic power, and military victories in the year 1800 is declared the winner.

It's Total War’s key idea: History is yet unwritten. Empire promises the chance to write a fascinating new one of your own design. “Too often, you can look back at history and think there’s an inevitability,” says Ferguson, “But certainly, in 1700, no one would have thought that Britain was going to become the largest nation on Earth - except, possibly, the British. In the same way, no one would have thought Prussia would become one of the mightiest nations on earth.” Adds Russell, “None of these things are preordained.”

Repeating History
A historical game requires historical research, both for factual elements and for inspiration. Creative Assembly tends to divvy up research duties based on team interests: Designer Jamie Ferguson has pored over sailing books and stories of life aboard ship. Lead Designer James Russell favors tomes detailing the grand political and social forces of the age, and what actually pushed the European powers overseas: the driving economic forces of colonization and the rivalry between the great powers.

They’re aware this lends their games an educational aspect, even though that has not been a core aim. “You can get people into something they wouldn’t necessarily get into otherwise,” says Ferguson. “They may not want to pick up a book. They may find that a dry medium. But games can be a learning experience without being a lesson. We don’t teach history...”

“...but people learn from the game,” interrupts Russell. “One of our sources of pride is when a forum-ite says the only reason they went onto university is that they learned about a piece of history and it excited their interest. Games should be a positive experience, as well as a pastime.”

Oh, brave new world map
Of all the things to get obsessed about, the world map is probably the shallowest. But, while the designers are extolling the promises of the democracy system and ship-based trade, we find ourselves preoccupied by the startlingly realistic seas. Given that they look like video footage of the open water, the word “photorealistic” may even be justified. “We wanted to try to create a world that seemed more real, and didn’t feel like playing a game of Risk,” says Designer Jamie Ferguson. Based on NASA data, the map gives more the impression of looking at a world, rather than a map of one - something the team has pursued vigorously. “You really get the feeling you’re looking at the Earth from great height,” says Lead Designer James Russell.

This influenced other decisions, too, such as showing economic resources outside cities on the map, rather than hidden inside the cities themselves; the result is transparency of information. Having a world that’s recognizable at a glance rather than an abstracted representation helps to orient players as they navigate in a sea of data. “You don’t have the issue of, ‘What’s that blue thing over there? Oh, that’s the sea,’” says Ferguson. “You can see that it’s the sea. You can see that this is the forest.”

Campaign troubles
Modern RTS games have trended away from a linear chain of missions and toward non-linear campaign maps. While that structure has appeal, it’s never quite worked - there’s a sense that the campaigns are artificial, that the macro-level of battle doesn’t mean anything because the game’s real economics are there on the battlefield.

In Total War, this works differently, and potentially brilliantly. Here, the economics of the battlefield are those of fatigue and morale. “Keeping that campaign level apart allows that to come through, because the player isn’t worrying about going off to chop wood,” says Designer Jamie Ferguson. “Napoleon didn’t spend one second thinking about woodcutters during the battle of Waterloo. Our games are about being Julius Caesar, being Wellington, Marlborough, Prince Eugenius, or any one of those great commanders... but at the same time, being Peter the Great, or Julius Caesar, the dictator administrating Rome.”

“They’re considering very different things, whether they’re on the empire level or the battlefield,” adds James Russell, “It’s a completely different mind-set, and that’s where the separation comes. When [Napoleon] was back in Paris, he was thinking about ‘Do I decimalize? Do I introduce the meter?’” says Jamie. “I think that’s the thing players of other games don’t get - the change of pace that allows you to have that intense moment with everything that goes into it, and when you step back out of that, you then concentrate on trying to achieve greater things.”

Sep 24, 2008

Aug 29, 2007

Medieval II: Total War's first expansion is immense and has taken up pretty much every waking moment of our past week. It's an RTS add-on pack unlike any we've ever seen before, one that shames many standalone games with its sheer depth and wealth of options.

Nestling inside this package is not one, not two, not three, but four full campaigns bursting with content. That's around 50 hours of gameplay if you want to get numerical about it. And that's if you decide to only play through each campaign once.

One of the criticisms leveled at the original game was that the Aztec sections were a positive letdown. If you were one of the people disappointed by this somewhat threadbare tail-end bonus, then you'll be champing at the proverbial bit in order to free your teeth so that you can sink them into Kingdoms' beefy Americas campaign.

The obvious choice is to opt for the Spanish, but while this may give you a sizeable technological advantage over the lightly armoured locals, you'll quickly find that expanding on your meager starting foothold is more than a moderate challenge. The campaign's early stages bear more than a passing resemblance to Rome's Alexander expansion, forcing you to rely heavily on local mercenaries while you wait for Spanish armies to be ferried across the sea.

Onto the Crusades campaign then, in which you command one of the five dominant factions scattered throughout the Holy Land in a bid to unify it. Of course, you'll also have to contend with those pesky European Crusades that crash against your walls like waves of steel on an irritatingly regular basis.

This cauldron of hate and death proves a far more considered and strategic affair than its claustrophobic Americas counterpart, forcing you to guide your armies over searing expanses of desert and unwelcoming mountainous terrain to reach your next destination, while ensuring that you keep your major cities fortified in readiness for the Crusade invasions.

If you've ever played the Viking Invasion expansion for the original Medieval, then you'll find the Britannia campaign instantly familiar. While it's not exactly the same, there are certainly a fair few similarities. Taking control of the land-rich English, one of the English-hating nations (Scotland, Wales or Ireland) or the invading Norse hordes, you must conquer the whole of the British Isles. The obvious choice here is to opt for the English, who start off controlling well over half the map but are soon beset on all sides by enemies. It's actually far more entertaining to play as the Scots, Welsh, Irish or even the Norse, who must overcome seemingly insurmountable odds to achieve victory.

Kingdoms' final bloody chapter is the Teutonic campaign, boasting what is perhaps the expansion pack's most diverse selections of factions. Eager to send the Pagan Lithuanians to hell, the Teutonic Knights launch an invasion of the Baltic, taking out anyone - Pagan or otherwise - who stands in their way. These boys pack some serious punch with a devastating array of heavy foot and mounted warriors, as well as Mangonels that fire exploding barrels that shower the enemy with a torrent of fire.

So there you have it: four whopping campaigns just waiting to suck you dry of your spare time and turn you into a social recluse. But that doesn't mean that it's above criticism.

For starters, cavalry is still a problem. In fact, seeing as it's such an imperative element of both the Teutonic and Crusades campaigns, it's even more of a problem than in the original game. Pathfinding is highly skewed, with horsemen often veering off in the opposite direction you've ordered them in, resulting in horses wading into lines of spears and turning themselves into ready-made nag kebabs. Exacerbating the cavalry conundrum is the fact that mounted units still have a tendency to pull up before the all-important impact, robbing you of those infantry-pulverising moments that made cavalry charges such a triumph in Rome.

Secretly in development for over a year, the next installment of the Total War franchise is set to release sometime in 2008. It%26rsquo;s our great pleasure here at GamesRadar to reveal to you now, Empire: Total War in all its full naval combat glory.

As these first screenshotssuggest, Empire: Total War is set in the maritime heyday of the 18th century and the height of the British Empire. There has been no confirmation of specific factions, but the campaign map is set to spread across the seas from the naval powerhouses of Europe to the hitherto untapped riches in India and the Americas, in what Creative Assembly are calling the biggest and best Total War ever. Series veterans will realise that's no small boast to make.

True naval combat hasn't been seen in Total Warbefore. Previous attempts have essentially beentacked-on affairs of exclusively computer calculated combat - possibly entirely random (not that we're bitter). It was a necessary faucet of trading and defence, profitable at first but little more than an unfulfilling sap on your finances once you actually started warring.

Spartan is nothing but a killing machine. We can’t say if it’s because he has no real name, if someone said he'd never make it in a third-person hack-and-slash game because he's not as pretty as Russell Crowe, or what. What we can say is this: the only way his countrymen could have designed a more effective tool for relieving Roman soldiers of their limbs would have been to attach giant razor blades to an airplane propeller.

This meaty brand of third-person action slaughter is executed via the trusted medium of button bashing. The developers will hate us for saying this, because they’ve pointed out to us on multiple occasions the non-bashy, all-skillsy nature of Spartan: Total Warrior’s combat. But put the controller in our hands and those buttons are going to take a spanking.

Yes, we know there’s a fairly workable system in which one button is a forward attack, the other an area attack, and the rest of the buttons switch between magic blasts, arrows, rage attacks, a jump, a rolling dodge, and shield bashes. We still button-mashed. You may well be able to intentionally block an enemy’s blow and deliver an immaculately timed counter, as we often unwittingly did. But, if you reckon you can do it when you can’t even see Spartan amid the 100-strong crowd of furious combatants swarming around him, you’ve probably been working on the game for the last two years.

Anyway, regardless of how it is achieved, the result is much the same: oodles of rapid-fire killing and the satisfaction of hacking up enemies more numerous than in any console action game that has gone before. Everywhere you look, Romans (and later, skeletons, zombies, and ogre-like “gigantes”) pour over castle walls and invade rooms via unseen doorways. Sometimes you’ll have some dim-witted allies to battle alongside you, but most of the Romans nonetheless go straight to you for the fastest possible ticket to the afterlife.

When you’ve sliced and diced enough people in the current area, you’ll be able to move somewhere else for a battle in alternative surroundings. Health and the little used magic power are replenished by praying at altars along the way, although the sneaky Romans tend to use such moments to start hitting Spartan from behind.

Those rear attacks become annoying, but it almost can’t be avoided. Most of the time you’ll have a full 360° panorama of meat mannequins to hack away at, and the unhelpful camera doesn’t always display the best angles for figuring out who’s next for the chop (hence our rather successful tactic of random flailing).

Before you get the wrong idea, let’s make it clear that there are mission objectives: if you want endless random combat, simply head on over to the Arena mode, where you’re more than welcome to chop till you drop. In the main game, you’ll have to protect certain individuals, sabotage various things, pull levers, climb ladders and find secret items. It’s got everything an ordinary adventure game would have. The battlefields are often multi-leveled cityscapes complete with hidden treasures and interactive killing aids like ballista, racks of spears, and cauldrons full of burning oil.

There seems to be a time limit in some areas that’s either unmentioned or was mentioned too quietly to register through our digital bloodlust. Whatever the cause, the action was frequently and prematurely brought to a halt. Sometimes we ended up losing because we failed to kill a certain enemy. That seems unfair, because we would have gotten to him sooner if we hadn’t been surrounded by other enemies with a death wish. Those Romans may have been civilized, but they were crap at waiting their turn to get skewered.

No matter, because we didn’t need to be asked twice on the Continue screen. Spartan: Total Warrior’s satisfying simplicity makes it easy to lose hour after hour to repeated play-throughs of the same levels in an attempt to max out the combo meter or try wasting a boss with a different type of weapon.

Medieval II: Total War Kingdoms introduces, along withfour New World campaigns, a number of additional features. Expected to release in August, the expansion also offers three additional campaigns set in Northern Europe, Great Britain and the Holy Land.

Players will be able to delve into strategy-thinking with 13 new factions and150+ new units.It will be possible tocontrol multiple armies on one map. New heroes, including Richard The Lionheart and Saladin join the fray and offer new abilities to tap.

Key strategic points throughout the campaigns can be taken control of withforts surrounded by moats, which can be garrisoned with large armies and used to research new tech treesinvolving religion and prestige.

Kingdoms will alsoadd six new multiplayer scenarios, and 20 new Custom Battlemaps. The campaigns feature a new Hotseat multiplayer mode, but the details on this new mode haven't been released yet.

April 2, 2007

The next age of medieval warfare is on its way with Medieval II: Total War Kingdoms, the expansion pack for the massively popular 2006 gameMedieval II: Total War. Also published by Sega, and due to be released in Autumn 2007, Kingdoms will offer four all new campaigns, adding over 75 hours worth of gameplay.

One campaignwill give gamers the opportunity tofully explorethe New World, which was revealed towards the end of Medieval II. You'll retrace the steps of Hernan Cortes in 1519, as he attempts to conquer, explore and generally give the Aztec or Native American factionsthe boot all over again. Orplay asone of the New World factions and use the power of their vast armies and Gods to be sure that boot is used to walk Cortes right onto a boat back to Spain.

Monday 6 November 2006
Whoever came up with the Chivalric Code was an incredible optimist. Or, rather, an incredible prat. "Thou shalt never lie. Thou shalt be generous. Thou shalt not recoil before thine enemy. Thou shalt make ceaseless war against the infidel..." Follow ethics like that in Medieval Europe and you'd likely end up a dead pauper in no time at all. That's certainly what would happen if you tried it in the mesmerisingly challenging Medieval II: Total War.

Creative Assembly has returned to the scene of its second triumph (Medieval: Total War) with a new graphics engine and a modest cartload of fresh ideas. Once again Europe is the cockpit. Once again rich turn-based grand strategy spawns spectacular real-time battles.

Just how spectacular those new scraps are is hard for mere words to convey. Swoop the camera through the fluttering pennants of three thousand charging knights, then watch them smash full-tilt into a similar sized wall of counter-charging enemy and you will swear Med II is the most awesome thing you've ever seen on a PC screen. Honestly, there are sights in this game that combine scale, beauty and brutality so sublimely they make you want to weep.

From the highest view, battles are pure geometry. Triangles attack rectangles, dissolving circles and lines. But drop the view all the way down and suddenly the giant battle reveals itself to be made up of a thousand tiny dramas, all exquisitely choreographed. Wherever you look men are fighting for their lives. It's breathtaking.

The frantic pace of the warfare and the vividness of the violence is the perfect counterweight to the slower, cooler grand strategic game. Whether you've dished out a drubbing, scraped a nerve-shreddingly slim win or had your regal rear well and truly booted, returning to the strategy map is a constant pleasure.

While much of the depth is inherited from its dad and grandpa (Medieval and Rome), there are new elements dotted here and there if you look hard enough.

Take merchants, for instance. Guide them to an ingot of silver, bolt of silk or similar resource then leave them there and they send back a trickle of florins to your treasury. On occasions wheeler-dealers get bullied off their pitches by more experienced AI competitors. This low-key economic warfare is a risky business. Success aggravates foreign powers and failure can result in the aggressor closing up shop permanently.

Spies and assassins have been a crucial part of the Total War experience ever since the series started and they are as important as ever in Med II. Hooded hitmen scamper everywhere for a few turns, hitting each other, then getting hit in return. It's splendid to watch, especially when your top operative emerges alive and kicking with massively enhanced stats.

Adding to the pleasure of covert capers are amusing pre-rendered cutscenes illustrating the mission results. Cannily, success and failure sequences start the same way, so you aren't instantly alerted to the result the second the clip starts.

Above: It looks amazing, but street-fighting can still be fiddly

Remember the inquisitors from M:TW? They are back with a vengeance (and a big sack of blood-caked interrogation instruments) but are only available to the Papal States. If you treat religion as dismissively in Med II as you did in M:TW you'll rapidly come unstuck.

Let things slide and eventually, in addition to visits from the holy arsonists with the thumbscrews, you'll face Rome's ultimate sanction - excommunication. Other states look on excommunicated nations as strategic sweetmeats. If things get really bad you might even find the Pope's decided to give Jerusalem a year off and sent a Crusade in your direction.

Neither in the hands of the player, nor completely AI controlled, Catholic CEOs are now identifiable characters with traits and prejudices. If your humble priests keep their conks clean and work hard they can end up sitting in the 13-seat College of Cardinals - the pool from which new Popes are elected.

On the death of a sitting Pope, factions with Cardinals get to participate in a murky, diplomacy-spiced election. It's yet another fascinating tactical tool in an already bulging player toolbox.

As in Rome: Total War optional tasks are tossed in your direction from time to time. Instead of the senate, in Med II it's often His Holiness who does the tasking; fall out with him and the offers dry up. Luckily, missions also come courtesy of the poorly-explained Council of Nobles. This convenient body subtly encourages you to expand, build up your armed forces and blood them with monetary incentives.

Above: That's gotta hurt. Every knight truly appears to fight for his life

More subtle/credible spurs to action come in the shape of immutable historical events. At some point during your campaign, the news arrives that the Mongol hordes are on the move. Eastern factions that don't adopt a war footing on hearing this are signing their own death warrants. In blood. Or possibly just ink.

Gunpowder is sprinkled into the game in a similar way. At a certain point you get news of its invention and exciting new branches appear on the already dense settlement structure tree.

Eagle-eyed readers might have noticed the absence of disparaging comments thus far. That's because this game is stunning - a classic amongst classics. Just about the only weaknesses we've found nestle in the battle segment.

The pause key remains your best friend in large engagements. Though the developer has slowed things down slightly we'd still kill for a speed selector that could decelerate time as well as accelerating it.

Then there are the control and AI issues that occasionally leave units, both friendly and enemy, dithering foolishly. There are times when every sword, spear and bow is desperately needed and yet, frustratingly, a portion of a formation refuses to get stuck in.

Above: Not everyone does exactly what they're told - are they scared?

There are times when discretion is the better part of valour, and panicky double-clicks appear to be ignored. Some of this behaviour is probably intentional - the side effects of an unusually subtle combat model that acknowledges fear and fatigue. Some, we suspect, reflects the fact that Total War's AI routines and control mechanics haven't advanced quite as quickly as its graphics and campaign engines.

No matter. When you're watching a battery of towering trebuchets hurl rotten beef over the walls into Gaza, or charging wedges of shiny lancers through the smashed gate at Cordoba, trust us, you are not fretting about the AI niggles. Medieval II is much, much bigger than that.

The latest shots of the visually stunning real-time strategy Medieval II: Total War give us a glimpse at the turn-based campaign of the game, which is just as important to the game as the epic, real-time battle scenes.

The turn-based portion of Medieval II is where you can develop your civilizationand make it stronger, creating a firmer base from which to launch offensives. For instance, it's here that you're given the option to turn fortresses into cities. This completely changes how that settlement works as it will then be able to produce sprawling markets, which can help the economy.

Once a city is established it can be upgraded, but only by increasing the population. Only then it will be more vulnerable to attack than a fortress, due to the more exposed buildings. So, in order to develop a successful civilization you must be certain that your borders are safe.

The game is shaping up well for its November 24, 2006 release - expect more on this one very soon.

August 4, 2006