"It felt like a great, natural fit, it was just a matter of tuning the gameplay": How Shogun: Total War marched into new territory and laid the foundations for a strategy game empire

Winston Churchill might have once uttered the phrase, "History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it," but we can't help but think that it's better suited to the Total War series. After all, since its inception, it has handed the reins (or is that reigns?) of the most notable empires the world has known over to its players and said: "Here, you try."

It's a franchise that has carried Creative Assembly from a little-known work-for-hire studio developing sports titles for EA through to the big leagues, with a studio now its own battalion in size and replete with its own on-site motion-capture facility. Prior to the release of the very first Total War game, the small developer based in Horsham, England, didn't dream of such an epic scale.

Founded in 1987 by Tim Ansell before growing to a respectable small-sized team over the years, the studio had reached a point just before the turn of the millennium that it was ready to step out of the shadow of EA's sports games and take on a project of its own with the hopes of writing its own history.

Inception

"During the mid-to-late-'90s the PC market was full of Command & Conquer clones, which were selling well," explains Joss Adley of the early days of the game.

Joss joined as a UI designer for the game, but remains at Creative Assembly even now as a lead design artist. He's been through it all with Total War. "Tim saw an opportunity to start a new speculative RTS project in addition to the ongoing sport titles development."

This C&C inspiration might not sound so alien to a '90s PC gamer, considering how explosive the genre's boom had been thanks to the likes of Westwood and Blizzard. "The initial brief was a simple Command & Conquer-style RTS in a historical setting, underpinned by a rock-paper-scissors unit matchup: infantry, archers, cavalry," explains Joss, adding that the studio believed that the real historical setting would "make an interesting change from the standard sci-fi/fantasy fare" that was all too commonplace within the RTS genre.

While the real-time strategy genre was the starting point for its development, the references that were used were vast and varied. "Other games that we looked at for reference included Warhammer: Dark Omen by EA/Mindscape, as that too had battles moving units of (mostly) men around under unique banners," recalls Nick Tresadern, one of Shogun: Total War's artists and now project art director on the series.

"We also looked at an old Amiga game called Lords Of The Rising Sun which was based on 12th-century Japan and featured a campaign map that triggered battles when enemy armies met." Joss adds that the influences came from other places outside of videogames, too, such as the Shogun board game (which they had in the studio) and any sort of feudal Japanese medium.

"Actually our main inspiration came from other sources: Kurosawa movies (Seven Samurai, Ran), the Shogun television series, numerous history and military reference books, which all gave us insight into this rich and fascinating time period."

And for a time, this was Shogun: Total War's biggest innovation in a genre that was rife with it. Its unique historical setting – especially that of warring Japanese clans – meant some novel approaches to standard RTS mechanics, and paved the way for some fresh ideas.

"The setting helped as it gave us a bunch of references to springboard from, as we were able to use kendo and iaido as a basis for melee combat," says Nick, adding, "we hired an iaido practitioner for the mo-cap shoots for the cutscenes' samurai characters and hired a Japanese tea lady to act for the geisha."

This meant a lot more for the gameplay, too, since there was a breadth of new mechanics that could be brought over into the game from this very specific historical setting.

Ninja units, for example, could be hired to assassinate your opponents and make any ensuing battles much easier. "Picking a mono-culture with all factions sharing the same small unit pool required less content and provided a clear rock-paper-scissors dynamic," explains Joss, which was naturally a boon for Creative Assembly and its finite resources at the time.

"The Sengoku Jidai (the age of the country at war) was a turbulent period of near constant civil war and so translated well to a strategic wargame. It seemed like a really interesting time period in terms of rapid technological advancement, with Portuguese traders bringing firearms and spreading Christian doctrine."

Moving pieces

The initial first challenge for the team was the implementation of this grand strategy campaign map, where players could move units about a Risk-style map to tactically plan their combat, build up their defences, manage their income and ultimately initiate combat.

Likely inspired by the Shogun board game, this aspect of Total War was bringing a different spin on the typical RTS where strategic combat and economic management were usually woven together in the same space. "There was always the intention to have a turn-based strategic element underpinning the battles and providing context," says Joss, "and the Risk-style campaign gameplay remained a constant during development.

There was some finessing and tweaking of the supporting mechanics such as diplomacy and agent actions along the way. From a technical point of view, the biggest challenge was the overheads of loading from one game to another."

Joss adds that the team had dreamed of having a seamless loading transition from campaign map down into the reeds and the fields of the battlefield "with the camera swooping down on through a cloud layer and into the battlefield". While that dream didn't make it into the game, the two distinct but connected halves of the game complemented each other well.

"From a design perspective, once we had the two halves functional and feeding into each other it felt great, a natural fit, it was just a matter of tuning the gameplay."

Shogun: Total War was a game of two halves, then, and it was already feeling like it could bring something new to the table by blending those two different parts.

But development of the game began at a time when the hardware of gaming was changing, too, and PCs in particular were at the forefront. "Development of the game coincided with the release of the first wave of graphics cards," explains Joss, "and we saw the potential in using a 3D spline grid to create undulating terrain."

Originally Shogun had intended to have a top-down view just like any other RTS at the time, but in building 3D environments for the game a new opportunity appeared. "The lead coder, Anthony Taglione, was playing around with the camera settings one day," recalls Joss. "We realised that angling the camera towards the horizon not only looked cool but could offer new possibilities in terms of gameplay."

This shift in perspective gave the game more of a 'boots on the ground' sort of feeling – which no RTS game had done before – and ultimately shifted the tone of the combat section quite dramatically. This was seen as the 'Commander's view', and from there the attitude towards how the player interacted with the combat maps changed too.

New frontiers

This was a big alteration for the game since it really brought a whole new way of playing real-time strategy, one that felt more authentic and real. Given the historical setting, it was clear that Shogun: Total War was leaning more towards realism than bombastic entertainment.

"It opened up the possibility to bring in extra mechanics that we probably wouldn't have considered for, say, a sci-fi title," explains Joss, pointing to new combat elements such as morale, fatigue, hiding in cover, unit formations, routing and rallying, terrain advantage… "The list goes on," he says. "Many of these real-world mechanics translated surprisingly well to the battlefield gameplay."

But it was important to keep the authenticity in check, Shogun wouldn't have been such fun if it was ardent about its attitude towards the realism of feudal combat. "We were careful not to go too far with it," recalls Nick.

"On the Amiga there was a battle game called Waterloo, where playing as a general you would issue orders to your troops then would have to wait quite a while for them to go away to execute them and come back to tell you how it went and give you news that you'd then use to determine what your next orders for them were. This was considered too slow-paced and hardcore for what we wanted for Shogun."

And what more authenticity does such a game need than Sun Tsu's Art Of War, the famed book of military strategy?

Creative Assembly leveraged the thoughts and findings of the book as a means of implementing the game's AI strategy, helping to design and shape the way real military strategists of the era might have thought and the battles might have actually played out. In the combat phase, this was seen in the ways that the AI attempted to flank or ambush you, or to lure you into weaker terrain or disadvantages.

"Similarly, on the campaign side the enemy AI had an annoying tendency to retreat and defend where you were strongest and attack where your regions were undefended," reveals Joss. Some of the additions from the Art Of War were even more subtle than that, even, as Nick recalls, "If an army moved into a forest to hide, it would sometimes cause a flock of birds to be disturbed and fly out of the forest, and if the other player spotted those birds leaving a forest then that'd be a hint that an enemy unit is lying in wait in there.

"That comes from the Sun Tzu quote, 'The rising of birds in their flight is the sign of an ambuscade. Startled beasts indicate that a sudden attack is coming.'"

Land ahoy

Shogun: Total War had expanded over the course of its development as a result of all these new additions, starting out as an extra little aside for the studio but ending up as a fairly major project that even got the backing from long-time partner Electronic Arts.

"We managed to get covers and six-to-eight-page articles in a few of the popular gaming magazines," says Nick, "which suggested that for what was originally to be just a niche game it was starting to show potential for a wider audience."

And it did: releasing in June 2000 for Windows, Shogun: Total War sold in the hundreds of thousands, and was very well-regarded in the press and by its players.

While it didn't dominate the charts like many of its predecessors did, Shogun: Total War was innovative, unique and compelling – it was something that helped to define what Creative Assembly was and what the team could do.

"We started with a core dev team of seven, which had expanded to 15-20 people by the latter half of the project, still a laughably small amount by today's standards," says Joss, who continues to work on the franchise in Total War: Medieval 3.

"The success of Shogun was a pivotal point for Creative Assembly in that we now had a mandate to create not just one but a series of sequels, using the first title as a template. It's been a privilege to have been involved with Total War from day one, and to have been a part of its evolution over the years. Also it is incredibly rewarding to see those gameplay pillars we set all those years ago still holding strong today."

Can't wait for Total War: Medieval 3? Check out the best strategy games to play in the meantime.