Trash
Pointing and laughing.
Tags: Eurogamer; Polygon; The Creative Assembly; Total War: Rome II
With the September release date of Total War: Rome II slowly coming closer it appears that The Creative Assembly is gearing up the media campaign. First off is a new trailer that shows us a bit of the campaign map.
Then we have Polygon having a rather insightfull article on the new political system in Rome II.
Sounds like incline. Hope other factions will also have their own political infighting and systems to represent that. And finally Eurogamer has a preview with some attention to the newly revealed campaign map.
Interesting. Let's see how it all comes together.
With the September release date of Total War: Rome II slowly coming closer it appears that The Creative Assembly is gearing up the media campaign. First off is a new trailer that shows us a bit of the campaign map.
Then we have Polygon having a rather insightfull article on the new political system in Rome II.
The Creative Assembly's Total War: Rome 2 will introduce a detailed political system that will see players vie for power within their faction, according to studio communications manager, Al Bickham.
Where previous Total War games had players perform diplomacy with outside factions, Bickham told Polygon that Rome 2 will add an internal struggle to the campaign game by having players manage their relations within Rome.
"If you play as Rome, then you have to deal with the great families of Rome at the time as well as the senate," Bickham said. "The history was all about who was going to be the first man of Rome. After Caesar became a tyrant and crowned himself emperor, everybody else was like, this is how Rome is now, we're no longer a republic.
"It just created all these power struggles that were more about personal gain and personal power than running an entire culture and society in a way that was beneficial to the people."
"Politics is a way of providing more intrigue and more of an internal struggle."
According to Bickham, both the player and the houses in the senate have an agenda and everyone has a fluctuating level of political power. Players can increase their political power by having the right people in the senate working for them. But this carries its risks, because if other houses within the senate feel that the player is getting too big for his boots, they may raise their own armies and go to civil war. If such a situation occurs, a player's expansion across the world would have to be put on hold while they deal with the fact that Rome is now at war with Rome.
One way to balance the political power is through marriage. Marrying family members into other families can balance the sway of power in Rome. If the player marries into a lesser house, it reduces one house's political capital but increases the other's, having a slightly equalizing effect. "It's a way of saying to everybody, 'Hey, I'm not as big as you thought I was,'" Bickham said.
On top of managing Roman politics, players will still have to expand and conquer territories outside of Rome, perform diplomacy with non-Roman factions and fight in Total War's signature real-time battles.
"Politics is a way of providing more intrigue and more of an internal struggle," Bickham said. "Previous Total War games — Shogun 2 being a good example — you're the faction leader and that's it. But now that faction has teeth that may bite you."
Where previous Total War games had players perform diplomacy with outside factions, Bickham told Polygon that Rome 2 will add an internal struggle to the campaign game by having players manage their relations within Rome.
"If you play as Rome, then you have to deal with the great families of Rome at the time as well as the senate," Bickham said. "The history was all about who was going to be the first man of Rome. After Caesar became a tyrant and crowned himself emperor, everybody else was like, this is how Rome is now, we're no longer a republic.
"It just created all these power struggles that were more about personal gain and personal power than running an entire culture and society in a way that was beneficial to the people."
"Politics is a way of providing more intrigue and more of an internal struggle."
According to Bickham, both the player and the houses in the senate have an agenda and everyone has a fluctuating level of political power. Players can increase their political power by having the right people in the senate working for them. But this carries its risks, because if other houses within the senate feel that the player is getting too big for his boots, they may raise their own armies and go to civil war. If such a situation occurs, a player's expansion across the world would have to be put on hold while they deal with the fact that Rome is now at war with Rome.
One way to balance the political power is through marriage. Marrying family members into other families can balance the sway of power in Rome. If the player marries into a lesser house, it reduces one house's political capital but increases the other's, having a slightly equalizing effect. "It's a way of saying to everybody, 'Hey, I'm not as big as you thought I was,'" Bickham said.
On top of managing Roman politics, players will still have to expand and conquer territories outside of Rome, perform diplomacy with non-Roman factions and fight in Total War's signature real-time battles.
"Politics is a way of providing more intrigue and more of an internal struggle," Bickham said. "Previous Total War games — Shogun 2 being a good example — you're the faction leader and that's it. But now that faction has teeth that may bite you."
Sounds like incline. Hope other factions will also have their own political infighting and systems to represent that. And finally Eurogamer has a preview with some attention to the newly revealed campaign map.
And the same philosophy - tweaks to both macro- and micro-management - has been applied to the wider game, too. Switching from the battlefield to the campaign map - it covers the full scope of Europe, a chunk of North Africa, and stretches all the way over to Bactria (or northern Afghanistan) in the east - reveals a Total War game filled with elegant refinements. The number of regions has been dramatically boosted for Rome 2, which allows you a real sense of power as you accrue territory, but they're grouped into provinces to stop them from becoming unwieldy.
Capture the entirety of a province, then, and you're allowed to lay on a few perks and local bonuses in the form of the game's edict system, but you also get to benefit from a centralised capital region, which handles all the bureaucratic stuff while the surrounding territories focus on production. This should streamline management without diminishing scope, and it could hopefully quash the Total Siege end-game of some previous Total Wars, too.
Elsewhere, the new interfaces are still going in, but it should be easy to check the progress of your faction - Rome is divided into three rival families - and it's relatively simple to keep an eye on deeper systems such as how much political capital you have at any one time and how you can spend it. Amongst other things, political capital's handy for tackling the many problems that randomly pop up over the course of one turn to the next. Here comes Cicero, doing all manner of classical-era mic drops about you in the senate. How do you want to deal with him? Support him? Extort him? Discredit him? Or why not just have him assassinated?
Speaking of bloodshed, your armies are as much fun off the battlefield as they are on it. Alongside a series of stances you can select for them, ranging from a forced march to the ability to set ambushes, there's a new tradition system that focuses on building a legacy for your legions. In the new game, these are more than the sum of their parts - even if all your men are lost in battle, the legion itself will prevail.
It's that business of making war personal again: each legion has its own experience meter through which you can earn points to spend on traditions - one might give a bonus to heavy infantry units, say, or engineering expertise. There are ten possible traditions in total, and you can try and capture a broad range, or you could pick a limited handful and then spend points levelling those up to create specialists (Generals can also be levelled up and can both learn new skills and pick up new traits.)
Capture the entirety of a province, then, and you're allowed to lay on a few perks and local bonuses in the form of the game's edict system, but you also get to benefit from a centralised capital region, which handles all the bureaucratic stuff while the surrounding territories focus on production. This should streamline management without diminishing scope, and it could hopefully quash the Total Siege end-game of some previous Total Wars, too.
Elsewhere, the new interfaces are still going in, but it should be easy to check the progress of your faction - Rome is divided into three rival families - and it's relatively simple to keep an eye on deeper systems such as how much political capital you have at any one time and how you can spend it. Amongst other things, political capital's handy for tackling the many problems that randomly pop up over the course of one turn to the next. Here comes Cicero, doing all manner of classical-era mic drops about you in the senate. How do you want to deal with him? Support him? Extort him? Discredit him? Or why not just have him assassinated?
Speaking of bloodshed, your armies are as much fun off the battlefield as they are on it. Alongside a series of stances you can select for them, ranging from a forced march to the ability to set ambushes, there's a new tradition system that focuses on building a legacy for your legions. In the new game, these are more than the sum of their parts - even if all your men are lost in battle, the legion itself will prevail.
It's that business of making war personal again: each legion has its own experience meter through which you can earn points to spend on traditions - one might give a bonus to heavy infantry units, say, or engineering expertise. There are ten possible traditions in total, and you can try and capture a broad range, or you could pick a limited handful and then spend points levelling those up to create specialists (Generals can also be levelled up and can both learn new skills and pick up new traits.)
Interesting. Let's see how it all comes together.
