Creative Assembly's Shogun: Total War made real-time strategy game fans everywhere sit up and take notice when it was released in 2000. Shogun did something totally unique: It let players fight huge battles with armies of thousands of individual samurai over the course of a century-long struggle in ancient Japan. Until then, no one had ever attempted to create as ambitious a game with that kind of scale, and no one had done so since. That is, until Creative Assembly decided to expand on Shogun with its next game, Medieval: Total War, a game that will pack 400 years of European war history into a colorful, accessible, and very good-looking real-time strategy game. Fortunately for us, the developer was kind enough to pay us a visit with the latest version of the game, and judging from what we've seen, Medieval will absolutely, positively live up to the "Total War" moniker.

It's called "Total War" for a reason.

Shogun let you fight large, real-time battles between a few thousand troops. Medieval will let you have gigantic battles between 16 different companies of different soldiers on the field at one time--up to 15,000 individual units on the same battlefield simultaneously. And this isn't some far-off, theoretical plan for the game either. We watched these enormous battles firsthand--massive melees between thousands upon thousands of troops in real time. According to the developers, Medieval will actually have about four times the level of unit detail as in Shogun, and it indeed looks this way. Unlike Shogun, in which soldiers looked like simple but functional 3D characters, in Medieval, individual units wear colored tabards that clearly indicate which side they're on and also wear detailed armor suited to their home nation. The game has 12 playable factions in all, including countries in Eastern and Western Europe, the Middle East, and the Mongol horde from Shogun: Warlord Edition. The game's four-part soundtrack will actually correspond to these four regions, though just like in Shogun, the soundtrack will be dynamic and will change with the tide of battle. What's more, Medieval's battles will take place on huge battlefields that will be up to four times the size of those in Shogun, and like Shogun, Medieval won't have the artificial constraint of fog of war--if you can't see an enemy company, it's because that group is hiding within a ravine or behind a hill on the game's fully 3D terrain, not because you haven't explored that area yet.

With that in mind, Medieval isn't just going to be a bigger game with bigger armies, bigger maps, and bigger battles. Though the game will have about 100 different unit types, including archers, knights, spearmen, crossbowmen, swordsmen, and many, many more, all of these units will fight differently in battle. Medieval will have all-new tactical considerations, such as the increased defensive strength of densely packed formations of pikemen to meet charges and the new ability of cavalry to actually smash right through infantry squads and disrupt their formations while charging. Units will also be more responsive in disengaging orders so that if a particular skirmish is going badly, you won't have to sit there and wait for it to resolve--for example, we watched an overwhelmed cavalry regiment, which was quickly called back to attention and ordered to regroup.

Siege engines can be powerful weapons...and dangerous liabilities.

And every unit will have to be wary of artillery, especially cannons, whose powerful fire can scatter the ranks of most mounted and infantry soldiers. Cannonballs will not only smash through footmen but, as we saw firsthand, also actually kick up a cloud of dust and bounce through enemy ranks, taking down even more troops, and just as in the real battles of the Middle Ages, they'll become more accurate the longer they remain in place while firing on a single target. In other words, foolish warlords who attempt to cower in one place behind rows of halberdiers will receive a very rude awakening from the business end of their enemies' cannons, which will dash most infantry and cavalry units to pieces. Fortunately, cannons themselves are by no means an easy, no-risk means of doing battle, since they're extremely expensive to build and very slow to move--plus, they require lots of troops to man them and even more to sustain a decent rate of fire. And just like in the Middle Ages, cannons can and will misfire, explode, and take their cannoneers with them.