Stainless Steel Studios has previously worked on sprawling real-time strategy games that have covered much of human history. The company's latest game isn't quite so sprawling, but it's perhaps even more ambitious. Rise & Fall: Civilizations at War is set in the ancient world, and you'll assume the role of some of the greatest leaders in history as you attempt to carve out an empire. Rise & Fall is by no means a traditional real-time strategy game, and it will introduce several innovative new features to the genre. The screenshots of the game are graphically stunning, and we can't wait to check it out ourselves. For now, we caught up with Rick Goodman, the president and founder of Stainless Steel Studios, and he filled us in on what the game's about.

Achilles is just one of the heroes that you can take control of in the game. We hear he's a heel.

GameSpot: Tell us about the game's setting, time period, and civilizations.

Rick Goodman: Rise & Fall: Civilizations at War is an epic, historical real-time strategy game that lets you command four of the ancient world's mightiest empires: Persia, Greece, Rome, and Egypt. During the game's massive battles, you'll command thousands of soldiers and formations, direct large-scale sieges against enemy cities, and command a navy capable of ramming and boarding enemy ships.

As your empire expands, you control every aspect of its growth. You collect the resources required to fuel your war effort, you build all of the buildings, walls, soldiers, and siege equipment. And everything happens in real time, including the exploration of the maps and the fast-paced, larger-than-life battles.

The truly innovative thing about Rise & Fall is hero command, which will be the key to your civilization's success. A powerful, heroic leader like Julius Caesar, Alexander the Great, or Ramses the Great will perform incredible feats on the battlefield. At key, strategic moments in the game, you will leap into action and take personal control of your hero and cut a swath of destruction across the battlefield.

Rise & Fall's single-player game is divided into two full-length, story-driven adventures that take you all over the ancient world. The first chronicles Alexander the Great as he ascends to the Macedonian throne and wages war against his bitter enemies, the Persians. His campaign begins in Greece and then moves to Asia Minor, where you will relive some of Alexander's most famous battles, such as the Battle at Gaugamela and the Siege of Tyre.

The second campaign follows Cleopatra as she struggles to defeat Roman invaders, led by Octavian, who have conquered the northern regions of Egypt. Accompanied by Mark Antony, Cleopatra must fight her way down the Nile and retake Memphis, Cairo, and Alexandria. Although the two campaigns appear to be unrelated, Cleopatra was a direct descendant of Alexander through her Ptolemaic lineage, so there is a direct connection between the two characters and campaigns.

In multiplayer, there will be four playable civilizations--Persia, Greece, Rome, and Egypt. We are carefully balancing each civilization so that it will have its own strengths and weaknesses. The Persians, for example, will be able to field a large army, but their units are a little weaker than the other civilizations.

GS: Stainless Steel has previously worked on games that have attempted to cover all of human history; why did the team decide to focus on the ancient world?

RG: Gamers' tastes have changed over the past few years. Today they want a movielike experience, similar to recent cinematic epics like Troy or Gladiator, and that means giving gamers stunning graphics and a highly detailed and immersive world. When you're covering a huge slice of time, it's very hard to give any one of the slices the kind of in-depth visual treatment that it deserves and still match the scale of detail and immersiveness that consumers now expect in games.

With Rise & Fall, we didn't want to make those kinds of compromises, so we placed all of our focus and energy on bringing this ancient world to life and making the players truly feel like they're leading their forces into battle as Alexander the Great, Cleopatra, or Achilles. The result is an experience that places you directly in the heart of the ancient world's greatest battles.

GS: From the huge battle sequences we've seen so far, we know that battles will clearly play an important role in the game. Can you give us an overview of how battles will work? Will players be scrambling to amass enough resources to build the biggest army, and then guiding groups of soldiers into the fray, or will they be leading large companies of units with central control?

RG: One of the hallmarks of a Stainless Steel Studios' game has always been massive, earth-shattering battles. And Rise & Fall will continue in that tradition. The battles that you'll fight aren't little skirmishes without consequence--they're full-blown battles that'll pit the armies of the ancient world's mightiest empires against each other. There will be formations of units simultaneously fighting to the death, catapults raining down death from afar, and war elephants trampling enemies underfoot.

Ancient Egypt is in the game, and you can fight like an Egyptian.

Battlefield formations let you group your soldiers into a single command, creating a very easy-to-control formation. All of the soldiers within the formation are still individual units--and they'll still take damage on an individual level--but they move and fight as a cohesive unit. This makes them a devastating fighting force.

In fact, we've even developed a special "army intelligence" as a part of the units' AI, which ensures that all your units know where your other units are located and what they're doing. So if you select several formations of different unit types, they'll automatically line up properly and attack in a unified manner.