If you were a cynic, you could claim that real-time strategy games are all about building up resources, building up a base, and building up armies as quickly as possible to win. Fortunately, the PC has seen many excellent and highly innovative strategy games that break away from this structure, like Creative Assembly's Total War series, for instance. The series has previously focused on such real-world historical periods as feudal Japan and medieval Europe, and the next game in the series, Rome: Total War, will chronicle the rise of the Roman Empire. Like previous games in the series, Rome: Total War will have a strategic, turn-based mode that lets you plot dastardly political schemes, in addition to a real-time battle mode that will render thousands of troops onscreen at once. However, Rome will also feature an overhauled graphics engine that will include far more detailed units and cities, among other things. The developers at Creative Assembly have graciously agreed to share the details of this ambitious game's development in this series of designer diaries.

Let Slip the Dogs of War

Massive legions of devoted soldiers will battle in Rome: Total War.

Greetings! In this first episode of the Rome developer diaries, I'm going to attempt to give an overview of what we've been up to here in deepest, darkest Southwater, UK.

"All roads lead to Rome." Sigh. "Rome wasn't built in a day." Groan (swiftly followed by a thrown shoe). These phrases have been used enough times around Creative Assembly's spacious offices in rural England that the whole team responds to them with communal complaints. But, in fact, they contain more than a grain of truth. It's been a good three years since Managing Director Tim Ansell invited yours truly into his office for a brief chat, the gist of which went something like, "How would you like to start work on Rome: Total War? It's going to need all-new design and technology--with all the soldiers in 3D, motion-captured animations for the units, and a richer campaign map." In hindsight, it was a modest beginning for a project that would snowball into a team of more than 30 people spread across two continents, with 1.6 million lines of code and tens of thousands of art pieces. It's even spawned a popular TV series on the BBC.

Rome was intended from the beginning to reinvent the Total War series by updating the technology and introducing fresh concepts. We had many ambitious ideas--such as multiple campaigns, detailed cities and hinterlands, and a mission-driven senate, to name but a few--that vied with established concepts for inclusion in the final game. Some didn't make the cut as key elements from previous Total War games were fitted into place. The epic battles involving thousands of men still form the heart of the game, and there are still two environments to play in--one turn-based and one real-time. People who have played Medieval: Total War will find many familiar elements in Rome: Total War, but there is also much that is different. As they say in the whiskey industry, "It's all in the blend."

The campaign map has undergone the most drastic changes. The parchment map from the earlier games is gone, and it's been replaced by a top-down view of a more-realistic world that shows landscape features, such as heights, seas, mountain passes, and forests. Cities and generals with armies are placed here and there, and characters now walk across the map, striding about like giants of the ancient world. They can hide in forests, block passes, construct forts, spy on the enemy, and much more. Many new gameplay elements come from this. Provinces still cover varying areas across the world and mark the terrain governed from the provincial capital. If you conquer the city, you will own the province. With these features in place, we started to bring the world to life by gradually introducing summer and winter seasons, roads, ports, trade links across the sea, disasters, and climates.

Within this world we placed 21 factions that are divided into six cultures. No game about ancient Rome would be complete without the early Punic Wars between the Carthaginians and the Roman Republic or the later ones against the Germanic barbarians. The other factions are distributed across the world so that they capture, as much as possible, the flavor of the times. You'll find Britons, the Greek City States, the Seleucid Empire, and Egypt all in their familiar places. Each of the factions has been given an individual tech tree, and each can build around 30 buildings, some of which are shared within the cultures. The same also holds true for the units. There are more than 200 different troop types in the game--with approximately 20 unit types per faction--and many are unique. We've included elephants and chariots, mobile siege artillery (including onagers, ballistae, and scorpions), praetorian guards, hoplites, sacred band cavalry, and of course, several varieties of Roman legionary. Many of these units also have special abilities, such as the chariot's ability to scythe down men on either side as it charges, or the legionary's ability to form a "testudo" (or "turtle") formation. It's an incredibly rich historical tapestry, which ensures that as you play the campaigns, you will continue coming up against new units and new tactical problems.