Rome: Total War

Wasn't built in a day... obviously

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Creative Assembly's march through the great periods of warfare in human history has reached the era of sandals and turtle-shaped defensive formations. After wowing the RTS world with its innovative take on small and large scale conflict in the seminal Shogun: Total War, the CA team stepped back a few centuries to continue the fight in the Medieval sequel. Rolling back the clock another few hundred years and we find ourselves in the times of the Roman Empire. This is the era of history when making war became a professional enterprise and tactics and strategy enhanced man's innate ability to beat the crap out of his fellow man with anything that happens to be lying around. Whether or not the Total War series will ever reach far enough back into history to entice us with Caveman: Total War remains to be seen, so for the time being let's slip on some sandals, grab our gladius and report for duty.

If you are unfamiliar with the format of the Total War series here's a quick briefing. The main game screen is a map of the area of the world under dispute. Broken into various regions populated by the assorted factions in the game, the main map screen is where the player makes their strategic decisions. It is here that you build up the different cities in your realm, decide where to invade next and which army group will get to do the slaying. If, at the end of the present turn, there's a battle to be fought play switches to the fully 3D tactical terrain map. Here things shift from the realm of Civilisation to the domain of C&C. Except with a lot more units. The tactical map gives the player the opportunity and tools to wage war on the grandest scale yet seen in a computer game. The rules of combat here are as close to those that would have been employed at the time as it is possible to simulate. Come the end of the battle it is back to the strategy map to address any further issues and planning, right up to the (hopefully successful) conclusion of the campaign.

Now Rome: TW does a few things differently from its predecessors. The first thing that is apparent is a visual overhaul of the map. Everything is drawn in 3D and while it remains impossible to rotate the map you can zoom in and out from the action to a considerable distance. The placement of towns and troops is now directly related to their placing on the battle maps. This small change is quite significant. Now you can place a defensive army in an advantageous position on the side of a mountain, or manoeuvre an army to ensure it attacks the enemy from the most favourable direction. This new integration not only allows you to gauge the lay of the land in any upcoming battle but it also allows players to set up defensive rings and to employ impassable terrain such as mountain ranges to their advantage. There's an info bar under each city which quickly gives the player an indication of how that city is performing, whether it is losing money or people, or if in fact all is going swell.

Right clicking on armies or cites will bring up the detailed information screens. And while there's a wealth of information to be had there's still too much swapping of windows and scrolling about for my liking. While it's now possible to say, list all of your special agents such as assassins and diplomats on one screen keeping track of each one is a case of r-clicking on each envoy to jump to their position and give them new orders. If the list is long you will have to scroll down, so the way that the game cannot remember your last selected envoy can make things unnecessarily fiddly. Controlling cities as well as armies and fleets are done in the same way, and while the choice to keep everything on a single screen is to be applauded the implementation is still somewhat lacking.

Most frustrating is the management of retinues. These are people who become attached to the leader units, either through a successful battle, the progress of time or as a benefit from the construction of Academies, the administrative buildings in the game. Most of these retinue figures are handy, giving say an extra point to a general's command ability, a bonus to trade or taxes or an increase in movement points or siege ability. There's a very impressive number of different retinues, yet while transferring warrior types to your generals and administrative types to your governors is initially an easy enough task, by the time the game reaches its midpoint the sheer numbers involved show the weakness is the entire army/city/envoy management system. It's an unfortunate thing, but the one area where Rome: TW could most benefit from is an improvement in the interfaces screens for both the strategy and tactical maps.

There have been a number of tweaks and changes to the way players control their armies once they have taken to the field of battle. In the old days, to know which unit was selected, you had to squint at the melee and try to determine whether a unit's banner was bobbing up and down. Now active units get a coloured triangle under each individual solider which makes it a lot easier to track how things are going in the middle of a big fight. Battles themselves are noticeably faster. Units all move with an extra spring in their step with fights coming to an end considerably faster then in previous Total War games. The grouping system is still not very intuitive, with the display of grouped units bearing no relation to the order in which they were created, so group one could be in the middle of groups two and three.

The biggest and most celebrated change is the move from monolithic masses of 2D sprites to groupings of individual 3D models. Battles are now so much more enthralling to watch, with cavalry charges flinging defenders up into the air, arrow showers piercing hapless foot soldiers in every plane of their body, siege weapons smash through massed soldiers like a fat man through a sweet shop queue. At the start of every fight your commander will deliver a rousing speech to his troops. While at first this is cinematically atmospheric it's unlikely you'll be listening to the pep talk after your twentieth battle. After a brief lull to position your forces on the battlefield combat commences. Here the influence of Hollywood really gets the opportunity to shine. Couple the rousing score with the varied and bruising sounds of hand-to-hand combat with the epic scale and splendour that the revamped graphics engine allows for and a smile is guaranteed to spread across the face of any gamer, RTS fan or not.