The British are coming! Also, the French, Russians, and possibly the Ottomans are coming, to Empire: Total War for the PC, the 18th Century addition to the Total War franchise. Until they get here, however, we’ll have to settle for preview coverage, like the demonstration we got last week at the E3 Summit while visiting Sega’s booth. We saw all manner of seafaring slaughter in this upcoming RTS/Turn-Based Strategy from The Creative Assembly, and our impressions await you after the jump. Step lively!
Veterans of Total War will already be familiar with the series’ mix of turn-based elements, such as resource management and army placement, with real-time skirmish gameplay. New to Empire, however, is the ability to take the real-time battles into the water. The Creative Assembly has been hard at work putting together some impressive new visuals and game mechanics for naval warfare, and our demo consisted largely of watching two groups of boats sink each other in several different ways. Our demonstrators promised that the final game would contain better than fifty different factions to do battle with (9-12 of which would be playable), but in this case, the battle consisted of the indomitable British Empire versus those pesky colonials.
The battle opened with about half a dozen ships to a side, and we were shown how the interface would work while warring at sea. Obvious factors appeared, visually, for us to take note of: wind speed, the cannon range of our selected ship, and so on. Our navy consisted of a few different ship types, ranging from speedy, maneuverable little sloops all the way up to massive, cannon-packed first-rates. Creative Assembly had spared no effort to recreate these ships down to the smallest detail, telling us about their cooperation with the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich to study and model the various craft. The end result, we were told, is that the game’s wireframe rendering models were essentially one-to-one mirrors of the wooden models available to work with. The full game is set to contain 20-40 different ship types.
The level of detail that has gone into the ship models is only one of several impressive elements awaiting players in Empire — the number of meticulous details that Creative Assembly was promising made my head spin. A battle could be handled from a wide-angle view, but we were shown how the camera could be zoomed all the way in on any deck, showing each individual crew member, cannon, and individual line of rigging. These can be used, visually, to inspect how much damage a ship has taken, and its remaining offensive capabilities which, in turn, are detailed down to the most minute elements. Firing a cannonade is more than just being in range and rolling for damage; each individual cannonball is rendered and its position and trajectory tracked with in-game physics, and its resulting impact will affect your foes in any number of ways. Shots aimed high can kill crew members, shatter masts, and shred sails (especially if one is using grape shot or chain shot), while putting holes in the hull will directly affect how quickly a ship floods and sinks — depending on how close the hole is to the water.
Before long, a pitched battle was underway. Having sent our sloops in to harass the enemy’s larger frigates, we immobilized a comparably sized vessel and sent out the grappling hooks, pulling it close and boarding it. Again, we were shown the high level of detail, zooming in on the decks to watch the crewmen fight in motion-captured duels. In this way, we learned, capturing a ship rather than sinking it, we would be able to cripple the enemy’s morale, or even capture some of their advanced military technologies. As a demonstration, we were then shown some of those technologies: Steam-powered ships which were not beholden to the wind, and fire-launching “rocket” ships which could ignite an enemy deck from a long distance. Fire, we learned, is not a sailor’s friend; the wind soon spread the blaze to nearby vessels, one of which was sufficiently damaged as to let the fire quickly reach the powder magazine, splitting the entire ship in half with a massive explosion.
We weren’t given a chance to see the land-based warfare in action during this demo, but a few quick slides accompanied some more promises of what lay in store. The same level of detail would be available with individual troops displayed during battle, each acting slightly different from the other; “no automatons,” we were assured. Soldiers would take cover behind, and go inside, buildings on the battlefield, and we’d be able to zoom in and watch that, too. Adverse weather conditions would affect the battle, with rain ruining our gunpowder and making it difficult to march. And, similar to the cannonballs, each individual musketball would be handled with its own rendering and physics. I imagined my CPU catching fire from the effort and hoped my PC didn’t have a powder magazine. Strategy fans who demand more detail and control from their wargames should have plenty to keep them busy.
Empire: Total War is scheduled to launch in February, 2009.
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