I’m so happy to hear this. I’m a big fan of the Total War series (you may have noticed that I’m more forgiving of its foibles than most players are), and Rome was my introduction to it.
Interesting that they seem to be trying to combine land and sea battles. Maybe they want to get some experience implementing naval landing operations before they attempt a World War II Total War.
If they increase the land area especially as others mentioned the amount of built-up area in the fighting screens, that’ll also be good work toward a WW2 Total War. I think that tactically it’d be pretty easy (all you’d have to do is allow artillery strikes and air support from a strategic square or so away), but strategically it’d be hard to allow blitzkriegs while at the same time allowing counter defenses.
New screens over at Rock,Paper,Shotgun: Up Their Sleevies - Total War: Rome II Screens | Rock Paper Shotgun
Man, this game looks EPIC!
Yeah, I’m totally looking forward to this one. I kind of figured it would be Rome next. Hopefully the Total Realism team will be able to get it together and do a mod for the new game, but even the plain vanilla game looks good so far, and sounds like it’s going to be a hell of a lot of fun to play.
I wonder if they’re planning to do the Julii/Brutii/Scipii division again. I can see why they did it, but I’d rather be able to play as a united Rome right off the bat.
I admit - I’d rather go semi the other-way entirely.
Instead of playing a single, mighty unified empire, you’d play one family (as before). You build up some alliances, but the core of your mini-empire is trying to grab control of subsections of counties. (provinces. whatever.) Sure, you have troops and use them, but you’re trying principally to build up your power base so you can take over the empire, peacefully or otherwise, from within. At the start, you couldn’t even control a whole province or get taxes from it: you’d have to take missions, build up economic alliances and strongpoints, and then eventually declare yourself dictator.
War would be something relatively quick compared to previous games. In the early game you wouldn’t even be able to afford a standing army (no taxes to pay for them). Instead, you’d have to save up, grab troops when you need them, and then disband them as soon as you could. In the meantime, you would hope to grab some more economic influence and wartime glory. If you wanted to keep a alrge army in the field for a while, you’d probably want to despoil a lot of territory…
…like, I don’t know… Gaul might be a good choice. 
This would also be a neat bit of self-balancing to challenge the player. If the Empire has given you a military mission, you’ll probably get an army to use and can stack any troops you have as well. So the game can help out strggling players with a couple slowballs. On the other hand, if you try to expand you own power base, it can give you some tougher missions to occupy your time (as “The suspicious Senate is keeping you occupied/wants you to fail/whatever”. And of course, any military actions for yourself will be entirely on your own, whereas the enemy has taxes to pay for their own ongoing defense and can probably outlast you. So you have to strike really hard and fast to bring them to their knees, possibly with an undermanned and underequipped force, and even then you probably aren’t going to conquer a whole state.
In concept, you’d move up in rank. First you’d be a private citizen with a small powerbase. Then you’d get some lower ranking Roman titles and the chance to buy popularity. Eventually you’d want to become a Senator and form alliances with the power players in the Republic. Then you’d hopefully become Consul, and then ProConsul governor of a province or get a major military command. And then you might just be strong enough to take on the other factions of Rome and win.
Or at least, that’s the crazy dream I have. Call it Europa Romesalis: Total War.
Funny, I’ve been trying out Crusader Kings II the past couple of days, and I can see the parallels in your post.
I’m reminded of a common refrain I saw on the WotC D&D forums back when I followed them. From time to time someone would come up with a radical suggestion to improve/alter the game system and start a thread with a long OP detailing it. A common response was/is: “That’s a good idea for a hypothetical game system, but it’s not D&D.”
I feel the same way about your idea. Paradox could make it into a fine game, but it’s not Total War.
Reading through some posts on the TW forums I came across an idea I like a lot.
Factions with different victory conditions.
Right now the only was you lose a total war game is if/when the enemy wipes you out. It’s the only way the enemy AI wins, hence the dev’s cop out in Shogun 2 of having all factions join against you after a certain point in the game. It would be amazing if instead of this single goal, various factions had their own set of goals to win. The Greeks might have to own certain territory and research a particular technology. The carthaganians might need to establish a certain amount of trade and built a particular structure, etc.
It would be like bringing a little bit of civ V to the mix. It certainly would make for a more interesting grand strategy game, IMHO.
Meh, I knew that going in. The one real criticism I’ve ever had against the TW series is that, no matter how they do it, Empire management just seems bland. Sure, there’s all kinds of stuff to build and it’s fun to improve your cities. But I never really get any thrill out of it no matter what I do. If the economic and diplomatic aspects fo the game were as involving as the military, well..
Hmm… they should never attempt to do that. I wouldn’t be able to leave home again. Ever.
Heh, I’ve never read those boards, or many d+d boards at all for that matter, but I felt the exact same way about a lot of the changes in 4th Edition. Many of them were good changes. Many of them were even improvements to the existing system. But the result is not D+D. ETA: about the only coutnerexample I can think of is the increased HP at first level. Some may think differently than me, but having 1st level guys get whacked by blowing on them too hard isn’t my idea of fun, and it doesn’t turn it into a different RPG entirely.
New trailer featuring some gameplay (supposedly - looks scripted to me).
But still, so awesome!
Doesn’t that harken back to the original MTW? Faction-specific non-world conquest victory conditions were one of the design choices I liked best about that game. I greatly lamented when it was dropped in later iterations. Glad to here they are thinking about bringing that back.
An exclusive 9 minute gameplay walkthrough has being posted up on Gamespot!
It’s the battle of Carthage that some of the media got to play at E3 or PAX, one of those shows.
That looks pretty good, especially for a pre-Alpha version. I’m pretty psyked about this one, even though it’s not going to be out until around this time next year. 
I don’t think the ancient world had many amphibious assaults that were resisted on the beaches. But historical nitpickery aside, it certainly looks pretty cool.
Yeah, but they could accomplish that with an expansion to Empire:TW. Up through about 1890 or so (machine gun, indirect fire artillery), the only major differences would be range and rate of fire vs. the muskets and smoothbores of 1790’s era Empire:TW.
All a Civil War game would really need would be a dig-in action, and adjusted weapon accuracies and range, along with Civil War uniforms.
Yeah I think this franchise is going to forever be limited to Rome, Shogun, Medieval, and Empire/early 19th century warfare.
Which I’m fine with, I mean call of Duty manages yearly releases without such a broad spectrum, right?
Hmmm… Total War: Neanderthal!
What we are likely to see though, I think, is an off-shoot of the series that focuses on fantasy settings. I know I’d love to see a LOTR or Game of Thrones version of this game! 
There’s lots of variation in those themes, though. And I wouldn’t count CA out - there’s dozens of good warfare locations yet. (I still want China.)
That video looks pretty sweet. Sieges were one of the weakest parts of Total War series. Hopefully this time they’ll have gotten it right.
Fall of the Samurai showed it’s possible to do the American Civil War using the Total War engine. I don’t know if we’ll ever see that, though, since the ACW doesn’t quite fit in with Total War’s multi-faction strategic approach.
Honestly, that was a little cheesy. Hopefully they won’t give up too much on historical accuracy? I feel like that is a big part of what makes Total War games fun.