Trailer at www.totalwar.com
First look from IGN here: PC Games, Wikis, Cheats, Walkthroughs, News, Reviews & Videos - IGN
Only thing that remains to say is:
Fuck yeah!
Man, I’m way more excited about this than Starcraft 2. Let’s just hope they don’t fuck it up. 
They could almost literally release the same game with upgraded graphics and have it a winner.
Enemy AI will be released as an expansion in 2015.
I’ve only been playing the series since Rome, but I’m very eager to see what they’ll do with this game. The Creative Assembly has been getting better and better over the years. Even Empire to Napoleon was a big step forward.
They haven’t been getting better, they’ve been getting worse. The strategic AI has been nonexistent in their games and the tactical depth of the battles is laughable. The only thing they’ve shown themselves to be capable of making is a pretty-looking battle simulator.
Man, did the founder of CA piss in your cornflakes or something? Did he take a combat-dump in your yoghurt? Seriously?
The strategic AI isn’t brilliant and the tactical depths of the battles aren’t quite up to realism yet. But they’re still miles and miles ahead of everyone else.
Yes, they did, because CA is a crap company that over-promises and under-delivers. Their games are glorified betas, they use their purchasers to do their playtesting for them, and they drag their feet on patches. The tactical depth of the combat hasn’t progressed much farther than the EA sports games that they got their start on. The Total War series has been all flash with little substance. If you’re looking for graphically beautiful renderings of battle with a bunch of corpses you can admire afterwards, then Total War is the only game in town, but that’s all you’re going to get out of it.
Well, I don’t feel as strongly about it as Moidalize , but I quit buying the Total War games when I realized that my dog could beat the AI on even it’s most advanced levels.
I know, I know. Current game AI’s can never even come close to a human opponent. I normally don’t have a problem with that. But TW’s AI is inept to the point of seeming like an afterthought. Damn shame too, as I truly love games like this.
Bah, I wanted Rome 2. Empire was pretty disappointing, I’ll definitely wait for some reviews before having a proper look at this one. At least they’ll have got rid of boring gunpowder.
Damn it I wish they would have gone with Rome II.
That being said I agree with the overall sentiment on the AI. On the overland map it’s ok, but not yet up to what I’d like, but on the battle maps it’s terrible. Utterly incompetent and terribly buggy.
The last time I played Empire I had the enemy line up canons just BEHIND a hill. Every time they fired the canons, the payload slammed into the hill and bounced high up into the sky, to land severla hundred feet from my walls. The AI never corrected.
Frankly, I’m sick of fighting over Europe. I’m glad to see Shogun II, just for the chance to fight in some new geography.
Although I’d really have preferred China.
Me too. One of the problems with the original Shogun TW was that the geography of Japan as modeled, including the Risk-style map, imposed a real straighjacket on strategic movement. Bottling up opponents was trivially easy. China, in addition to being novel, would eliminate that ( potential ) issue.
I agree CA games tend to be horribly buggy out of the box and I also agree that unlike Paradox Studios, which has similar release bug issues, CA’s patch support is often dilatory ( Paradox on the other hand is superb in the area of post-release patching ). But I will disagree they’ve been getting steadily worse. Empire’s AI, even release AI, was certainly at least a little superior to either Rome or MTW II’s IME.
IMHO MTW I was probably the apex of the series so far. But let’s face it - many people are just not up to multi-hour battles. Heck, even I found it annoying at times. It wasn’t a game you could fire up for even an hour and make any real headway. It pretty much demanded an evening of committment and I would think that really limited the audience.
But I’m still looking forward to this one. The tactical simulations, even if too easy ( and I’m not one to demand super-challenging games in general - the TW’s are probably the only series I’ve ever played on VH ), still engage me and provide real entertainment. And who doesn’t love the Sengoku Jidai :)?
Damn do I wish I had a computer that could run this game. There aren’t many games I wish I had a PC for, but occasionally an RTS comes along that makes me miss owning a non-macbook
WHile i might not totally agree with Koidalize… yeah, he’s pretty much right across the board. For me, though, what really killed Rome and Medeival 2 was the interminable seige crap, as well as the pain of managing a million little special;ty units. Seiges were done a lot differently from what they portray - and a lot less common. Since the AI pretty much just sits behind walls, I’ve never finished a game. It gets plain boring, and I hate sitting there fighting the same assault fifty times. You can just starve them out, but then they charge your forces at the last turn and die pointlessly while damaging your good units. The game needs ways to pull the enemy out of their fortresses.
Then there’s the mini-units, like spies and diplomats. They’re a huge pain, because you can’t get that many without a lot of cost, they walk slowly . it can take a decade to send a damn envoy to a faraway nation. I want to have a stable of units I can dispatch on missions, not actual little guys on the worldmap.
The mod community is no help, because most of them aim to build in even more tedious micromanagment into the game.
Well, obviously I’m thrilled by the announcement (I actually came into the forum to start a thread and found one already going). I must be the only 'doper who actually loved Empire and the Napoleon expansion (and MTWII, Rome, MTWI and Shogun). I don’t know what people expect from a game like this. AI to be brilliant? Well, if it’s not up to your brilliance, drop in a human and see how that goes.
‘Fun’ is obviously completely subjective. A lot of games I’ve seen being gassed about on this board I’ve run out to get and found them to be pretty bad, or boring, or both. Others that get ragged on (such as Fallout 3) I completely enjoy. The Total War series, to date, has certainly been among my favorite games. Shogun II? While I’d have preferred they did something new (such as the China suggestion), I’m still looking forward to the thing nearly as much as I’m anticipating Civ V.
Banzai! 
-XT
I may pick this up. I wasn’t too impressed with Empire, played the crap out of MTWII and played a lot of Rome: Total Realism.
I think my main issue was Empire always played slow on my system despite it being practically new. The battles played fine, but I didn’t want to wait an minute/30 seconds each turn.
One of the big features they added to Napolean was apparently that a player could sign up to be the enemy force in someone else’s campaign - so it was like a quick battle to that player, and the guy playing the campaign would get human challengers instead of AI. How did that work out? It sounded like a great, clever system - no idea how the implementation or participation went.
It works pretty well, though obviously the enemy ‘AI’ varies greatly. 
I think you need a decent internet connection (which I have), as well as the hardware (which I also have) to enjoy the drop in battles, but they are pretty quick to set up (almost as quick as the set up to fight the computer), and I’ve rarely had a problem finding someone to fight.
-XT
How often, in doing these drop-in battles, do you actually get an army worth using? It seems like when I’m in a campaign, in three-quarters of the battles I fight I radically outclass the enemy force. I’d worry that in dropping in I’d typically be taking an army with no real chance of victory.
Generally I don’t accept others battles, but only request them…and I only do so when it’s going to be a battle. If I’m taking a city with a full army against a couple of militia units I don’t request a drop in battle. But if I’m going up against the enemies main field force then that’s when it’s fun to request a drop in to command the enemy army.
-XT