It might look like another yet another military strategy game at first glance, but Total War: Arena is a big departure for Creative Assembly. The Total War series is known for its deep and lengthy play sessions, its spectacular-looking but resource-intensive battles, and a, um, well...let's just say a level of ambition that inevitably results in an initial bugginess that needs to be patched away over the first few months post-release.

A completely new approach is required when you transpose the Total War formula into a 10v10 free-to-play multiplayer game. Grand lengthy strategies are gone in favor of a tight focus on battles. Resource-intensive graphics no longer fly, as the primary goal of a free-to-play title is to reach the widest possible audience. And losing a competitive game because of a bug or some other bit of jankiness is the fastest way to get a player to log off and invest their time in a different free-to-play game.

So the team at Creative Assembly have to approach Total War: Arena in a way that they haven’t approached developing a Total War game before.

Managing servers and tweaking the tech specs

Arena adopts the World of Tanks model. It starts you out with relatively simple troops, three units that you can take into battle, and then over time you purchase more advanced units with more advanced equipment, and are matched against people with similarly elite units.

"For traditional Total War titles, the battle model would update at 10Hz. We’ve reduced that to 5Hz to really pull a lot of CPU performance."

Getting Arena working with twenty players all bringing several large units to play, was a new type of headache for a team.“Previous Total War games were purely peer-to-peer multiplayer games,” explains Jan Van Der Crabber, the Live Operations Manager on Arena. "So if one computer was lagging in a match, all the others would lag to stay in synch. Now, if you have 10v10 across multiple countries and streams and so on, it’s extremely likely that someone is going to lag."

Creative Assembly had to build a robust relay server to accommodate all of this. "It acts like a proxy server," says Van Der Crabber. "It receives all the commands from all the players, and then sends them on to all the other players. So if one player lags, the server will continue on at a normal rate, and that player will lag but no one else will.”

This is one of the relatively big changes that the Arena team have had to make to a standardized practice in a series that’s nine games deep and a decade and a half old. And it’s far from the only one.

“For traditional Total War titles, the battle model would update at 10Hz,” Van Der Crabben continues. “We’ve reduced that to 5Hz to really pull a lot of CPU performance. It’s barely noticeable when you’re playing; you’ll only notice it if you’re really looking for it.”

Slimming down for battle, and ruthlessly executing exploits

Cutting down on the resources needed for the game heavily influences how the team develops their art assets, which have typically been one of the most impressive aspects of a Total War game. Instead of adding as much detail as possible, here Van Der Crabben and his team have to do the opposite.

“A lot of times, junior artists would produce buildings with tons of details on a part of the building that you’d never see," he explains. "We’ve put so much emphasis on optimizing the art assets to run on lower end PCs,and really figuring out how to get the most out of the art. That's something the whole company has benefited from.”

And those lessons aren’t purely about optimization. As Total War: Arena moves through its alpha and into open beta, this engine that has driven the battles for fifteen years is starting to be put under more and more pressure from a direction that it hasn’t experienced before.

The new demands on the engine are highlighting gameplay problems that haven’t previously been an issue. With a competitive focus, "cheesy" tactics that aren’t so much of a problem in a single-player game become glaring flaws that have to be addressed.

“One thing we’ve done is fix so-called ‘pull through’.” Van Der Crabben tells me. “That's something that the Total War community has been complaining about for a while. Basically, it is when you have two units engaging, and one of the players repeatedly clicks a movement order behind that enemy unit, his unit will wiggle through, take some damage, but be able to get through to the other side. Which means that if one player has made a defensive line at a choke point, the other could just run through with some losses, but very often it’s worth it.’

“With classic Total War there’s more of a single-player focus, so this kind of behavior isn’t as important--the computer isn’t going to do that," he says. "In Arena, it’s become very important, so we decided that it was worth a very significant investment of time. After we fixed it, the other teams at Creative Assembly were very interested in how we did it.”