For the next major entry in Creative Assembly’s Total Wars series, not all the changes are going to be related to land battles . Sure, regions of land can be captured without having to take over cities and there’ll be new and modified systems for upgrading units and AI behavior, but quite a bit will shift with the naval portion of the game as well, making it a more significant part of play.

In Rome 2 ships will be active participants in coastal land battles. Ships will actually land at beaches so soldiers can disembark, and can be outfitted with siege equipment to knock down city walls. “That’s a really big deal for us,” said lead designer James Russell. “You’ve got to choose where to land, it creates some interesting defensive points. Does the defender attack you while you’re landing? There’s all sorts of interesting gameplay choices there.”A naval unit will also consist of multiple ships instead of just one. “Because ancient world battles weren’t fought with eight ships, they were fought with larger fleets, so you’re going to have several ships in each unit. That really changes the gameplay. It makes them feel a little bit more like land battles in terms of being able to block. You have all these spatial dynamics going on like your land battles. All these ships are generally oar-driven, so what that means is you can turn on the spot, it means the attack is more focused on boarding and ramming attacking, although you still have ranged attacks.”Creative Assembly is currently working on fine-tuning the battle system, and even in discussions about whether or not to include unique gameplay during boarding sequences as crew hop across to enemy vessels. “We’re experimenting with that kind of thing,” said Russell. “You get so much variety on land it’s just mind-boggling. You’ve got hundreds and hundreds of units on land. What we want to do with the ships is, we want to create some different looks and feels with the ships. Different factions will have different colorings. We want to bring out the spectacle of these grand fleets.”The speed of ship battles is another aspect Creative Assembly is still experimenting with, because ship speed needs to make sense when the vessels are included in the same battle space as soldiers on land. “We have to engineer that gameplay right, especially because of combined battles. It means that the pace has to work, be analogous, land and sea. It’s still slower speed compared to cavalry charges, but it’s still fast enough to be exciting. In terms of emotion, what we need to deliver in battles is adrenaline.”Not only will that lead to a different style of sea battle, but also how you assess threats on the campaign map. “Navies can capture territory. That means a navy can capture a port. In Fall of the Samurai, we made navies able to attack armies at range, so you did have to worry about navies because they could impact what’s going on on land, but now navies have so much more important. There are still tons of features to implement. Lots of it is working in the game, lots of it is not. It’s still very much at the coal face of construction. But we want to make sure that every battle is fun. We don’t want stalemate battle types.”Total War: Rome 2 is currently scheduled to be finished up sometime in late 2013. So far, it’s one of the most promising strategy titles in development