Creative Assembly has announced that the next game in its Total War strategy wargame series will be a return to Rome, and will feature a "darker vision of war".

The Total War series has long been a favourite among strategy gamers for the way that it blends epic real-time battles with Risk-style strategy on a vast campaign map. The original Rome is often considered the highlight of the series, so a sequel has been much-requested by fans.

At the Rezzed videogames show in Brighton, Creative Assembly's lead designer James Russell detailed the history of the British studio and outlined what to expect from Rome's sequel.

"We really want players to make human-level decisions on the battlefield," he said. "Close up, we want the men to feel more human. We've got facial animations, emotional reactions between men. It's about a darker vision of war, we want the combat to feel darker, more visceral."

Russell outlined how the scope of the game would be expanded, too. For the first time in a Total War game, players will be able to use boats and units in a single battle, complete with ship-mounted artillery and soldiers jumping from landing craft. He showed off a scene from the siege of Carthage, with Roman troops storming up a beach under fire from arrows and artillery, like an ancient recreation of the D-Day landings.

Elsewhere, there'll be huge cities with multiple capture points and an expanded campaign map. Russell declined to be specific about exactly how it would be expanded, but said that it would stretch further east. He also expressed interest in releasing educational versions of the studio's games with lower age ratings.

"Rome 2 is the game that our playerbase really want us to make, and it's the game that we want to make," he said. As for dealing with other periods in history, he said: "We haven't rejected anything. We have a stack of ideas for different eras we want to cover. Some of those might be more challenging than others."

Total War: Rome 2 is expected to arrive in second half of 2013.