Massive preview of the game including the holy grail: battle screenshots.
The first one is of two sizeable armies engaging each other across a field with a low wall and scattered trees and bushes. It looks to be about 15 units a side with cav and horse drawn artillery complementing the suitably chunky looking infantry formations of 120-140 soldiers.
There's billowy smoke, of varying thickness, infront of many of the infantry units. The different levels of dissipation looks great. The whole thing has a painting like look to it and there seems to be a DoF effect in the distance which aids this. Everything seems well proportioned (no giant trees etc.) and there's none of the garishness in the colours that both RTW and M2 suffered from. There don't seem to be many casualties yet but the gaps in lines with a couple of fallen bodies look fantastic.
The blurb at the side of the picture says "With walls, buildings and hedges now providing proper cover, land battles become taxing tactical tests."

Info from text (some we already know but i'll list it anyway):
"Most of the World as our military, economic and political playgroud" (hint on size of campaign map?)
"New technology is rolled out automatically" (no need to retrain units after tech advances)
Examples of tech improvements: more efficient bayonets (plug bayonets will stop your soldier from firing and stabbing), better ammunition, more reliable muskets (so muskets will fail?)
You can reform your Gov to research more effectively. Will effect the "type of military material you can develop"
Three types of Gov.
Each faction has the potential to build between 10 and 20 types of ship.
if you get your research right you'll be able to field tech more advanced than that which historically appeared in the time frame eg.steam powered vessels
Suggestion that Infantry will be equipped with grenades
"There's still a lot of visceral melee going on. It gives the player a choice: whether to hang back and fire or charge in"
Set up inside buildings and behind walls.
Dragoons mount and remount
One member of team dedicated to making Generals "more cunning"
"You absolutely can still charge around turning the map your colour. What we've tried to do, though, is up the challenge and provide options"
Depending on which nation you choose you'll have very different starting objectives. (sounds a lot more like the glorious acheivements of MTW than the take x provinces in M2)
Regions contain towns and it sounds like they hold the special buildings.
Possible to sabotage docks and farms.
harder to hold onto a city than before. The example given is English (British surely) taking Paris.
Generals no longer drawn from family tree and are recruited (although their numbers are limited). Their retinues and traits will be limited and less confusing
No campaign mapscreenies until summer
they've tried to reduce the time spent on tax fiddling and army building.
"We've done a lot to diplomacy. It'll be clearer to understand how a faction feels about you, and why. The factions will seem more human. You'll understand their decisions"
Engage in diplomacy at any time. More useful alliances and complex treaties.
lot less characters on the map. No priests, diplomats or princesses.
"The new campaign map is freer with its information. You won't have to physically have a man on the spot to know whether France has invaded Spain, for example."
Aiming for 20 ships aside in seas battles but yet to be finalised.
Hint that Sean Bean will provide voice work.

I wonder if this will be on this month's malaysia's pc gamer magazine.

this game is officially out liao?

Units vary more than ever, and improvements are gradually discovered. Nor is there any need to keep sending units back to retrain, as new technology is rolled out automatically. More efficient bayonets, better ammunition and more reliable muskets can be researched if you focus your economy in the right areas. Neglect to do so, and your men will be using plug bayonets that prevent the soldier from firing and stabbing, while your enemy has moved on to higher tech.

Research is not just about economy, though, as James Russell explains. “There are all sorts of ways to improve your technology, but you have to play the game according to the strategy you choose - for example, you may have to reform your government to research more effectively.” There are three types of government you can establish across your empire (the names and details for each are yet to be finalised), and each has a broad impact on your economy and populace - but also on the type of military materiel you can develop. And with sea power so important to expanding your empire, you’d be mad not to improve your ability to fight at sea. Each faction has the potential to build between 10 and 20 types of ship. Depending on how you prioritise your research, you will also have the chance to field technology that didn’t actually appear until well into the 19th century, such as steam-powered vessels.

Ever been frustrated that you can’t get inside any of the buildings on a Total War battlefield? That’s changing. “The tactics in Empire reflect the changing nature of warfare,” says James. “Cover becomes far more important. It’s the ideal time for us to allow battlefield buildings to be occupied.” Once troops are inside, or ordered to set up behind a wall, you’ll have command of the territory you can cover with your arcs of fire. It’s not quite like Company of Heroes’ capture points, but you’ll quickly realise how important it is to seize these battlefield features. “Battles are full of charges, counter-charges and vicious melees for these tactical areas,” says James. “Buildings give an area of focus. We don’t want to create obscure tactics for players to learn; the game will reflect intuitive actions such as it obviously being better for your line infantry to stand behind a wall and shoot.”

Early details about Empire’s campaign map - coupled with the historical fact that countries didn’t often wipe out other countries and steal all their land in this era - led us to suspect we’d be playing a very different type of game. No more painting the map your faction’s colour, we’d thought. In fact, says James, the formula is not too different. “You’re still sending armies out and capturing territory. Depending on which nation you choose, however, you’ll have very different starting objectives. Some will start with a couple of simple home territories, others will have the beginnings of an empire, for example in North America. You absolutely can still charge around turning the map your colour. What we’ve tried to do, though, is up the challenge and provide options.”

Jamie Ferguson fills in the details. “We’ve taken all the structures that you’d previously built in a city out of that ‘container’ and made towns around the region. This means that a player can easily see, from the campaign map, what a region holds, and also attack or sabotage individual things - docks, farms, etc.” It’ll be more obvious how valuable a region is, and what the effects of attacking it will be. You won’t have to take out the region’s city to seriously hamper your enemy: you can cut off supply lines, trade, docks and industry without tackling the main city. “We still have capital cities, though, and sieges are still in the game, but depending on where you are it’ll be harder to hold onto a city than before.” So for example, the English could take Paris if they wanted, but the populace will be very hard to control. Attacking France’s infrastructure will be easier and be more effective strategically.

As for your overall objectives, it won’t be the previous Total War style of conquering a set number of territories before declaring victory. Creative Assembly wouldn’t be pressed on exactly what a given nation’s objectives might be, but think in terms of what those countries were aiming for at the time: successful colonies, trade routes and dominance in certain regions. “We don’t want players to try to recreate exactly what a particular nation did at the time,” says Jamie, “but your goals and opportunities will reflect what really happened.”

The 18th century saw a shift in power from monarchs and the aristocracy towards politicians and the people. So no more kings lording it over the battlefield, we thought, no more assassins and spies trailing after the men in big hats, no more princesses, priests and shady characters wandering the map. For once, we were actually close to the mark. Generals will no longer be drawn from a family tree: army commanders are professional and as a result are recruited; though there’ll be a limited number you can have at once. However, these men will be every bit as heroic and characterful as any previous suspiciously-chinned prince. Traits and retinues will be limited in number (eliminating the confusing lists of Medieval II) and thus clearer; names will be more varied. In fact, some characters will be historical; not only real generals and admirals to lead your forces, but also inventors and politicians to improve city life.

James Russell feels there’s a lot to address: “We’ve looked carefully at what the player spends their time doing. Too much time in the past was spent on managing tax rates and assembling armies, so we’ve streamlined that.” You will be able to construct armies and fleets around generals and admirals; the units you want will be built at the nearest possible place and move as quickly as they can to join up with their leader. As obsessive builders of ‘perfect’ armies ourselves, we can’t calculate the micromanagement time this will save us.

But what of your foes’ actions on the campaign map? With that in mind, there are two programmers dedicated to the campaign map’s AI. Whereas the diplomatic and military AI in previous Total War games were separate entities, leading to some curious international actions, they have now been unified, which should result in more realistic diplomatic relations: more useful alliances and complex treaties. Diplomacy can now be entered into at any time, as opposed to having to send a diplomat to find a foreigner and click on it. James Russell again: “We’ve done a lot with diplomacy. It’ll be clearer to understand how a faction feels about you, and why. The factions will seem much more human; you’ll understand their decisions.”

The array of personalities we’re used to seeing standing around the map has also been reduced: no diplomats, and priests and princesses have probably got the chop too. Instead of spies and assassins, we now have the rake, a presumably caddish bounder who’ll ingratiate himself into your enemies’ corridors of power. His abilities have yet to be confirmed, but we’re guessing that it’ll be something more deadly than guzzling all the Prussians’ sherry and seducing a duchess. Spies have not definitely been cut, but the new campaign map is freer with its information: you won’t have to physically have a man on the spot to know whether France has invaded Spain, for example.

Jamie Ferguson chips in: “There are visual and audio clues to help the player use the wind. It’s a simple concept and is easier than you might think to use the ships in battle.” Still, though, it’s completely new territory for Creative Assembly, whose previous games have been strictly landlubbers. “It’s been a lot of work. One guy spent a whole year working on the water. When you see raindrops hitting the sea, cannonballs skipping over the water... and of course waves get bigger, ships roll. In the Caribbean the sea is a beautiful blue, while the North Sea is grey.” There’s also a global weather system and climate types, so the weather conditions and position of the sun all dictate what you’ll see in a sea battle.

With Empire’s release scheduled for November, meaning there’s less than six months left for CA to realise their ambitious dream, it’s a slight concern that the campaign map is still under wraps. Adding the third major element - sea battles - to the two existing aspects of Total War has thrown up many new challenges, but this experienced team is well equipped to cope. Confidence is high that Empire will be CA’s crowning glory.

They say that we can modernize into early 20th century so I thought maybe tanks, maybe its not 20th century.

PCGM JUNE 2008 have the cover story bout this game....

Tuesday Jun 24, 2008
Empire: Total War AI Diary

Hi, I’m Jack Lusted a Games Tester at the Creative Assembly UK and this blog will detail my part in the Battle AI development process and how the AI testing works. This blog compliments an upcoming video development diary on the Battle AI.

First a bit of background on myself. Now I’m sure many of you from the community will know me (so you can just skip the next bit), but for those who don’t I used to be an admin of Total War Center, one of the biggest Total War fan sites. I’ve been playing the series since Medieval: Total War was released back in 2002. I’ve been working here at the Creative Assembly UK since June last year as a Tester and secondee to the Empire design team.

As a tester, I have a wide range of tools available to me with which I can see exactly what the AI is doing and thinking. This makes it easy to spot problems with the AI, and helps Richard Bull (Battle AI programmer) more quickly fix any problems that are found.

There are a variety of battles that we have set up that we use to test the AI on. Most battles will consist of me trying a variety of tactics against the AI to see how it reacts, and noting what it does and doesn’t do well. Other times we will run the game so the AI controls both sides and fights itself, to see how well it does in that situation. That is also one of the most useful ways of exposing flaws in the AI. As the project goes on, the AI will be tested under a wider variety of situations to make sure it plays well in all battles.

During each battle, we can play with all the AI debug information being shown. This lets us see exactly what each AI unit is doing and what tactics it’s engaging. This allows us to get a very clear picture of the AI’s overall strategy and so makes it easy to see where it could be improved and where it isn’t quite behaving right.

Every fortnight myself, Richard and one of the Designers will meet up and discuss the progress of the AI. We’ll talk about the issues with it, new things that have been added in and other progress that has been made since the last meeting. We’ll also make suggestions for improvements by discussing how the AI should react in certain situations and how it should play. For instance some new code has recently gone in based on an idea to try and improve the organization of the AI during the later stages of battle. After each meeting we’ll generally have a few specific areas of the AI that we’ve been asked to test before the next meeting.

The close link between myself as a tester and the battle AI programmer is new for Empire and this process of regular meetings and constant testing helps ensure that the battle AI is always moving forwards. The process will carry on right up until release, and things are looking very promising already.

Also for Empire, I’ve written a series of design documents on how the AI should deal with certain situations and general things it should do based on how myself and others play the game. These documents are constantly updated as more is added to them, new tactics are included and situations arise which have AI design implications. This ensures that there are always up to date documents detailing how the AI should play both generally in battles, and more specifically for certain situations. This helps give clear goals for how the AI should progress, and means we are aiming towards an AI that plays a lot more like a human and so should provide more of a challenge to both our experienced players and those new to the series.

If you’ve got any questions on this blog, please do send them in.

Jack.

Hi guys,

Welcome to our fifth Empire: Total War FAQ. This month we are focusing exclusively on your Land Battle questions…

With so much of the warfare in the period being focused on the use of gunpowder, will there still be a role for melee units?
Despite the emergence of gunpowder, melee and dedicated melee units remain important parts of warfare in Empire: Total War. Flintlock, muzzle-loading small arms were unreliable, relatively slow to reload and not always accurate. If you were sensible you carried a sword, or a bayonet, or both, or an axe or almost anything as a backup weapon. Once you’d fired, you had a tactical choice: try to reload before the enemy closed to stabbing range, or charge home before he could fire and reload. Hence the need for melee combat. The comparative short effective range of musketry makes this a ticklish problem for commanders. At the start of the period, players will have to make the choice between shooting at the last moment and not being prepared for melee or fixing bayonets. The land battles are being designed so that there is no single ‘right answer’ to that decision. This ensures that the tactics of timing and manoeuvre are vitally important. The period was full of successful bayonet charges and cavalry attacks. There’s a huge, rich variety in the period and we’re determined to get all that flavour into the game. Empire is definitely not just Rome or Medieval with gunpowder units.

With ranged combat being so much more important to the way land battles work, will units be able to use cover and stances to protect themselves?
Absolutely, finding cover on the battlefield for your units introduces a brand new idea to the land battles. Buildings on the battlefield can become a tactical focus of battle because of the cover they provide. Historically, farm and village buildings often saw some of the most ferocious fighting in many famous battles of the period, from Blenheim to Waterloo. Empire allows for this by letting men deploy in buildings for the first time in a Total War game.

There is a downside, of course. Concentrating your men in buildings makes them prime targets for enemy artillery. All the buildings on Empires battlefields will be destructible so the walls can come tumbling down!

Buildings aren’t the only cover. There are deployable items such as chevaux de frise (a kind of portable barrier studded with hideous spikes and blades) and earthworks that provide partial protection for units. The walls, trees and the outside of buildings that can be used as cover too. In addition, some units (skirmishers, in particular) are trained to fire from a prone position in order to reduce their vulnerability to incoming fire.

With ranged combat now so crucial, will the land battle engine UI display areas of fire in addition to unit range?
Aside from range, the battle UI will enable the player to view a unit’s line of sight and there are elements that communicate unit movement and fields of fire (the area that can be hit by a unit with its current facing and formation).

What effects do the weather and environment have on armies in battle?
Weather and the battlefield environment will have a variety of effects on the armies in battle. Fog and smoke influence line of sight, while rain affects rate of fire (or even whether a unit can fire at all) and the chance of misfires. The environment meanwhile will have a range of effects on troops via fatigue. Troops will tire on the battlefield if they march uphill or through mud and, as result, you’ll see their rate of fire and accuracy diminish. Ground types will also affect the movement rate of all troop types, as will obstacles like walls. This only goes to promote the importance of manoeuvring your units with care. If a unit is slowed and fatigued by mud, or commanded to climb over a wall whilst under fire, they could be cut to ribbons in no time by a well-drilled enemy.

Uniforms in that time period were mostly similar, how will you keep armies from becoming clones again?
Not all units are created equal - a number of units are not ‘regular’ army troops, and have plenty of scope for variation. Each unit we are using has a variety of different faces, hair colours, haircuts and facial hair. Unit equipments, such as backpacks and ammo pouches, have a variety of positions and sizes and there is also some variation with unit weaponry.

We’re also introducing a system that allows us to alter any part of the unit on a per-unit basis, so for each unit type we can add variety wherever possible and appropriate.  Even the most uniform of uniforms can have hats at different angles, some buttons unfastened, shorter or longer coat tails, different shoes and all manner of visual flavour.  Of course, with the more exotic unit types the world is our oyster!

Faction colouring is done in a cunning way, and we can have slightly different areas of faction colour on each soldier. Dynamic dirt and wounding will mean that in the heat of battle, every man in the unit will display a different level of grime and injury. All of this is intended to give us as much flexibility in de-cloning the units of men as possible.

Will we have the ability to dismount men pre-battle?
Better than that - dragoon units will be able to dismount and mount during battle. Dismounting is a unit ability that won’t be available to all units and must be selected through the tech tree. This opens up many strategic possibilities - dragoons can for example, ride to buildings or areas of cover on the battlefield, then dismount and fire from the cover they’ve seized. Before battle there will also be a few units that can choose to fight on foot or horseback (but can’t change during battle).. Guns will also be able to limber and unlimber on the battlefield; this means that horse artillery will gallop to where they are most needed.

Units could deploy stakes in Medieval 2 - what kind of deployable items will be available on the battlefield?
There are a variety of weapons and defensive structures that can be deployed in battle. Some in real-time, others in the deployment stage of battle. We’ve already mentioned the chevaux de fries. This can be deployed in the pre-battle deployment phase and provide an effective defense against cavalry charges and limited cover. Other examples include the infantry earthworks and gabions (large wicker baskets filled with earth), which can be deployed pre-battle, and provide significant defensive cover form small arms and artillery fire. The latter is a defensive emplacement that offers strong protection for artillery units from small arms fire but fixes your artillery to a set field position - lose the position, and you may have lost your guns! There will also be items such as wooden stakes, depending on other factors.

How will fixing bayonets be handled - will it be an order you can issue?
The order to fix bayonets can be given to any, musket armed, infantry unit that carries them in battle (and not everyone did, strangely). At the start of the period, a bayonet plugged into the gun barrel like a cork in a bottle - the musket became a heavy spear, but could no longer fire. As the game progresses, more advanced bayonet technology becomes available, including ring bayonets and eventually socket bayonets. The socket bayonet in particular didn’t interfere with loading or firing. Actually, that’s not quite true - historically the French decided to offset their socket bayonets above the barrel exactly into the firer’s eye line. This made aiming a bit of a tricky exercise.

Will there be different types of ammunition available?
Artillery units in Empire can gain access to a variety of ammo types that can be selected by activating a unit ability in battle. Ammo types include explosive shot - these are cannon balls that fly towards their target and then burst and fragment, showering an enemy with shards of metal that can be devastating to a unit of infantry. Canister shot or grape shot works in the similar way but at a shorter range, turning a cannon into a giant sawn-off shotgun. Then there are grenades which are delivered via grenadiers on the battlefield, with their range and effectiveness based on the experience and training of the unit.

I hope you have enjoyed our Land Battles FAQ. Keep your questions coming on our official forums and stay tuned to www.totalwar.com for the latest updates!

Take care,

Mark O’Connell

We had speculated that the special weapons the eastern powers might be able to use would be some sort of fire ship but we weren't even close. Creative Assembly revealed the brand new rocket ships that can really make short work of the enemy battle line ships. These are unlocked towards the end of the tech tree and are armed with basically a large firework on a ramp. When fired, the rocket arcs up into the sky and crashes down onto the deck of enemy ships. They seemed uncannily accurate in the build we saw, setting fire to the admiral ship in a matter of seconds.

The team also showed off another late game unit, the steam ship. This industrial wonder can steam under its own power, making it a great asset when the wind is low. It can also move at double speed by using the wind and steam power at the same time. The steam ships also have cannons that can fire in all four arcs around it.

Creative Assembly didn't have a great deal to say about the campaign but they did reveal two interesting items. First, in addition to the grand campaign, the game will include a Road to Independence campaign that lets players take charge of America from the founding of Jamestown to the victory at Yorktown. They also mentioned that the campaign AI will now advise the tactical AI about how important a battle is. So if an enemy is fighting while retreating on the strategic map, they might tell the tactical AI to fight a delaying action, preserving as many of their troops as possible. If the battle takes place just adjacent to the enemy capital, the campaign AI will tell the tactical AI to go all out and fight to the very last man.

Those company sure used GTX280 SLi or Tri-SLI to turn on all MAx and full AA 16X to make picture nice to attrative you buy this games. SO you need Triple GTX280 for it if u buy this games and want taht graphic....LOL

fujkenasai your Rig sure can play since can play WIC also and Mediaval Total War 2. Just turn setting to medium to playable then ok le