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Early Praise For Empire: Total War
CVG had a chance to preview Empire: Total War, the latest in Creative Assembly's popular strategy series. This installment focuses on a time period which includes the Industrial Revolution and the struggle for US independence. CVG praises the intuitive interface and the improved AI, as well as the level of detail shown in large-scale battles. Quoting:
"With a single mouse click I changed my troops' attack orders to melee and sent a sea of blue uniforms sweeping down the hill at the enemy. Zooming into the action revealed a previously unmatched level of battlefield realism and detail, with each motion captured soldier actively seeking out an opponent before engaging in a mortal shoving and stabbing match. Men toppled into the mud, squirming with terror before receiving a deft bayonet jab to the windpipe. After a titanic, 20-minute struggle the tide turned my way with the enemy hightailing it thanks in no small part to a bullet to the British general's head that broke his men's morale."
It comes preloaded with British you insensitive clod!
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Imagine, for the moment, being given complete control over the American Civil War. You would play the North under Douglas MacArthur and start with a division of Panzer tanks and two battalions of chariots from Pennsylvania. The South is split up into three different kingdoms, each headed by its own Pope, and you will need to capture their three holy cities of Pensacola, Columbus and Houston in order to win. Fortunately, swashbuckling pirates from Antigua show up every few turns to offer their services as mercenaries in your Grande Armée.
That's about what playing Rome: Total War is like. It's entertaining, but has very little to do with actual history. It's not that the events of the campaign are wrong, it's more that the armies and people involved have all been picked from different time periods or fantasy novels and thrown together into a blender set to "purée". The end result is a reasonably enjoyable, somewhat balanced game, but it is filled with bizarre inaccuracies like the Roman legions fielding companies of archers, and Julius Caesar riding around the battlefield at the head of his own band of Teutonic knights. Don't even start with the crazy armies that come out of Briton.
I personally enjoyed R:TW, and am willing to forgive a lot of the changes having been made in the name of game balance, but it looks like the Creative Assembly team skipped doing some of their homework there. Fans of the Total War series have been hoping for some time that the development team would have an unpleasant encounter with a ruler-wielding nun who would remind them to take their research a little more seriously with their next game.
The Total War games are each set in a single time period. All of the units are drawn from the same general technology level and the cities are in fixed places. Sure, they don't hit the mark every time, e.g. the chariots and scythes being the primary weapons of Ptolemaic Egypt but they deviate to make the game more fun, not because they are ignorant. I think you're referring to the Civilization series here, Civ 3 to be precise since you have 3 units under the one general, though you should have upgraded your chariots to cavalry before you put them in McArthur's army since they cannot be upgraded when they're in there.
They did. They had always had auxiliary archer units and/or Roman archers called sagiterii. The Roman military during the Republic and early Empire was built around a core of heavy infantry but they realized early on that they had to field a diverse and flexible army or face devastation.
The Romans employed large amounts of cavalry units, originally mostly supplied by allied kingdoms. In fact the word "ally" comes from the Latin "allae" meaning squadrons of cavalry. The Romans won the favor friendly chieftains in places like Germania in order to supply units that the Roman legions lacked. The Tutonic Knights themselves were a later military founded well after the fall of the Western Empire and the Germans at that time were more likely to fight on foot, however the idea of a Roman general commanding German horsemen is very possible.
You mean Celtic warriors wearing nothing save a torc and a liberal coating of woad on their faces? Much was exaggerated about the "barbarity" of the northern barbarians by classical Roman and Greek historians, but they certainly did have some quite unorthodox battle tactics.
When Argumentum ad Hominem falls short, try Argumentum ad Matrem