It's interesting to see how different people approach the game in different ways. They want to be an Alexander, who carves an empire and isn't concerned with administration. They auto tax, auto govern and auto build everything and just dive in and do all the fights themselves. "There's also a percentage of players who do the bare minimum of management. The good thing about not forcing players into naval and land battles is you have variety. "Is it disheartening when players only use the campaign map? Well, a third of the team only work on the campaign and find that really heartening! When players skip battles as they don't get the complete Total War experience, but you have to appreciate that players play how they want to play. This was the age that Britain established itself as a worldwide superpower, so we have plenty of domestic records of battle mechanics and ship designs." Campaign In The Arse There is a wealth of information available. There's a lot of competing evidence and one-off examples of certain guns. "It's a double-edged sword as we have the most fanatical fans who will come back and contest our designs. Having access to that level of detail is really a great boon when designing. So we know we have created accurate representations of the ships. "We licensed all the ship plans from the Royal Martine Museum in Greenwich and were able to scan in the blueprints for the ships and carve in polygons exactly how they'd be carved in wood. It was a very good first effort in doing narrative-driven campaigning." Researching The Aces It was a fascinating period and it sits within Empire's remit anyway. All these things are what we associate with what we'd call the birth of modern democracy. You've got the Battle of Bunker Hill and George Washington holding the Declaration of Independence. You've got huge cannons billowing smoke across the battlefield. "It's also a period which is actually pretty cool.
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Nation and you literally birth it, grow it and defend it in those series of episodes. "Road to Independence is almost that same story, except it's told from the opposite viewpoint. The European powers moving out into the wider world and conquering and commanding all that they saw. "Imagine the Grand Campaign as the story of Imperialism and Colonialism. You tend to find that ancient European history, like the Greeks and Romans, doesn't have much traction in the United States. "People often think, 'Oh you chose the American period to open up to the American market,' and that's partly true. We tried this out, but it became too fussy and we decided to drop it, even though it was a very well recognised and practised tactic of the period." Road To Independence A good example is 'tacking' - this is when a sailed ship zig-zagged along with the wind to go faster. There were a lot of manoeuvres you could perform at sea which were historically accurate but not particularly fun to do in the game. "When it comes to the actual strategies and tactics, there's a slight element of tweaking history. For example, Empire's time period runs from 1700 to 1800, but we probably go 15 to 20 years beyond that end point as far as technology and philosophical advances are concerned, so in that sense we bend the rules a little bit. "Where there's a toss up between something being historically accurate versus being fun, fun wins. In Empire's case, the way we did it with that was the technology, obviously with the use of gunpowder and artillery advancing all the way through the game, so by the time you get to the end your single-shot flintlocks and cannons have been replaced by rapid-fire mechanisms and long-range mortar bombs." Fixing History It has to be a period in which the sort of battles you're fighting at the outset aren't the sort of battles you're fighting at the end. "It also has to be a time of technological and military change. There had to be a time where there was a competition element between these people. Basically, you've got to have a competing set of nations, families or clans or, as in Empire's case, established nations that could've come and dominated at that time. "There have to be a number of factions that could've come to power at any one time. "When considering a setting for Total War, there are several features present in any area of history that you're thinking of using.
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