Part 2.
Edge: The rumour we heard is that you’re fighting other colonial powers rather than the colonies themselves
MS: Yes, that’s what kind of happened in that period. There was a lot of war in Europe but also a lot of little proxy wars elsewhere reflecting that.
JR: We’re not forcing the player to do that in any way though. To introduce the idea… well what we’ve done is expanded the geographical scope a lot. This period is the first time that Europe is surging across the globe, so the likes of India are in the series for the first time, the USA we’ve mentioned, the Caribbean and Central America. It’s the start of the era of global empire.
Edge: So how many areas are conquerable?
JR: Well, you could conquer all of those places we mentioned. India, North American, the Caribbean.
MS: We’re not forcing the player to go out and conquer colonies and say ‘stay away from mainland Europe’, but basically Europe is pretty difficult to capture and control in any region. So effectively the game mechanics will encourage you to go out there, colonise, conquer places and gather resources and build yourself up enough to fight big areas of Europe.
Edge: The scale is huge, so how does that balance between the regions and areas of land, as well as small-scale skirmishes and wars against an entire country?
JR: There are a lot of things that are different. We’re getting rid of a lot of the chores you might have had to do in earlier games. There’s a lot more central control – you might make the same kind of decisions to the same kind of depth that you’re used to, but you make them maybe less often than you’d think. You’ve got deeper gameplay, and because it’s a lot more about centralised power it’s easier to deal with a large geographical scale and we can’t do exactly the kind of region division, for example, we had in the previous games.
MS: Resources are key, but a resource in this context we might consider to be something like your own time. You have a limited time to spend with the game, so we try not to waste the player’s time and really make you think about what you’re doing and why.
JR: Maybe it’s about valid choices and optimisation rather than getting the numbers perfect. It’s all about real choices, playing off efficiency against thoroughness, and that’s why we’re trying to avoid repeating things across regions. Some of that works in the ways you might think – maximising your production capabilities might mean more troops for an invasion, but then you have a huge army to look after that needs fed. You have a huge area to think about, so you’ll need to think about the use of something beyond the immediate problem to be solved.
JR: It’s analogous to the landmasses. You might have 20 battalions which have thousands of soldiers, in the same way you’ll have 20 ships to control which might all be of different sizes but you’ll have a similar number of men. Effectively you’re ordering them much like anything else though – you’re telling them to move to certain places, group in certain formations, attack certain other ships. There are different methods of attack, different abilities and technology, there are lots of different combinations.
Edge: How much of a difference is it to go from melee and arrow combat to rifle shots and cannons? Does it make a change to the gameplay?
JR: It’s just a shift of balance really. In terms of the landmasses, yes, there’s a lot more emphasis on ranged weaponry, but in the 18th century these weapons weren’t particularly accurate. They didn’t fire particularly fast either, and so you had to get quite close to your enemy anyway to have a chance of hitting them, so there was a great deal of close combat. Plenty of vicious hand-to-hand fighting. The fact that there are more ranged options does change the nature of the battlefield – you might have to think a little more about cover, for example – but that’s why we have new things like buildings (which can be destroyed by artillery). A lot of the battles of the period did focus a lot around farmhouses and buildings that might become the focus of mini struggles within a wider conflict for the best positions. It creates these focal points and there is a lot of drama to be had with these important areas within a larger fight.
MS: Some of the fundamental tactics in this period are actually more in-depth than those in Rome: Total War, that scissors-paper-stone aspect to the troop types and formations: infantry in a square formation is very strong against mounted troops like camels, for example, but not as effective at shooting as a single-file formation, which is very vulnerable to being broken up by mounted troops. And then the square formation is quite susceptible to artillery. There are some very strong tactical elements that are deeper than its predecessors.
