The PCGamer UK preview of the upcoming Empire: Total War is online, courtesy of Tim Edwards. Here are the highlights.

Formations are the new rock-paper-scissors of warfare. It’s all about arranging men in such a way as to present the most possible muskets at the line of enemy advance. “A square of men beats a cavalry charge. A column of men will beat a long line, but only if it arrives. And a line of men, pointing the maximum amount of muskets to an advancing force, will always beat a square.”

Gamers say they hate rock/paper/scissors, but it actually makes a lot of sense to do musket warfare in this way. Each formation was developed for a purpose and if you can translate that purpose to a game world then you do a lot to help the player understand what is going on both historically and game wise.

“Because combat moves on from melee,” explains James, “cover becomes really important. In the Battle of Blenheim, for instance, a lot of the fighting was focused around capturing and occupying key buildings. That creates focal points for the battle – adding drama. It’s almost like terrain ‘plus’: can I capture this farmhouse? It’s a strong point that you can try and hold. A dramatic node for the battle to focus around.”

Imperial Glory had this, one of the few redeeming features in an otherwise disappointing game. The ability to seize and fortify a building, and then hold it against assault can be a the fulcrum around which a frantic defence becomes a counter attack. Artillery figures into this mix allowing you to destroy battlefield structures. Will this be reflected in battles that take place in the same locale on another turn?

On the sea game, the developers say:

“It already looks beautiful,” Mike says. “I’ve been staggered by how good it looks for quite some time now. And we’re not done yet. There’s one guy I gave a job to. I said ‘make sea look like the sea.’ It’s a hard challenge. Sea is incredibly complicated stuff. We want to model different wind conditions, different light conditions, different weather conditions. The thing is that gusts of wind don’t actually move at the speed of the wind. A gust of wind is caused by a whirlpool of wind moving vertically; they actually move quite slowly and cover quite large areas – you see it because it makes the surface of the water rough, and the rest shiny. It means you can build gameplay into entering and chasing gusts of wind, and using them to overtake an enemy fleet.”

For some reason this doesn’t make me feel better about sea combat. Edwards has a lot of paragraphs of Creative Assembly describing the naval game, but never describes what he sees. Probably because it’s not close to being showable. Probably because it is going to be very hard.

James Russell then lets loose this little nugget of “what the hell?”

“One of the quirks of the old engine was that the diplomacy and military AI were two separate routines, developed separately by two different programmers. Those systems fought each other. The military side would say ‘we need to invade’ while the diplomatic side will say ‘well, I just made a treaty with them.’ Getting them to work together was difficult. It meant the behaviour wasn’t always consistent.”

I know very little about game design or game production, but this doesn’t make much sense to me. It certainly explains why it was so hard to keep from fighting a three front war in Medieval II or why Macedonia wouldn’t stop being suicidal in Rome. Military calculations should be part of the diplomatic AI; war is politics by other means and all that.

Probably the best news in the preview is this paragraph:

Even better, they’re aiming to draw armies out of the cities, removing the dominance of sieges. That’s being done by making region improvements – structures such as barracks, mines and palaces – exist outside of the city, vulnerable to attack. Generals can no longer afford to hide behind their city walls in the event of an invasion. They must sally forth and chase the aggressor away.

Anything that gives the player a reason to witness your strong suit (the battle engine) is a good design decision. And there just weren’t enough incentives to engage the AI in a field battle in Rome or Medieval II. To some extent this was period appropriate in Medieval II; castles were designed for this very strategy. But the AI liked to assault cities and could be easily beaten back. The 1700s are, for the most part, a time of field encounters. You can’t have Marlborough hunkering down and waiting for Maximilian to blunder through an open gate. It just doesn’t feel right.

Does putting region improvements outside a city also raises the possibility of a pillaging war? Can weaker opponents can behind your lines and put your mines to the torch if you don’t leave a home guard in place?

“Some people will be quite offended by that- that we’re not allowing them to trade slaves. But it’s not necessary to make the game work. You’re not going to be landing in Africa and dragging slaves off to America.”

Who are these people who want to actively trade slaves? Is there some SCA slave trading Renne Faire thing that I don’t know about?