
Chain shot is automatically fired higher, and is designed to reduce your opponents' mobility by destroying their sails. My ships spreading out like an Atari logo, I fired chain-shot to take out my opponents' masts. Having positioned my boats in a straight line, I was told that this was a tactical mistake I was directed to fan out. A generous sixty-second deployment phase was a bit long for my three ships, but full battles will feature more like twenty. All of this is useful in deciding what to do - don't present a weak side to the enemy, take advantage of superior control if you see your opponent's sails are damaged, and if the wind's in your favour, use it. A flag indicates the allegiance, and flashes white when your morale has been sapped to the point of retreat, and around the selected ship's base is a compass, displaying the direction of the wind. Each ship has sail strength, and a hull strength bar for each side of the ship. And that's what we're playing today.įirst, we're shown a demo, which introduces us to the basics of maritime warfare.

As fans will know, Empire: Total War's most striking innovation is the introduction of naval combat. Brilliance on dozens of levels taken as a given - and they are staggeringly brilliant games - this was a recurring annoyance.īut diplomatic nuance isn't what's on display in Creative Assembly's Horsham offices, as six people file into a room with five computers, to play a 2v2 match. Occasionally, the AI rejected fair offers in the face of certain defeat. Previously, diplomacy has occasionally felt something of an irrelevance, beyond trade deals. This means that Creative Assembly will have to reign in some of the AI's brasher decisions. Trade will be vital, as ever - and diplomacy will take a stronger role in the new game, as it did in the period itself.

They're just not used to run through the middle of troops.

Not completely, of course - bayonets were still being used in the trenches of the 20th Century, and horses still have their role. It's a time when new weaponry was beginning to shift the emphasis of battles away from melee and mounted combat. So, a recap: Empire is set over the entire 18th Century, on a map from India to America. Golden bridges? That'd be really slow and expensive.

It's not the most colourful quote, but as Empire marks the biggest leap in innovation since the first Total War game, it seems more relevant than the strange stuff about building your enemies a golden bridge to retreat across. Having pored through Wikiquote for a few more minutes than I'd intended - his Art of War really is bite-sized entertainment, even to flaky real-life pacifists like myself - I settled on "You cannot stop innovation". It seems appropriate, writing about a Total War game, to start off with a quote from Sun Tzu.
