Total War: Rome 2 is out now; here’s our Total War: Rome 2 review.
When somebody tells Creative Assembly’s Al Bickham that Total War: Rome 2’s campaign map is big, he corrects them: “It’s colossal.” Its reach reportedly stretches from the westernmost point of Spain to ancient Afghanistan, Bactria, and from the British Isles right down to north Africa and the Nile. And what are Creative Assembly doing with all this new space they’ve afforded themselves? Something new.
Rome 2’s map is filled by provinces, each made up of a number of regions. Once you control all the regions within a province, it becomes yours.
“Back in the days of Shogun 2, every region on the map had a castle in it or a settlement of some kind, so every region conquering ended up being a siege battle,” explained Bickham in a studio update. “And we wanted to bring more tactical variety, more battle types into Rome 2 and not just rely on siege battles, like a series of headshots.”
As a result, players will go through a number of different battle types in the process of capturing a province. Their reward is the ability to issue province-wide edicts. For instance, you can endorse festivities in a province with low population happiness to receive a turn-by-turn buff to overall joy.
The team at Creative Assembly hope that the new system will allow players to bring local successes to bear on continent-scale problems.
“It’s about local management benefitting your greater empire, just like any Total War game to some extent,” says Bickham. “You’ve got to manage each region individually and deal with its specific problems. You’ve just got more ways in your armoury to deal with that then you ever have before.”