A couple of new interviews.
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/07/02/total-war-rome-2-interview/
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/07/03/rome-total-war-2/
Some interesting bits
"RPS: Does that move to legions and the fewer and more significant battles reduce the rock, paper, scissors aspect and make it become more about where you’ve put your legion as opposed to needing the specific counters to the specific types you’re up against?
James Russell: We definitely don’t want to have bog standard legions where they’re all the same, absolutely not. In fact the opposite in many ways because that’s why we wanted to give these legions a character, so they’ve got their own unique nature. We don’t want to have all your legions being the same, I think there’ll definitely be strengths and weaknesses to each legion and to each General, and obviously there’ll be plenty of rock, paper, scissors gameplay within the battles themselves. You’ve got a massive variety of combat styles and cultures as well. The Rhine legions might be quite different from the Eastern regions, and that kind of thing, depending on how you use them."
"RPS: Even though essentially the campaign is to some degree non-linear, you’re carving your own path across Europe and the rest, does it necessitate that some fixed stuff has to happen so that you can then encounter these key storyline beats?
James Russell: No, I don’t think so, I see it more as there’s this huge landscape of possibility, and what we do is lay little Easter eggs everywhere, but loads of them."
"RPS: Are you going to have to play as Rome essentially in your first play through of the campaign?
James Russell: No, we don’t want to do what we did last time where you can only play as Rome. We feel very comfortable now having really focussed the gameplay in Shogun 2 and gone where we really went all out to bring the gameplay down into that one small contained play area, we’re now really comfortable rolling it out into a vast world again. We feel very confident with keeping that contained in a way, in terms of how it feels to a player so they don’t get overwhelmed, but they feel that there’s this massive world to explore.
Because of that there’s this massive variety on the campaign map, so we don’t want to restrict that to experienced players. You’ve got all this variety, like barbarian cultures in the northern forest, exotic kingdoms in the eastern desserts, all that kind of stuff, we want the player to be able to experience that so we definitely don’t want to force you to play Rome."
"RPS: What is the geographical scope of it? Is it just Europe or are you going to have Egypt and North Africa as well?
JR: It’s definitely bigger than the Rome 1 map, so it will obviously include all the areas that the Rome 1 map included, like Egypt, but we’re going to go further east in particular. Different directions."
"RPS: And AI in general I guess has become a bit of an albatross round the CA necks, at least in the perception of some. Do you feel they’ve had valid concerns or has it become an unfair accusation that you can’t shift no matter how hard you try?
JR: There’s a number of things I’d say there. Obviously as a player, you want a game that offers you a convincing game, and an enjoyable game, and a challenge. No amount of talking about how difficult it is to do a good AI is going to change that, you’ve got to create a great experience. I feel that we’ve made significant strides in the AI over recent years, and the Shogun 2 campaign AI for example, is I think a lot stronger than any campaign AI we’ve had before. So we’re constantly improving AI. Certainly it’s the case, working on Rome 2, we’ve got more AI effort than we’ve had before that’s for sure. We’ve got design and programming working on AI, we’ve got a bigger AI team. It’s something we are determined to make work well. I don’t feel that it’s a massive weakness as a series in a way."
"RPS: In terms of the naval aspect from the defensive perspective, are you able to knobble the boats as they’re coming in towards your cities?
JR: If you’ve got the artillery for it, then yes. Also you might be able to have your own naval reinforcements, so you might have a defending navy. You saw Carthage there, the Carthaginian navy got destroyed, but Carthage there had a big harbour, you’ve got your own ships in there. If you were defending Carthage, you could have your own ships in there and come out and have a naval battle before you even land."
"RPS: It must be possible to have some incredibly long battles with cities that size and that many different elements going on as well.
JR: I think the key thing is that you’ll have some battles that will last longer than others, the battles tend to be a good length. The very longest battles tend to be 45 minutes or something like that, maybe an hour I think. We’ve got an hour-long setting, a time limitation of an hour. Those are the very longest battles, so they’re reasonably contained. It’s very rare to get that long. They vary from 20 minutes to 40 minutes for a big battle."
"RPS: Especially once the elephants get to do their thing. One more question: will there be incendiary pigs?
JR: (laughs) Never say never."
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