The Total War game series is famous for its deep strategic gameplay that encompasses both building up an empire and leading huge armies onto the field of battle. But while its reputation has been largely made with stunning PC games, the franchise has branched out to mobile platforms with the Total War Battles series, starting with 2012’s Shogun. Its follow-up, Total War Battles: Kingdom, not only takes players back to a historical time period, but include cross-platform play across iOS, Android, PCs and Macs.
The motto in developing the game was “Total War for everyone, everywhere,” and the developers are living up to that motto by creating a free-to-play game for a multitude of devices. In the game, players grow their kingdoms, raise armies, and compete to become the first true King of England. In the meantime, they have to make decisions shape events. Damming off a river creates a lake, but they will still need to contend with seasonal droughts and floods, along effects stemming from how they choose to expand.
Then there’s the actual battle portion, which features 1v1 real-time combat across different platforms. That means a player directing his army from a tablet can go up against one using a large screen PC. Furthermore, unlike many other combat games on mobile, you have to be quite active. You don’t just send in troops and passively watch events play out. Total War Battle players have to direct troops in a rock-paper-scissors style of combat that features up to 400 3D animated men rendered using motion capture animation.
Total War Battles: Kingdom is currently in beta, and is expected to release sometime later this year. [a]listdaily speaks to Renaud Charpentier, Creative Director at Creative Assembly, about how war tactics play out across so many different devices.
The Total War series is famous for having huge armies to command. How will Kingdom capture that sense?
You’ll be able to have 18 units on the field at once, which can mean up to 400 soldiers, depending on how you outfit your army, like with extra cavalry, or if you go with fewer but stronger troops. That’s quite a lot, and why we chose this historical period: England in 915 AD.
That’s about the size you have for armies. You didn’t have armies with tens of thousands of men — they didn’t exist yet. The big Viking army that plagued the nation, and were considered an unstoppable force, were made up of a few thousand men.
What else makes this time period so appealing?
It is the moment when England is emerging from the Dark Ages, and is divided into small fiefdoms, which is exactly what you’re building in the game. There is no global ruler. Twenty or thirty years later, the nation will be unified and the first King of England will be crowned. So, until that happens, you have a collection of small kings and lords that are effectively battling to unify the country. It was very similar to what happened in medieval Japan, except that occurred 700 years later, and it was a setting we already used [in Total War Battles: Shogun], and we didn’t want to return to that.
How do you keep the combat quick enough for mobile play?
Battles generally last about 2-4 minutes. To do that, we cut out many of the elements that take time, like selecting the army order, and set it up before the match starts. Deciding what troops are on the front line is very important, so you choose the composition of your army (archers, cavalry, artillery, etc.), how they’re set-up, and how they’re deployed before you enter the matchmaker for battles.
If you completely trample your opponent, you may dominate the battle in about a minute or so. But if it’s two very high-end players doing very well, then the battle could last 4 to 5 minutes. There’s no timer, but our data shows that 90 percent of battles take about two to three minutes.
How did you make the controls work for both PC and mobile platforms?
There were a few concerns that we attacked head-on. As a slow-paced economic simulator, controls don’t really matter, so that’s the first thing we made. For battles, we needed a control scheme that was as good as it could be for touch screen, and those controls are same on the PC. So, even those playing on iOS can make their way up the competitive ladders, showing that the controls don’t discriminate against anyone.
It’s still an RTS game, but it’s not about how fast you can issue your orders. It’s which orders you choose. Do you move these units from the back lines? Or do you move the ones from the right to the center of the battlefield? You have seconds to think about it, so you’re not in a hurry, and you don’t have to worry about missing a twitch click.
Will new players have a tough time competing against established alliances?
All competitive activity on consensual. You’ll never get attacked by someone in your realm, and you’ll never be forced into multiplayer if you don’t want that. So, you’ll be completely protected, or isolated, from other players if you prefer that. Other players won’t be able to strong arm you or wipe you out.
Where does Total War Battles: Kingdom fit into the Total War franchise, which includes PC games like Attila, Rome and Medieval?
We try to envision what we want to achieve when we start a video game. For Kingdom, we wanted “Total War for everyone,” which means more accessibility, a learning curve that isn’t as steep, and also everywhere. You don’t need a high end PC to fully enjoy this game. We thought in terms of gaming habits — “If I’m a player, when am I going to play that?”
I could choose to play on a high end PC if I want to, but it’s designed so that I can sit back on a couch and play from an iPad.
The Total War franchise has a reputation for being very in-depth historical strategy games. How have fans reacted to this more approachable design?
To be honest, you have a very small percentage of extremely hardcore fans who don’t want us to go in this direction. But what’s interesting is that they still play the game, and do so for 18 or 19 hours. Many have left us very good comments saying, “This not a big PC Total War that I’m used to playing. This is something different. It’s still a strategy game, and a great one.”
You can also see that response on the user reviews, which are mostly 4 and 5 stars.
