A few weeks back, we reported the news that Creative Assembly was expanding its Total War franchise to include a new real-time strategy twist, in a new product titled Total War: Arena. It’s a unique move for the company, and one that’s likely to increase its audience with both a free-to-play approach and multiplayer support for up to ten would-be gladiators.

In an interview with VentureBeat, creative director Mike Simpson provided a few more details about the expansion, and also talked a bit about its latest expansion of the series, Total War: Attila, which should also be making the rounds this year.

When it comes to development, Simpson explained, “We have five teams. The original core team is working on the main game, Attila, at the moment, and it’s still the same size as it was, or just slightly larger than on the previous project. So it’s not like we’re diluting the main team in order to do more projects. The main team will always be focused on single-player historical strategy games. All of these offshoots, though, we’ll try different things. Some will work well, some not so well, and we’ll just keep going.”

Regarding longevity, on the same level as Activision’s Call of Duty franchise, Simpson noted, “One of the unusual things about the original Shogun is that it sold more copies in its second three years than in its first three years. The rest of the brand has grown and people would go back to pick up a copy of Shogun. These games last a very long time. People play them for four, five, six years after release. Out of that 850,000 player base that we have every month, some will be playing Empire, Napoleon and so on.

“As we keep going, one that that we’ll end up doing is supporting games for much longer than we have in the past. It’s not like it was five or 10 years ago where you release a game and once it’s out the door that’s it. One of the five teams is now dedicated to ongoing support for previous products.”

Moving over to Attila, Simpson stated, “The idea is that playing the Romans is an epic difficulty in that game. In the real world, of course, they failed, or the Western Romans failed. The Eastern Romans succeeded and lasted another thousand years. It’s doable, but it’s difficult.”

The team is certainly large enough across both projects to keep the studio busy for some time. “In the whole studio, there’s more than 300 of us now,” said Simpson. “100 or so are the console team who just finished Alien: Isolation. We’ve always had two separate halves of the studio. There’s always been a console action game side. In fact, they were there first. When I joined there were six people doing sports games for EA. Total War is about 170 people now.”

No doubt both Arena and Attila will make big waves for the company when they’re published by Sega for PC later in the year.

The full interview can be found here.