Hey guys I know I am a huge fan of the Total War series ever sense Shogun, and I hope you are too.

I remember about two or three weeks ago me and my friend were talking about how we wanted an Imperical total war, and bam! there it is. This is exactly what I was hoping for, and from what they are saying they are doing it looks like it could be the best one yet. It will probably span from 1700-~1820

Here are some of the highlight features (to me) that they are claiming to be throwing into this sequel.

Naval Battles! (in 3d)

[There is tons of more stuff on this later in the post, I put this at the top because this is just one of the biggest things for me]

New Campaign AI (no more waiting for 50 offers that don't happen over one city)

No tiling. "Each tile could hold one army. In Empire, there's no tiling system. The player will never see any type of tiling artefact - it's entirely freeform. It's like taking the squares off the chessboard." [I couldn't think of a way to explain that any better]

10 playable factions (+-1). ~40 non-playable.

Government type swapping. Change Your Civics. +6 health in all cities and + 1 happiness for trees? No. This changes the way your decent works, the way AI looks at you, and your technology development.

Managing a large empire isn't so much of a pain-in-the-ass anymore. Better ways of taxing, recruiting, and overall governing.

Outside of cities buildings. Buildings that logically are build outside of the city can be destroyed by invading enemies.

Sadly there is still a maximum of 20 regiments per stack of units. (maximum units in one battle under PERFECT circumstances is 180 regiments [I only got this once with Mongols in Med2, but it was awesome! I won by four units, ~ 240 men. go janissary musketeers!])

Garrisoning buildings in combat and using cover.

Sieges only happen on Star Shaped Forts. [Star shaped forts were important because it was the only known forts that did squat against cannons because of their angles. Wikipedia for more about it if you care enough to.]

Malfunctioning cannons, muskets, and overall more realistic units. Particularly artillery.

"The whites of their eyes" effect. That is what I am calling the function that allows you to tell the units when to fire.

(This is inferred somewhat) - It seems as if corpses of things will play a bigger role. For instance: in a cavalry charge if you shoot them too late your infantry will be hit by the corpse of the horse and will take the ones hit out.

Naval Campaign:
Winds Matter, and play a large role
Storms ext.

Naval Battles:
capturing enemy ships
close and long range battle
"realistic models" - cannonballs hurt where cannonballs hit
people on the ship can die, even the helmsman
damage location matters - your ship hit in the right place, you can destroy its maneuverability
Yar Har, there be pirates
location aiming - tell your people which part of the enemy ship you want to pummel

I was also hoping for a Hearts of Iron kind of multilayer campaign. Explaining more what that means is that you can play however long you want to online, save your game and then load it back up whenever you both had time again (it would save as its own scenario so that makes it playable again). This would obviously lean toward friends playing online, but I think that will also remove some of the "anonymous D-bag" aspect of online playing. This has no signs of happening, but that was my second biggest hope for the new game (naval battles was my first).

This comes out in 08.

want to read more about it? Check it out here:
http://shoguntotalwar.yuku.com/topic/21848/t/Facts-about-Empire-Total-Wa...

It seems to me that once every three Total War games there is a totally new engine, and it looks like they are doing it again (shogun=med1, Rome=Med2).
And Sega lives on.

Sorry if this was already a thread (I used search), if this is in the wrong place after all, or if the way style in which I did this was not on par with what is expected on the site. I blame it on my newness here. Feel completely free to tear apart this thread in any way you feel necessary.

Oh and in case you can't tell I am a victim of info-hype. If I got anything wrong here in my 2-3 hour flurry of info gathering and sorting don't hesitate to call me on it.