Rome: Total War

Before Rome: Total War released in September 2004, Creative Assembly licensed a preliminary version of its new engine to the BBC and the History Channel. The BBC used it for Time Commanders, where teams of non-gamers commanded ancient armies to replay key battles. The History Channel used it for Decisive Battles, recreating famous engagements with military historians consulting on accuracy. Both series ran on the same engine and the same music that shipped with the final game. Jeff van Dyck composed the soundtrack and received a BAFTA nomination for it. The game itself landed as one of the ten best-selling PC titles of 2004, won the IAIA’s Strategy Game of the Year award, sold 390,000 copies in the United States alone by August 2006, and earned Creative Assembly a Platinum sales award from ELSPA for at least 300,000 UK copies. Activision published it. By March 2005, Sega had acquired Creative Assembly outright. By July 2005, Sega had also acquired the publishing rights from Activision.

The series had run two games before this – Shogun: Total War in 2000 and Medieval: Total War in 2002 – both using 2D sprites on a simplified campaign map. Rome replaced that entirely with a full 3D engine, which meant both the tactical battle layer and the strategic campaign map were rebuilt from scratch. The campaign map became a continuous surface with cities, armies, and agents moving across terrain in real time rather than through abstracted province connections. On the battle layer, the 3D engine allowed elevation, terrain features that affected unit performance, and the ability to zoom to ground level and watch individual soldiers engage. Creative Assembly managing director Tim Ansell said at announcement that one of their biggest challenges was convincing people that what they were seeing in screenshots was actual gameplay and not a cutscene.

The campaign covered 270 BC to 14 AD, running from the late Roman Republic through the early Imperial period. Three playable Roman factions – the Julii in the north, the Brutii in the south, and the Scipii in Sicily – each had assigned theatres of operation and reported to the Senate through a mission system that rewarded performance and punished failure. The Senate also issued directives that competed with each faction’s own expansion priorities, which created tension between building political capital and pursuing the aggressive growth needed to eventually trigger the civil war that ended the campaign. The Senate mechanic had a clear ancestor in Rome’s predecessor: Medieval: Total War had used a Pope and excommunication system to apply similar external pressure on Catholic factions. Rome replaced the religious authority with a political one that fit the setting and gave it sharper teeth.

Some non-Roman factions were playable from the start and covered most of the map: Greek city-states and Macedon running phalanx-based formations, Carthage and the Eastern factions relying on war elephants and cavalry, the Gallic and Germanic tribes built around shock infantry with high charge values and limited armour. Each faction had units that reflected their historical military traditions rather than being reskins of the same template. Parthian horse archers required completely different tactical handling than Roman legionaries. Egyptian armies combined Hellenistic and pharaonic elements. The unit roster across the full game was wide enough that playing different factions felt substantively different.

Barbarian Invasion was released in September 2005 under Sega’s publishing banner, shifting the setting forward to the 4th and 5th centuries AD. The Western and Eastern Roman Empires were now separate factions with their own military traditions and political pressures. The Huns and various barbarian peoples could migrate across the map as coherent factions rather than fixed regional powers, which changed how territorial control worked. Religious unrest was added as a campaign mechanic, tracking the spread of Christianity and the tensions it created within existing power structures. The expansion effectively made the decline of Rome its subject rather than its backdrop.

Total War: Rome Remastered followed in April 2021, developed by Feral Interactive – the same studio that had handled the Mac and iPad ports of the original. The remaster updated textures, models, and the campaign map visuals, modernised the interface with better tooltips and controls, improved the AI, expanded faction availability, and added enhanced multiplayer and mod support. It also needed to work on hardware that didn’t exist when the original engine was designed, which required optimisation work beyond the surface-level graphical upgrade. Reviews were positive. The original design had held up well enough that the remaster’s job was mostly removal of friction rather than structural repair.

Medieval II: Total War, released two years after Rome, was built on the same engine by Creative Assembly’s Australian branch. The engine’s next major use before that was The Lord of the Rings: The Battle for Middle-earth in 2004, also developed at EA Los Angeles on a licensed version of the same technology.