The 'Rome Total War' LEAKS

Some insight into how one of the greatest games of all time, not just of Total War, came together. Some information from sources together with the fabled Rome Total War Game Design Document circa 2002.

NOTE: I worded the "motion captured" part a bit weird. What I meant to describe was that they used 3ds Max to pretend they had done motion capture work that would end up in the actual game with mouth movements etc., but the actual game ended up not having any of this stuff. So you saw soldiers doing weird animations in the trailer and none of it ended up being in the game because they faked it for the marketing with 3ds Max and then never followed through with doing the actual real work with proper motion capture for the actual game. Just clarifying in case anyone got confused by me making connections without stating them explicitly. I listened to this part again later and noticed this could have been confusing.

#totalwar #rometotalwar #creativeassembly

0:00 Some Rome 1 development background from sources
10:20 Explanation of what a Game Design Document is
13:00 Some reminders
16:45 Getting into the Rome 1 GDD
21:35 Rome 1 trailers and 3ds Max and the Siege of Carthage similarities
24:40 Continuing with battlefield features
30:10 Key campaign features
34:15 Multiplayer features including wishlists
37:40 Design objectives
44:10 Development Schedule
49:00 Imperial campaigns including Spartacus
50:15 Historical battles including Thermopylae
53:40 Difficulty Settings
56:10 Campaign interface (and loads of Civ3 mentions)
1:02:30 Battlefield Interface (including cut formations)
1:04:00 Ambitious Campaign/Battlefield coherence
1:08:00 The Battlefield
1:15:20 Constructible Wonders
1:18:10 ctrl+f on "wishlist" for 112 results

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[MelkorGG]

Wow, this is very interesting - thanks for sharing.
33:30: These campaigns can also be found in the game files. There seems to be a 'Scipio Campaign' that is set later in the Empire, but before Barbarian Invasion, with a full map the size of the base game we got. There's also a Caesar in Gaul campaign that can be found in the files, that seems to be more like a narrative, scripted campaign, with missions, again with Campaign (we have the audio files for it). And an image exists that shows a Hannibal campaign. Therefore, I am assuming that this is what that was referencing.
(48:37: And wow, there they all are)

33:00: The entire senate system was clearly meant to have more depth. To the best of my knowledge, the entire Senate screen, where it has the people on the left and the senate of the right, does nothing and has no effect at all on the game. Many people think this has something to do with the Civil War, but it was proven not to.

47:40: I saw stuff about Triumphs there. Triumphs were meant to be a big part of the game also, gaining triumph points for conquering cities. (I even had a possible hint from an RR dev that triumphs could have had something to do with the Civil War mechanics) I think a player would get 5 points for taking a wonder, 15 for defeating a faction, and 25 for landing in Britain + many more.

48:16: Just a minor point, but it mentions Macedon being playable after playing as the Brutii, but Macedon was never made playable - unless you modded it in. No clue why.

57:00: I think I recall something about Hostages being in the files. There was certainly decimation stuff that got cut, and some su***de animations.

58:00 There was an entire food mechanic which got cut. Each unit cost a certain amount of food upkeep. How food was meant to be made is unknown.

1:02:12: I recall there been an icon for that in the files. And a lot of the stuff that continues to be mentioned also likely exist in those areas - but the icons are difficult to decipher.

1:09:51: I recall, but cannot remember where from, that the large temples in the cities appeared to be able to support units - hence why they had stairs going to the top on the release build. Just another thing that was sadly cut.

1:21:12: Shame that naming cities feature got cut, because it was almost complete. I think modders were able to find the files for this and finish it. And yeah, I think it is in Med 2.

There's so much more small, interesting points here. Thank you for sharing, this is finally the confirmation that I was right on so much stuff.
As someone who grew up on Civ 3, a lot of the lost features are 100% Civ 3 inspired. Naval battles were meant to be incredibly in-depth also. We have the stats and everything for them. In the Version 1.0 Navies are incredibly broken - the AI just spams them constantly - to the point where there are more ships than troops. Clearly it seems navies were rushed at the end, resulting in everything being cut.

[Warmaker]

"The battlefield is derived from the terrain of the tiles on which the battle takes place" <---- This is something I feel isn't talked about enough compared to how later Total War was, even by Empire's time in the late 2000s, never mind later releases like Warhammer. In RTW, the map your battle takes place on depended on where you were in the campaign map. Were you fighting around the mountains? Then you got a very mountainous, hilly map to do battle on. Battle takes place in the open desert or plains? Then the map was a lot more level. Bridge / River crossing? Then you got a bridge map.

Example: I remember playing Rome Total Realism and campaigning against the Gauls. I attacked a Gallic army in the mountain passes between modern day Italy & France with my Roman army. My spies informed me that not only did I have numerical superiority, I had outright better quality in infantry and cavalry.


There was only one problem... The Gauls were defending in the mountains. The map generated featured mountainsides, huge hills with steep slopes. The Gauls were sitting atop a massive hill, waiting for me. I had the superior, larger army but I knew this was going to suck.

My heavy infantry slowly made their way up, exhausting themselves as they did so. My archers and slingers were useless. My superior cavalry force was useless as mobility was nullified and the horses were exhausted going up. The Gauls were throwing javelins and firing arrows from the top of the hill with devastating effect. When my heavy infantry got closer, they were exhausted and the casualties had already mounted. The AI finally sent the infantry charging downhill at me and I watched my line get stuffed and pushed back downhill.

I still won but the cost in casualties were severe.

On the flip side to that experience, I turned this to my advantage fighting in the Near East. I was campaigning as the Romans and fighting Parthia. I scoped out a lot of armies of theirs with powerful cavalry and horse archers. If I went to say, Parthian territories in modern day Iraq, I'd be fighting in the desert, out in the open where my heavy infantry focused army would have a tougher time. But I lured the Parthians to fight me in hills and mountains of Asia Minor. Now my infantry army on defense used the rough terrain to its advantage, nullifying the far superior Parthian cavalry.

Later Total War games no longer had this. Even Shogun 2 for all its great things no longer did this. It really became clear with the engine transition for Empire that it was gone as all battles took place in overall flat terrain.

This loss of feature for Total War was massive to me. One of the things with military history is hearing how generals tried to choose the battlefield they will fight on for their advantage. Rome 1 had this.

[SerbianLifter]

Ah yes, basic features behind DLC.
I see they've learned from Paradox Interactive.

Totally not an act of pure desperation fueled by hubris and greed.

[TheSuperappelflap]

Being able to build new settlements and have multiple resources for construction and unit recruitment sounds like a pretty cool thing to me, if it is added on top of a complete total war game and not replacing existing mechanics. Like the chaos dwarves in wh3 using multiple resources. That faction is quite fun to play and a bit more in-depth than vanilla. Now if they made those resources local (besides from the unpaid interns in each province) and had some actual logistics mechanics, I would play that game a lot.

[chuckb]

Back when R2 came out the creative director was supposed to come to the CA forum to explain some issues with Rome's launch. This engagement was cancelled and I asked on the forum why he couldn't "creatively direct his way to a computer with an internet connection to explain this mess" and was permanently banned.

[laserprawn]

A game design document is technically supposed to detail, at a high level, how each feature is supposed to work--not just announce what a feature is. A lot of 2000-era GDDs seem to be written like this, by game designers who are really producers, who don't really know how anything is supposed to work, and leave it to other people to figure out what is actually feasible. What you have here is not really a GDD, but a big shopping list.

[greensoldier]

The thing that drew me in as a kid was the spectacle and the grandeur of the battles.
Now as a man child adult what draws me in is the attempt to recreate historical behavior. You read History of the Wars by Procopius and the entire first part is about the Byzantine-Sassanian squabble. You read about generals besieging cities, battle plans, diplomatic relations, how the Persian rulers tend to consult their court magi and you can't help yourself but want to experience something like that. I think this is what the OG Total Wars were trying to accomplish. You can clear see it with Medieval 2's aesthetic, the game feel very ethereal when you line up your troops and their armor is shining, the general is doing a speech and the music is getting you in the mood for battle.
This design document might not be a very good one but you can clearly see that these guys were trying to achieve something big and innovative with Rome 1.
It's a shame honestly, NuTotal War is just number pumping, I have more fun on the calculator than in Rome 2. It's just a spectacle without depth.

[Dolfy]

A scary thing that people really take for granted was that this is November 2002 when this doc was passed, I assume created around August/September 2002 when Medieval was done. It's not 2 years before launch but the game was already supposed to ship from its initial launch schedule and then release for 2003 but thankfully Activision delayed it to late 2004. CA were also extremely close to bankruptcy back then, one interview mentioned that they were just days before bankruptcy.

[peteruk]

CA going to target fanbase for each licence they can get. Warhammer, Star Wars, Lord of the rings, Dune, Game of thrones, Marvel. Selling games based on pop culture. Their survey even showed pop culture polls to reflect that. They are now going to falsely think Pharaoh failed solely based on it being "historical", so they're going to assume fantasy/sci fi will be solution going forward.

[Volound]

"Music
Continue what was begun with Medieval and make the music as dynamic as possible in terms of responding to the state of the game.

Music for the game should be suitably epic in feel. The movies Spartacus and Gladiator are obvious models for the kind of thing that is required. "


mission accomplished?

[smolpp]

its amazing how the exact same thing happens regularly in my soon ex company. different field but the project management has exactly the same issues management refuses to plan realistically because most projects turn out fine after months of overtime and shitty quality delivered to the customer by corner cutting.

[ThethRonin]

Volound, I'm happy to leak to you the current CA design document.
Here it is: Imagine Cartman's line from "Into the Panderverse", but replace "chick" with "Warhammer goblin".
That's the entire document.

[Shiro.]

Why they didn’t implemented the old cut content into the remastered? It would have been like doing a movie and someone wrote you the whole script already

[Warmaker]

Fun comment about the former dev saying the original RTW trailer was just as bogus as Rome 2's. CA was just lucky that RTW was spectacular, so that tactic worked. But it didn't work for CA with Rome 2 because the game was not good. They couldn't point to a fantastic game to shield them anymore and players were angered and looking for blood.

Also interesting to see the design intent for 2 turns per year and you commenting that your generals got old quickly. Vanilla RTW was fast. The 2 turns per year was too fast for some of us when the game came out. 4 turns per year mods started appearing and became core to others like Rome Total Realism.

[metaflight]

Not finished watching, but its so interesting how even with multiple good games still in their future, you can see the tendencies that'll eventually lead to disaster for the franchise.

You can see which individual guardrails that prevented it from happening earlier (people who made the orginals correcting course, activision giving them extra time) will disappear over time. Nothing happens in isolation. Everything exists within a context.

[MasonDixonAutistic]

This reads as if some people at CA were trying for 'lightning in a bottle' without realising they had already done it with Shogun and Medieval. Everything that Total War was and should have become would have used those as the basis, and explored the areas which those games themselves highlighted as having opportunities. What instead happens: they look at so many other games, games which are adjacent in terms of genre but are not like Total War.

There is the context of the time to consider; this was just past the halfway point of the PC gaming golden age and companies were doing radical things with games that smashed genres together or challenged the idea entirely: Sacrifice by Shiny Entertainment, Giants: Citizen Kabuto by Moon Studios, Hostile Waters by Rage, Deus Ex by Ion Storm. All of those were great games, but they all failed and yet they're fondly remembered. Total War was almost something entirely brand new, because no one else thought to properly try representing and simulating battles in games the same way as had been done in films. It did well enough for follow-ups titles to be made, where the other experimental but mashed-up games did not.

This idea still remains grossly under-explored, and it didn't need any gimmicks.

[LazarusWilhelm]

31:55 I'm pretty sure succesfully completing SPQR missions does make them more likely to appoint faction characters/generals to the Senate, which gives those little buffs. Really wish they didn't ditch the RPG mechanics.

[charlesransom]

If I wanted to play a C&C game, I’d play C&C 3. If I wanted to play a AOE game, I’d play AOE 2. If I wanted to play a TW game, anything Shogun 2 and back I’d play.

[ahmedabdolghani]

The scot is back!
CREATIVE ASSEMBLY DELENDA EST!

[Sanglaine]

The ice cracking thing is a pretty neat idea. I remember that in C&C Tib Sun they have that and if you have a line of heavy units going down a riverbed with ice that at least one of them will accidentally sink and be lost.