By Alec Meer on May 24th, 2008 at 11:59 am.
A short Making of video for the upcoming Empire: Total War, concentrating on the mo-cap that’s going into the sword fighting. Cited influence? Sharpe. There’s only the briefest glimpse of final footage, but it certainly seems as though they’re increasing TW’s cinematic values enormously.
And what exciting music!
Special Unit: Sharpe
Cost: 0 Requires Wellington General to raise from random infantry unit.
Bonus against nobility and French.
Weaknesses: Women.
Huge morale bonus to any friendly units nearby, automatically stops routing units and forces them to charge at the enemy until all are dead.
Special Formations:
Random Duel. Any officer in Sharpe’s line of sight will be challenged to a duel and will automatically fail. (includes friendly officers)
Dashing Hero: All enemy units lose morale as their wives automatically fall in love with Sharpe and threaten to leave them. 50% chance effect will also be applied to friendly officers.
If wounded Sharpe will be forced to retreat for 60 seconds but when healed will rejoin the battle and be invulnerable until victory.
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You and I know you can fire three rounds a minute.. but can you stand?
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Nice Matt, I’d rather have Flashman as my hero unit though.
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lol Matt.
Incidentally it looks like the ‘pairing off’ combat animations is what you might have seen in the battle scenes of Viking. It looks like CA were trialling a lot of things in Viking to be carried over to Empires.
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Weren’t they using paired animation for some of the moves in Medieval 2?
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Hopefully there will be a Hornblower unit for the high seas.
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Looks pretty great, also, I can’t wait for some proper naval battles.
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I love the music in this. That excites me more than the (admittedly lovely) motion-captured snippets of animation shown.
Also, Flashman would be a wonderful if anachronistic addition. :P Maybe we could have a Buck Flashman hero in the 1800s?
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Actualy I think all the work you saw going on there was for the movie sequences that happen when events trigger (general dies in a duel, spy enters city etc). Game looks great anyway.
Myros
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I am super-excited about this. Despite my inability to ever play more than one complete campaign in a TW game I am now looking forward to this more than anything bar Spore. Everyone knows the 18th and 19th centuries were the best centuries.
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More money on teh pretty, less time on the gameplay eh? Typical sequel.
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If they talked about the AI in the first video, I would be seriously excited.
Since they didn’t… “Skeptic mode: ON” ’till they talk about it.
Meanwhile, I will be enjoying Europa Universalis – In Nomine and Victoria. In Paradox we can trust :)
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Is there some part of the world where “stratagy” is the correct spelling?
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I’m just curious about how detailed they’re going to go into non-colonial powers. (You know, those poor exploited bastards that nobody’s been showing lately.) I’ve always liked the thing that the Total War series does that lets you take history’s underdogs and actually *not* lose.
Like taking over Europe and Northern Africa as Scotland, Portugal, Milan, Poland, or the Byzantines.
Since this is supposed to be worldwide, I wonder if we’ll get to unlock folks like Qing dynasty China or late Edo-period Japan. And I recall someone wanting to play Zulus sometime back. The sad thing is, nobody’s mentioning anything about it. The only thing you hear about is naval combat these days.
So I guess it’ll just be the UK, France, Spain, Portugal, the Dutch, Russia, Italy, the Ottoman Empire, the US, and whoever else was an obvious colonizer in the age of overt global imperial ambitions. I know I’m probably missing someone. And I don’t think Germany was united at the time. Maybe they’ll be unlockable. Or at least the Prussians. One would hope.
But I really would like to see playable non-colonial powers. *crosses fingers*
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In time period covered roughly by Medieval II and its expansions Poland definitely was not an underdog, although it lost miserably eventually. Hence the underdog stereotype. I doubt there will be a polish faction in Empires because the state was non-existent at the time.
Hell, I failed at resisting national sentiments. I despise myself now.
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@Dorian: *cough* You forgot the Austro-Hungarian Empire *cough*
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*cough*
It wasn’t around in the 18th century.
*cough*
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Truth though, its a video about fucking cut scenes.
WTF?
Now if the combat scenes were played out like Sid Meier’s Pirates?(i refuse to use an exclamation point) then I’d give a damn about the dueling scene.
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I’m sure there were lightsaber sound effects in that video…
Alec: At least having Sean Bean would mean the whole cast won’t be bloody ozzies again, like Rome TW.
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Xander, The Austrian Hapsburgs had been around for several centuries, and would still be around until the Great War. What is now Hungary and the Balkans was split between them and the Ottomans. You are correct in noting that the name Austro-Hungarian Empire does not apply until 1867. Austria still went by the name Holy Roman Empire until 1804 when Napoleon usurped the title of Emperor. But it should be pointed out that even after the Dual Monarchy the Empire was still ruled by the Hapsbourgs.
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Thank you for that enertaining history lesson. I’m not sure how it was connected to anything, but would surely have been fascinating had it contained a sliver of inofrmation that was yet unknown to me and/or changed the relationship between my post and the post it was posted in reply to in any way.
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Thank you!Your site is very nice
==
http://www.linkedin.com/in/paulandredevera
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