While I'm knee-deep in my new Shogun 2: Rise of the Samurai Minamoto campaign, the team at The Creative Assembly is back at work on Total War: Rome II after the winter break and Unit Design Lead Jack Lusted came bearing gift with some more details and a few screenshots of the game.

The screenies (that you can see below) showcase a few of the armor models in the game, letting us see what kind of variation Greek and Italian units will enjoy due to the different design of their Linothorax and chest armor. Not only the level of variation is indeed very nice but the detail is on a completely different level compared to previous Total War games.

The most interesting tidbit of information is that the campaign will not strictly follow historical events, but will, like in previous Total War games, rely on the campaign AI to make dynamic decisions. So, for instance, Carthage won't always attack Rome in the same year, as it would lead to every campaign being pretty much identical to the one before. I wonder if this time around the campaign AI will manage to prove really challenging without being overly reckless (and exploitable) or using blatant cheats...Only time will tell, I guess.

We also learn that the same focus will be put on all the factions included in the game (and there will be many), despite the fact that so far we saw almost exclusively assets from the war against Carthage. That's just because the siege of the north African city was the first semi-finished asset that the development team was confident to show to the public, and not because of an actual development focus.

There also will be a degree of height variation between soldiers in the same unit, for the first time in a Total War game. I can easily say that this kind of implementation has the potential to be massively impactful on the overall looks of the game, as previous titles, while very impressive, did suffer from a bit of a "Army of Clones" effect.

Can't say I'm not eagerly awaiting for the game. I can already see myself going back for a ride in the first Rome before it's released, for old time's sake and to massacre some Carthaginians. In the meanwhile, if I can be excused, I have some Taira to slaughter. You can find more details and older screenshots on this thread of the Total War Center forums.