TOTAL WAR: SHOGUN 2 – Enhanced for Intel® Core™


SUMMONING UP THE SENGOKU JIDAI IN


Samurai grab your swords: the Total War game franchise is heading back to Japan for it’s next strategy sequel. By Adam Oxford


I 10


t’s a warm spring night, and the darkness has stripped the clouds of soft pink cherry blossom of their colour. The only lights are flickering pools of yellow thrown from oil lamps which illuminate the courtyard of the 15th Century Japanese palace. Visible in their glow are tens of thousands of soldiers in lacquered leather battlegear, their highly polished dou reflecting back the flames. This isn’t the opening of a new Ang


Lee film about love and combat during the Warring States period - or Sengoku Jidai (1467-1573) - of Japan. It’s a typical pre-battle sequence from the latest PC game in the Total War series, Shogun 2. Eleven years ago, Horsham-based software developer Creative Assembly took the emerging genre of strategy gaming and redefined it on an epic scale with campaigns that spanned centuries and battles in which you controlled thousands of men. The game, Shogun:


Total War, put you in control of one of the families of Sengoku Japan, fighting to rule the country by winning control of one territory at a time from your rivals. Eleven years and five sequels later, Creative Assembly is returning to its original source of inspiration for Shogun 2. Like its predecessor, this is essentially two games in one. You begin looking at a campaign map, from which you must oversee the dynastical ebb and flow of your empire by building cities, recruiting armies and keeping an eye on your heirs. From the same screen, you can deploy special units like ninjas and undercover geisha spies to disrupt your rivals’ progress.


When two armies clash, however, the action moves to a 3D battlefield on which you manipulate vast forces of samurai, archers and ashiguru. Up to 50,000 soldiers can be on screen at any one time, but this isn’t about micromanagement: you issue orders to formations, rather than individual units, of men.


The atmospheric nighttime battles are only one of the many ways its technology has improved over the


Military Times in association with Intel and Total War: Shogun 2


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