Rome II Total War Teutoburg Forest Alpha Gameplay

Hey, what's up guys? Welcome to THFE Productions. Today, I'm going to be covering Rome 2 Total War. We're going to be going inside what they've shown so far about the historic battle of Tutenberg Forest. So, this battle took place in 9 AD and it involved the Roman legions, 7th, 8th, and 9th legions, led by Quintilius Verus, sent by Augustus to pacify the region. And he was actually betrayed by one of his cohorts, so this is going to be Arminius who betrayed him in the forest. In the end, the Romans suffered staggering casualties. They're forced, they lost many of their legionary standards. They lost 18,000 to 20,000 soldiers, more dead and captured. It was an utter humiliating defeat that drove the Romans back from the regions for many years. And so, in Rome 2 Total War, you'll be taking the command of the legions stuck here in the forest. So, the Roman column was spread out over more than 9 miles in small batches when they were finally ambushed. And here you can see Creative Assembly has made a huge, awesome recreation of the game. So, those of you who are unfamiliar with Total War, it's a real-time strategy game where you build empires, cities, you manage your state, and when it comes down to the battles, you can actually direct them in real-time, as you can see here. So, they've made a huge improvement to the graphics. I really love Roman history and I've always been a huge fan of the Total War series. So, you can see a relatively large size of the units. This is a little bit larger than the standard century. So, maybe it's two centuries put together, maybe it's perhaps it's a manifold size. Otherwise, you can see in the unit cards below, this is an eagle cohort. So, this would be some of the more elite units which had the banners. So, in many of the legions, the first legionary cohort would have the eagle and the standards of their century. But you can see here, on the bottom left, you have stats for each of the units. This is a little bit of a change. I know we had it before, but it's just a new layout. And you can see the unit cards on the bottom right. We get a quick look at this. So, it's not going to be pictures of the in-game models. These are going to be more artistic renditions of the troops. So, as you can see here, here's another feature that they've added to the Total War. It's going to be a strategic map from above. So, you can see you get a good grasp of what's going on with the battle. And you can command your troops around, but you don't get the strategic layout of the land as you can when you go into first person, as you can see here, or third person. So, that's a cool feature that you can zoom in on your troops. And I'm going to contrast this with Rome 1 Total War, which was an awesome game. My favorite game by far that they've made so far. And here you can see, this was early with the games, but it's big, epic landscapes, huge armies. The detail was pretty high for the time, but the animations weren't very varied. And the terrain, as you can see here, is really flat. Take this in contrast with what you see here. They've done a huge amount of detail in terms of terrain, the trees, the time of day effects. The forests are really convincing, especially for this ambushed landscape. And you have bogs right in front of you here that will slow down your movement. And they have new units, so what you'll be seeing over there is some new remodeled units. And they're actually bringing back the war dogs, so you'll see that briefly. Here you can see the Roman legions moving forward. And here, as I said, are going to be the war hounds. So these can be deployed. They move forward. They move quickly. They have a good initial attack, but after that, the commentator said they didn't actually have that much stopping power. Unlike the first Rome, where if you killed off their handlers, the dogs would stay on the field and continuously kill your troops. So they fixed that bug. But you can just see here the level of detail, the awesome sense of scale with all these thousands of troops that you can command individually. You have varied unit types, ranging from all sorts of skirmishing to heavier units to light cavalry, heavy cavalry. And you can see here the morale of the troops is modeled. Each different troop has its own strategic benefits. So here they show off the light cavalry running down some of the Gallic archers positioned up here. So the arrows are similar to what we saw in Shogun 2 Total War in terms of the graphics of them. They will stick in the ground, it seems, for a little bit of time, so that's cool. And soldiers will react dynamically to them. And here you can see some fire arrows being used. But anyway, this is going to be another cutscene from this historic campaign. This is going to be the two commanders facing off. So Varus was the Roman commander right here, and he's off staring at the distance at Arminius, who betrayed him. And in this cutscene, Varus is seen leading off Arminius so his legionaries can escape. In reality, we don't exactly know what happened in the battle. But according to historical documents, we think that Varus actually ritualistically committed suicide at the battle. And although some legionaries did escape from the battle, a large majority of the legions were destroyed. As I said earlier, 18,000 to 20,000 Roman soldiers were killed during this heavily decisive ambush. So here the Roman cavalry is being led off. And you can see just how they move slower in the water, and they look great. The unit detail is awesome. They have variation in the horse types, the armor, the faces of each unit. So you get to know your units really well, and they all can rank up. And it's really cool, the amount of detail. Again, you can see the strategic map coming into usefulness, where you can see the different rows you might want to take to move forward. And here you can see also another feature. Some units can form special formations. So this is going to be the Roman testudo formation. Roman legionaries putting their shields above themselves to keep them from being destroyed by the arrows coming in. And then they break from that formation and face the German charge coming at them. So here, Roman legionaries are heavy infantrymen. They're attacked by spears, so they will, in the end, do well. But what you can see here are the German heavy troops coming in. In the video, they mention them as the berserks. So these were very heavy, fanatic German troops that the Roman soldiers would do well to avoid, especially when they're being harried like this. So you can see at the end of the video, they're moving their troops out, trying to escape the forest. But at the same time, they're being attacked by all sides. So this is going to be really cool. You know, this is going to be in a historic battle context where everything's kind of set up. But you will be able to recreate some of these moments just spontaneously in the campaign if you ambush a group. Or maybe even in multiplayer, they'll have some scenarios where you can have ambush battles. But anyways, guys, this has been a really cool look at the Tutenberg forest. You can see just the amount of detail they're putting into this. And as I mentioned before in the video, this is pre-alpha footage, so they still have a lot of work to do. But I'm just super excited to cover this. I'm a huge fan of this series, and I hope to bring more videos to you guys in the future, especially when this game comes out. I love the gameplay, and I'll bring you Let's Plays and tutorials. Otherwise, I would recommend you check out our Siege of Carthage video and the Factions video that we'll be putting together. So those might not be active or up just yet, but check the links in a little bit, and we'll have those active, and we'll take you through those. Anyways, guys, I've been Oakley Hydeff with THFP Productions. Make sure to like the video and subscribe, and I could not be more excited for this game. Yeah, it's coming in late 2013. See you guys out there.