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Al Bickham, the studio communications manager for The Creative Assembly, is showing me the right way to go about razing Carthage. The Roman way. On the screen in front of us, a fleet of Roman ships beaches just outside the city and begins to disgorge thousands of centurions, their commanders calling out orders as the massed ranks surge up the sand. As they run to the walls of the ancient capital, arrows rain down on the soldiers and catapult stones and flaming pots soar overhead. As the men dash between siege defences on their way to the gatehouse, I realise I'm watching a classical version of Saving Private Ryan.Carthage feels like a city, too, a Mediterranean capital bronzed by the sun. It has a harbour, it has grand boulevards that lead to the narrow, winding roads of its residential districts and it has great and glorious temples that sit atop a hill at its centre. It's from these that we take a moment to look down upon the carnage that is spilling onto those grand boulevards, filling their gutters with blood. As the walls are breached and the defenders try to slow the advancing Romans, buildings are collapsing, fires are spreading and bodies are filling the streets. It's just another day in the Roman republic.
While Scipio Aemilianus' destruction of Carthage was the climax of the third Punic War, in the broader context of Roman history it's just a paragraph or two in a book. In a game of Total War: Rome 2, it could be but one of many great and terrible battles raging across an empire that spans three continents. It's this kind of grandeur, this sheer sense of scale, that's inspiring The Creative Assembly's developers as they make their next Total War game. They want drama, they want dynasties and this time things have to be big - certainly much, much bigger than the one-nation arena of their last game, Shogun 2.
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