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When they check out the results, the goal is to find surprises. When the team comes back after the weekend, the system has run through turn after turn at super-fast speeds, with multiple AI playing against one another. It’s sort of like It's a distributed system that just grabs spare CPUs and runs the latest build in the background.” “When everyone goes home at night, it takes over their work PCs and uses them for auto-testing. “We've got a really clever system,” explained Al Bickham, Creative Assembly’s development communications manager. That’s in part because of the amount of time the team has spent balancing it. In the tradition of all the great games in the Total War series that had come before it, this latest effort from Creative Assembly felt remarkably solid. The enemy’s artificial intelligence, especially on the high difficulty, stood its ground and at times took advantage of my mistakes.īastiladon concept art. Units that I had never taken control of before behaved in predictable ways based on their size and armaments. So, when I casually call the battles in Warhammer 2 “epic,” understand that I mean to say that they are the tyrannosaur-grappling-with-a-red-dragon kind of epic.īest of all, nothing felt cheesy. In the hands-on demo that I played later, the dragon incinerated my melee troops before falling on my army’s leader to do hand-to-hand combat with his mount.
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Later, other dinosaurs - bastiladon with massive lasers strapped to their backs - would saunter in to mop up the stragglers.īut, not to be outdone, the High Elves eventually called in one of their support units: a fire-breathing red dragon. But there was little reason to stay their hand, as the High Elf formations broke and ran soon after first contact. Those that were deployed in the demo were feral, meaning that after they’d been engaged in combat, there was a certain point when they would stop responding to commands. There are multiple species within the army, including gigantic creatures that look like ankylosaurus or triceratops. “If you'd like to sum up the Lizardmen in a couple of words,” said Andy Hall, the series’ lead writer and narrative designer, “we like to think they're dinosaurs riding dinosaurs with Aztec space lasers.”
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