It's a busy news day here at Longbow. To followup on Rick's interview with RTS Guru we're excited to finally have the first official screenshots of Hegemony Rome.

The sampling we've got today shows off some of the variety in the terrain from the curving Seine river to the marshlands of the Thames and the dark forests of Germania that the Romans's called the Silva Nigra. If you look closely you can also see some of the new details like the legionnaires on the walls of the Roman city in southern Gaul.

This is just small preview today. We've been trying to fit some PR time into our dev schedule so stay tuned for more screenshots, videos and interviews in the comings weeks and months.

... allies should act on their own ...

More AI vs AI combat is part of the plan for Rome - this will have the biggest impact in the sandbox mode but will impact the diplomacy. At this point the improvements to the diplomacy system are still largely on paper because they get built on top of everything else, but the system in Gold was literally tacked on at the end and we've got a lot of ideas both to expand it and better integrate it in Rome.

Question: what is the unit scale in those screenshots? 20:1 ? and what the maximum number of men will be in each unit?

Although we've made the units notably smaller in Rome to allow for more battlefield manoeuvring room, the actual scale is still well above 20:1 since we need to keep the units visible from a distance and with a map almost 1000km across we still want to keep travel time reasonable.

As far as the number of men in a unit, we are hoping to increase it somewhat and one of the recent screenshots shows a unit with about 50% more men than what was in Gold. However, we're also working on significantly improving the AI for individual men in terms of formations and collisions and the extra processing time this requires puts a limit on how many guys we can have present in the game at once.

Am I seeing some variation in the models? Half the units moving through the trees in the fourth screen seem to have brown hair while half have grey, nice touch!

Yep, units in Rome support multiple faces/hair and shields per group. We've also implemented a new animation system that supports a lot more variety so you'll see the units walking and running in different ways which we're hoping will help convey the lower discipline of the non-Roman factions.

will the units on the walls have thier own animations and different shield designs, because in the picture they all had plain red shields.

ok, you caught us on this one. The shields weren't quite working when i took this shot but I didn't think anybody would catch it at that distance. The units on the walls will have all the features of the regular units including multiple faces and shields. They share some of their animations with the regular units but will also have a few unique ones. For Rome we've switched to a new animation package (3DS Max for Rome vs Lightwave for Philip/Gold) which makes it a lot easier to have more animations.

i believe roman units all had the same shields per unit....

Yeah, the romans are much more uniform than the Gallic or German forces and my understanding is the romans did mostly use the wings and thunderbolt design; however, I've found a few variations on that design and we were planning on taking a few liberties to help differentiate the different legions like the 5th vs the 10th for example.