In a bit of a surprising announcement, Creative Assembly has revealed Empire Divided - a brand new DLC for Total War: Rome 2! As you might imagine from the name, its going to be set during the crisis of the 3rd century, and will feature a variety of new factions to toy around with. More interestingly, however, some of the new factions will be labeled as "Heroic", meaning they will come with elaborate victory conditions, famous leaders, and unique event chains.

Besides the factions themselves, the Empire Divided DLC will also bring in a variety of new features and improvements: banditry, plagues, cults, new general skills, new narrative technologies, updated building chains, new units, and naturally, a whole bunch of balance changes. It seems to me like this is an attempt from Creative Assembly to use the lessons learned from Attila and Warhammer to improve Rome 2, and if so, that is something I can certainly get behind given how rough the original launch was.

Total War: Rome 2 - Empire Divided will be premium content, while the accompanying politics patch will be entirely free for all users. If you're interested in all of the details you should head on over to Steam. Creative Assembly has done an excellent job outlining most of the major features and new units, so you should get a pretty damn good idea of what Empire Divided is all about.

As for the release date, you can expect to see Empire Divided this November 30th at a €15,30 price tag. And as a final note, it is also worth mentioning that you will need to own Rome 2 in order for this expansion to actually function - its not a standalone release like Total War: Attila!