Creative Assembly’s award-winning Total War games combine deep turn-based grand campaigns with epic real-time battles, alongside many intricately crafted systems.   

For much of the franchise’s history, in-game advisors have provided tutorials and introductions to these systems, helping players master the complexities and nuances of each title. Using Total War: PHARAOH as a testbed, Creative Assembly is experimenting with a new, dynamic AI advisor, powered by NVIDIA ACE, that will assist players in learning the game’s many systems and mechanics. 

NVIDIA ACE is a suite of AI technologies — spanning models, developer tooling and on-device inference — designed to help studios build knowledgeable, actionable and conversational in-game characters. 
 
The Total War: PHARAOH AI advisor is powered by a small language model, running locally on the user’s GPU. ACE’s developer tools were used to build the pipeline that connects Total War’s extensive game data to the model. 

Together, these systems deliver real-time, context-aware guidance that adapts to what the player is doing, while staying in-character and faithful to the game’s lore and time period.  

This early prototype is part of a program to research how Creative Assembly can make Total War more accessible to players of all skill levels, without losing any of the depth that has defined the franchise for over 25 years.  

There are currently no plans to introduce this in Total War titles, or to utilise generative AI for creating in-game content. Creative Assembly is looking to run a limited test to further assist their research efforts.