You could forgive The Creative Assembly for playing it relatively safe with Empire. The foundations of its strategy series are so solid that a shift in backdrops (particularly to one as promising as the age of reason) is enough to draw up the requisite bullet points for the back of the box.

Empire has 12 playable factions, a new focus on ranged combat thanks to muskets, and beefed-up diplomacy options as Europe and the colonies nudge themselves ever closer to a recognisably modern world.

Yet the developer isn’t playing it safe.  An 18th-century strategy game without a convincing naval element would be like an MGS title without windy disquisitions about love and conflict. There have been sea battles in Total War before, of course, but they’ve always been AI-controlled diversions. This time, the oceans have turned realtime.

Playing a short multiplayer skirmish quickly counters any worries about control confusion: a compass beneath each unit shows its direction, while a firing cone shows where each of your vessels is aiming. There’s a short grace period before each battle to allow you to position your ships, and for the rest of the fight they can be drag-selected to move as one, or micro-managed – an option which, when the wind and the roll of the ocean is taken into account, often proves the safer choice.

Movement captures a suitably see-sawing sense of the ocean’s tug without ever leaving craft wallowing or unresponsive. A big part of the appeal comes from waiting anxiously as the seconds tick down as you turn and your enemy slowly creeps into range. The team has cheated a bit for manoeuvrability: sailing directly into the wind will slow you rather than stop you, and there’s no need for complex tacking, but The Creative Assembly is confident that its modding community will have a realistic patch available within days of release for anyone who wants it.

Most importantly, the new battlefield provides new strategies, starting with varieties of shot type. Grapeshot takes out gunners, cannonballs splinter hulls, and chainshot will bring down an enemy’s sails. From these simple choices, a wealth of approaches becomes available: slow your enemy’s reload times, take out the masts to stall them, or just blast away until they sink.

And that’s just the superficial choices. If you can get an opposition boat to catch fire, that will draw the gunners away from their cannon. Pile on the pressure to keep them shooting and the blaze will grow unchecked, eventually igniting the magazine.

It’s one single piece of an elaborate jigsaw of a game, of course, but it’s still satisfying to see naval combat so confidently employed. The Creative Assembly could always be counted on to get the details right, but the ship handling itself is unexpectedly polished, too.

Most importantly, the open  sea brings a new kind of gameplay to the series. The war of attrition has finally been matched by the tense pleasures of waiting for the cannons to reload, for your broadsides to line up, for the wind to carry you to safety. It’s quietly awesome to see how confidently a landlocked game has found its sea legs.