Flying Squirrel entertainment has announced that they are working on a five hundred player game based on the American civil war.

The game, Battle Cry of Freedom, is going to be historically accurate. So all of the uniforms, weapons and scenarios will all be historically based on the American Civil War. There is going to be a large variety of player controlled artillery available, like mortars and cannons, each of which can use special ammunition types. There will be an engineer class who can build barricades, trenches and explosives and a musician for when you feel less violent. Lastly, the maps will be entirely destructible when it comes to fences, buildings or whatever is in the way.

In addition they are going to use real war civil war music, all the maps will be historically accurate recreations, there will be a regiment focused system that helps players join up with their unit, there is a goal system that assigns squads with specific objectives like supporting fire for artillery and there will be an engagement mode that is basically a historical objective mode.

Earlier this year Flying Squirrel Entertainment released the multiplayer focused Napoleonic Wars for Mount and Blade: Warband, which sold rather well with around 200,000 sales. With that game they unleashed two hundred players into early 19th century line battles that involved muskets, artillery and a customize-able battlefield.

Mount and Blade: Napoleonic Wars having two hundred players was pretty hard on their servers, so Flying Squirrel Entertainment has quite the challenge in front of them to make five hundred player battles without all of the lag. However, they are using a different engine this time around and they are entirely focused optimizing the game so it won’t needlessly load what the player cannot see. They are already reporting successful tests with up to three hundred and fifty players, so they have plenty of time to work on getting five hundred players to be manageable.

They plan to release the game in a year but, unlike Napoleonic Wars, this standalone title is being crowd funded by the fans and they are taking donations on their website.