This is not be the best in series, but it's worth getting nevertheless. The satisfaction is great.......... Event
Your General rides across the line, issuing his final orders.
Your enemies' formation closes in on yours.
The first shots are fired, and ranks of men drop dead.
The battlefield is covered in thick smoke, musket and cannonballs flying all over, and just as your line begins to collapse, your cavalry emerge from the woods behind your enemy, and charge home into their rear, winning you the battle, and with it, possibly, the campaign.
That's battles in Empire: Total War (and generally all other Total War games as well).
That's not all there is to it, though.
Aside from the incredible battles, you also have an empire to govern, along with it's trade and colonies in India and America.
Battles:
The battles are stunning. Just stunning.
literally thousands upon thousands of men can fight in every engagement (if your machine can support it, of course), and veteran Total War players must learn new tactics and strategies thanks to the shift from the Medieval era to the 18th Century.
You must precisely deploy your ranks of men and artillery to throw as much firepower as possible at the approaching enemy, whilst not spreading too far and being vulnerable to melee charges, you can hide your men inside buildings and behind stone walls that will give them cover.
You must judge the perfect moment to send in that final charge of your Lancers and Cuirassiers (among others) that will break your enemies and send them running for their lives.
You can deploy Native American allies that will sneak around the battlefield unnoticed and open fire on the enemies' flank, assuming you are fighting in the Americas.
If defending, you can construct defences such as spike fences and trenches, and even minefields later in the game to shield your men from bullets and cavalry charges.
There's a fairly wide (sadly not as wide as earlier games in the series) variety of unit types at your disposal:
From the generic Line Infantry and Militia units, to the elite Guards and Grenadiers, Horse-towed artillery pieces and the murderous Nepalese Ghoorkas (from the Special Forces edition), among others such as the Light Infantry and Riflemen, who screen your main line and snipe at the enemy from great range aswell as deploy minefields and anti-cavalry stakes, Dragoons who dismount and fight as Line Infantry whenever you choose (and also give a double public order bonus when on garrison duty), to the Household Cavalry (or Lifeguard cavalry for Absolute Monarchies), the elite of the elite, who can punch a hole in almost any other unit.
For the Indian factions there's also melee units such as Sikh Warriors or Hindu Warriors, or Muslim Swordsmen for the Mughals and Persians, not to mention the deadly elephants!
As you advance through the technology tree (a new feature for the Total War series), you will gain access to more, and better types of units, and buildings, aswell as ammunition for your artillery, such as Explosive shells, who massacre units when they actually hit the right spot, and Carcass, which bursts into furious flames and burns enemies alive, as well as munitions such as the Shrapnel shot, a cannonball that explodes after a set time into dozens of musketballs that can tear units apart. Not to forget the rockets that strike fear into the hearts of enemies with their smokey trails and loud explosions.
A new major addition to the game from previous titles is the ability to command naval battles personally, rather than automatically generating them.
Naval battles are highly tactical and look amazing, especially when there are numerous vessels involved.
Ships range from the measly Sloop of War to the menacing Heavy First Rate, bristling with over a hundred 24lbs artillery pieces, more than most entire land armies. In between there's Frigates, who have the power to easily defeat smaller ships, and the agility to evade the larger ones, Bomb and Rocket Ketches, who hurl mortar rounds and rocket at great ranges and can burn down enemy ships, eventually causing a grand (and very satisfying) explosion, and also Steamships later in the game who can cheat the wind and sail at the same speed in any direction.
Ships have 3 ammo types:
Round shot, the standard cannoballs, who tear apart the ships hull, eventually causing it to surrender, or sink, or even burn and explode.
Chain shot, 2 small cannonballs linked by a chain that rip apart enemy rigging and sails and halt enemy ships dead in the water.
And finally, the Grapeshot, a great many musketballs fired a very close range from the cannon, taking out the enemy sailors (preferably before an attempt to board).
When boarding a ship, you can zoom in and actually see your little sailors and marines duking it out on the decks with their rifles and improvised weapons, and sometimes even Admirals and Captains duelling each other with their swords.
Campaign:
The map has been enlarged threefold!
Rather than just mainland Europe, Britain, North Africa, the Middle East, and Asia Minor, the campaign map now includes all of India, the eastern half of North America and Canada (including the Great Plains), the North Eastern part of South America, all of India and the Persian Empire, all the land east of the Ural mountains in Siberia, and all of Scandinavia and Iceland, as well as trading theatres in Brazil, the Ivory Coast, the Straight of Madagascar and the East Indies.
More than 100 provinces for your empire to annex, and 20 trading points to control!
The game now has NO rebel faction (thank god), and instead now the map is filled with no less than THIRTY different factions, with still more coming up as rebels declare their nation's freedom, rather than the 20 (3 of which are emergent) of Medieval II, for example.
For some reason though, the Pirates are now a faction, and you can easily get rid of them completely by simply capturing the 2 Caribbean islands they control, without having to deal with their numerous and powerful fleets.
There's also a new way of dividing the campaign map. Rather then being divided into major cities, the map is now divided into countries, meaning all of France is one region, aswell as Palestine, Egypt, Anatolia (Asia Minor), among many other areas that used to be divided into several cities.
To compensate, not all buildings are now protected behind the city walls (or forts, in this case), and all resources and towns are spread across the region, and can be raided by enemy forces, which reduces the number of siege battles somewhat, as the enemy will leave it's walls to fight you in the field on some occasions.
BTW, city battles have been removed (NOOOO!!!!), and replaced by either forts (if available) or a small suburb town with the city visible in the distance.
Shame, if you ask me.
Agents have been merged together now,
with the Rake\Hashishim performing all the spying aswell as assassinations,
Gentlemen\Scholars helping speed up research and can also duel and possibly kill other Gentlemen and also Rakes (only Gentlemen duel).
And of-course, the Missionary\Imam, who convert the population to your religion.
No more merchants and diplomats! Huzah.
Diplomacy is now handled from an easy to access screen from which you simply choose any nation to negotiate with, and has been changed quite a bit. You now have to offer a lot of stuff for a different nation to accept even a measly trading agreement, not to mention an Alliance, especially if you have a big empire, as nobody likes too-strong nations (that's quite silly, really. Why on earth would a minor nation with a feeble army and destitute coffers refuse an offer from the world's greatest superpower is beyond me).
Trade is mostly sea-based, and is executed by parking trading vessels (Dhows, Indiamen, Fluyts and Galleons, on trade points in the maps Trade Theatres, and then signing Trade Agreements with other factions to sell the goods.
There's also many goods on land that are automatically shipped to your home region as long as the province, or the neighboring province, have a trade port in them.
Multiplayer:
So far only battle multiplayer is available, but the developers promise a campaign multiplayer in version 1.3 :D
The battle multiplayer is definitely worse that the previous total war games.
You canno't set a custom amount of money to spend, there's a ridiculously small amount of maps (compared to prevous titles), and there should be the option to choose technologies manually rather then simply choosing Early or Late period.
Still, it's fun once you get into the actually fighting, and REALLY have to think about your moves. I've only won barely 4 battles out of over 15, and I generally consider myself an expert in most games I play.
AI:
The AI has been both improved as well as dumbed down.
On one hand, the battle AI can be quite smart sometimes, often sending units to flank your forces and sometimes even retreating to reorganize.
On the other hand, it can be unimaginably, utterly idiotic.
Units will continue just running around inside your field of fire, or run right up to your units and just stand there, and then rout from the number of casualties. On other occasions the enemy units keep tying to get out of each other's line of fire, and in the end they just walk straight into the player's units and start a melee engagement.
Annoyingly, the AI also knows the EXACT range of your cannon, and have a habit of parking their units just feet away from where you will be able to fire at them, as well as knowing just what kind of ammo your cannon are about to fire, and attack\retreat accordingly.
On the campaign map, the AI is unable to sign a peace treaty with other AI factions, and even when left with just one city and no army, still won't accept peace with the player unless offered all the player's technological achievements, unlimited military access, and possibly another region, not to mention a few thousand credit. They are also incredibly reluctant to have anything to do with the player once he started expanding his empire and has gained some power. The AI also fails to put up a real fight. They rarely counterattack or even initiate any attack bigger than a raiding party to burn down some of your farms, and sometimes countries randomly declare war on you just because they don't like you and then do nothing at all to harm you.
The AI is also incapable of naval invasion at it's current state, but the developers promised an improvement in that area.
Performance:
There are many, many bugs in Empire Total War, such as sound issues where reinforcement units are completely mute, gameplay bugs that cause the AI to break when trying to deal with fort walls sometimes, a large delay (possibly even a crash to desktop) when selecting units (although the developers promised those issues have been fixed for the next gameplay patch) and other where ships in formation would break completely and sail in every direction except where you told them, etc., etc.
Many people also complain of extremely long (5 minutes!) load times and AI turns, though I have experiences neither personally, and massive system instability with very frequent CTDs.
The game will also need a supercomputer to run on the higher graphics, and quite stronger than the minimum requirements to run at all, according to other users.
Fortunately, I am able to play the game on High and Ultra settings, as long as Hardware Shadows and Fog Lighting Effects are off on my machine, with the latest hardware of last year.
Advise:
1)Use a mod.
You have NO IDEA how much better the game will become with a mod to balance the game and to fix some of the AI issues.
2)Also, rent the game before buying. You canno't tell if it's gonna work properly until it's too late.
3)Hope for the best :D
talknight2.