Empire: Total War

knobbicus

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jul 30, 2004
Messages
172
I got this last spring, and started immediately into the Grand Campaign, and was totally overwhelmed with all the stuff that had to be managed. After all, you're basically playing on the entire world. It was too much of a learning curve and I was getting my ass kicked all over.

About a month ago I fired it up again and this time decided to try the Road to Independence campaign, which starts the player out as the Colonial British, then switches to the newly-created United States, and now you're in the Revolutionary War. It turns out that this also has a lot of tutorial elements in it, which I hadn't realized before, and am absolutely LOVING this game. It's great to start with a very manageable scale of lands to administer and defend, and being able to beat up on the British is rather satisfying. :D

It seems like this game made a decent-sized splash when it came out, but also suffered from a lot of bugs. Well, they've got that sorted out, and it plays great and is very stable.

Just wanted to put this back on the radar in case some of you were fans of the series. Excellent game.
 
Thanks. Did they ever fix some of the more annoying issues? (Enemy units retreating forever into your territory with full movement points?)
 
Thanks. Did they ever fix some of the more annoying issues? (Enemy units retreating forever into your territory with full movement points?)

I haven't seen this happen yet. But my territory is so small there hasn't been much opportunity for it to occur. In the cases where enemy armies have retreated, they seem to make a beeline for their own territory. They do seem to take advantage of a lot of movement points, but I didn't pay attention to whether it was too many or not.
 
I recommend downloading the Imperial Splendour mod. It expands on a lot of the features of the vanilla games. It's much more robust, but not too terribly complicated to where it's just no fun.

Aside from that, i really enjoy this game. I just started a new campaign recently (though it's been sidetracked due to Dragon Age) playing as Prussia. Prussia is a difficult country to play, because you have to either initiate war early on, or give up your eastern territory for the time being in order to build up and attack Poland.
 
This game just makes me feel guilty.

I know that I 'should' be playing it more, but I've barely even begun the thing. I bought it on day one, too. It's right here on my shelf. I'd have to say that for 2009 this is my most neglected title. Here's the funny thing though: I actually bought the Warpaths campaign on day one too. My hope was that this smaller campaign was going to get me into the game. That hasn't worked out though.

But honestly, what I've read about Napoleon Total War makes me believe that THAT will be the game for me.

The turns are only two weeks apart, instead of every six months, and now players will have to worry about their supply lines being cut off - that alone is a significant change. These two features will make Napoleon much more of a classic wargame.

Yeah, I might never get around to playing Empire in earnest. There's been a flood of games this year - only a shut-in would complain of being 'bored'. Bored? How could a person be bored with dozens of titles flying at us from all four corners?
 
Got this a couple months ago. Played it for a little while and haven't picked it up since. My number one gripe with it was that structures were no longer all contained in the towns. If you were zoomed in you had to go find the structure you wanted to interact with somewhere in the province/state.
 
I have a love hate relationship with this game. The grand campaign is fun, i started a long one which is 200 turn but my grip is they changed the AI about half way though so i was at war with 3 counties one turn then about 15 the next. I spent the next 40 turns cutting my army's down and recapping territories. I guess it made it more of a challenge but i was thinking "great some updates then ... those fuckers change something." Just finished up about a month ago and it was fun while it lasted.

Unfortunately the MP was total neglected and the update where they added more "choice" for maps was a cheap work around more then a addition or fix to some of the features that where missing, ie what side is attacking, selecting money amounts and a really choice on maps. I don't think I'll be buying any expansion pack since in my mind they don't add enough. Hopefully, they get back to there roots and make Rome2 and finally give MP the attention it deserves.
 
I have to say Napoleon is what I'm looking forward to. After all the reading of the Sharpe books and the Maturin/Aubry series I really think I may have to high of expectations for the game but I'm sure to be buying it day one.

As to Empire, My biggest beef with it was the lesser utility of the spying game verse some of the older games. The patches have made a difference as I just did a play through with Sweden and the game didn't crash once and I found it more of a challenge then I had when I first gave the game up after two campaigns.
 
Back
Top