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Empire: Total War

First Steps to World Domination

For newbies, Empire: Total War starts out with fairly good tutorials. There are two simple tutorials to introduce basic land and sea battles and then you are offered a four-part campaign, "Road to Independence" as an introduction to the game mechanics.

Introducing newbies to the basic concepts of the real time battles.

Road to Independence - the four-part tutorial campaign.

"Road to Independence" starts out extremely simple, holding your hand at every point and introducing each gameplay concept in stages. Early on, you fight for the survival of the first European settlements in the New World but the campaign fast forwards between each part and in the end you get to push British troops back to sea as the independent United States of America. Total War games have sometimes been hard to approach for a newbie but Empire: Total War is easy to grasp even if you have never played any Total War games before.

Grand Campaign does toss you straight to the deep end of the pool, but at least you get a clear set of goals to go for. Each playable nation has its own "story" of sorts that reflects the real history and the gameplay experience varies a lot based on the faction you choose for play. There are numerous additional minor nations that dot the map as well, but this time you can't unlock any of them for play (at least without some modding of game files, which is unofficially supported)

Gameplay Improvements

Empire: Total War gameplay has been simplified in some ways when compared to the earlier games of the series. For example, the whole royal family tree part of Medieval 2: Total War is missing from Empire: Total War. No more royal assassinations or scheming with arranged marriages. Depending on your point of view, one could consider this as streamlining the gameplay by concentrating on core features and a good move. Alternatively, it could be considered as a case of cutting off secondary features that couldn't be finished in time for release - bits and pieces of this game concept are still present in game files, but for whatever reason the feature was dropped at some point during the development.

Kings also no longer take part in combat - they just sit in your capital province until they kick the bucket and get replaced by a heir. Part of the reason may be that in Empire: Total War you can actually end up with a revolution and a democracy. You do get a cabinet of ministers that give you bonuses based on their abilities and once the days of absolute monarchy are over, the only way to get them replaced wholesale is through elections (in which case you get a whole new bunch from the opposition, which may or may not be an improvement).

Diplomacy - the art of getting your enemies to fight each other. At times feels very random.

Directing the research efforts of your nation.

On the campaign map, everything is no longer concentrated to a capital of a province. Instead, resources are distributed around the region and each minor settlement can be plundered separately to disrupt the region without actually sieging the capital. This means that you have a lot of individual settlements to cycle through to build improvements - unless you decide to skip the whole empire building part and letting the AI handle the construction of improvements. Taxation can also be automated, allowing you to fully concentrate on building and managing your armies and navies. Even technology research continues automatically on the path you have picked in case you don't feel like tweaking what to research next.

Non-combat units have been condensed to Gentlemen and Rakes. Gentlemen can be used to boost research or take out opposing characters honorably in duels while Rakes handle all the cloak & dagger stuff (including the bits where that dagger is applied to the back of an enemy general). For combat units, the recruitment and reinforcement is simplified - if your army has a general present, he can recruit additional units right on the field and they'll automatically join the army from the closest available settlement that can recruit the unit in question. You can also directly pay gold to reinforce damaged units back to full strength.

Overall the campaign map play does feel faster and easier to grasp than before, but for some all this "streamlining" translates to a "dumbed down" experience. I generally didn't mind the simplifications, but hardcore Total War veterans may disapprove some of them.

Page 1: IntroductionPage 2: GameplayPage 3: Gameplay, cont.Page 4: Visuals and PerformancePage 5: Summary, Scores

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