Empire: Total War
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ESRB:
Alcohol Reference,Blood,Language - Mild,Tobacco Reference,Violence
Publisher: Sega Genre(s): Strategy Home Page: www.sega.com/empire/
Gameplay Woes Cannons and gunpowder units in general play a big role in Empire: Total War battles. The biggest issue with Empire: Total War is that the AI is just... dumb. Diplomacy is still very much crapshoot, with the AI doing things that appear utterly stupid and in a way it feels like a step back from Medieval 2: Total War. In addition to the apparently random decisions, the enemies tend to be very passive, even when a state of war has been declared. On the flipside it seems exceedingly hard to forge alliances with anyone that isn't allied to you at the start. At least the AI doesn't seem to feel as inclined to backstab solid allies as it did in earlier Total War games - even if it may be a side-effect of the general passive stance you tend to get from the AI empires. AI has also some outright bugs - it is completely unable to move troops with ships. In practice this means that the AI is at a massive disadvantage in North America and India as it is stuck with whatever troops it has or is able to recruit on the continent. As you can "exploit" this great ability to "ferry troops by sea", it is fairly easy to crush all opposition in the overseas territories. Oh, the AI will harass your trade routes and you may get a sea battle or two, but it just can't do naval invasions. This makes it impossible to actually lose in the campaign as Great Britain!
Fort Battles have taken a big step back as well. They weren't perfect in the previous game, but at least they were remotely sensible. In Empire: Total War you get silly things like Native Americans with massive stone forts and the unit pathfinding AI seems to go completely bonkers around forts, doing completely pointless maneuvers and generally seizing up when a fort is present. There are also some related issues like the inability to fire into the courtyard from fortress walls you have taken over - the only way to attack the defenders once the walls are taken is to storm down the stairs to the ground level, which always degenerates into a melee - the units just refuse to fire from their elevated position. There are also ton of minor bugs like the one that causes the armies to be deployed on the wrong side of the tactical battlefield when compared to the location on the campaign map. This also means that any reinforcements may appear from a silly direction as they seem to arrive from the correct side. In many cases this is not a huge deal, but it can be very annoying when fighting at a river crossing or on hilly terrain and having to fight from a poor position because of this bug. AI reinforcements also sometimes appear to be fairly confused and might end up sitting idle after entering the battlefield, doing nothing until you decide to kill them off.
As for the naval battles, they sure look pretty, but the tactical aspect you'd expect from sea battles just isn't there. I guess in theory small, more manouverable ships should be able to "outplay" bigger ships and fleet formations could alter the end result, but in practice it appears that whoever has the biggest ships and most guns end up tearing down the opposition and any tactical maneuvering has only a minor impact. I'm not qualified to say how realistic that is, but there just seems to be far less room for tactical decisions than you might expect. Crash and BurnSave early and save often (to multiple separate save games) is a mantra you'll need. Empire: Total War has a tendency to crash to desktop with little warning and worst of all you can end up with an unrecoverable position that keeps crashing even after restarting the game, so do not end up caught without multiple earlier saves so you can recover. I personally experienced only a couple of these, at a frequency I would call "annoying, but acceptable", but based on second hand information this is a serious problem for many. Unfortunately there seems to be no clear rhyme or reason what causes the crashes - only that the problems get worse the further along you get in the campaign, indicating serious lapses with QA and playtesting. Late game, once again, falls apart in other ways as well. As the your empire grows, the economic output far outpaces the costs and you end up with massive piles of money - even if you maintain a huge army that eats up tons of money for the upkeep. Part of the problem may be that the economic model is very simple, but the main issue seems to be a simple lack of testing and balancing. Steamworks!On the upside, Empire: Total War is a proper Steamworks game - no crappy SecuROM stuff here. Patching and multiplayer functionality is offered via Steam and you can also collect some Steam achievements - even if they do not really fit the style of the game that well. This also means that even if you buy a retail boxed copy, it still uses Steam for authentication and that means internet connection is mandatory for installation. Still, Steam is the most sensible form of DRM these days, and the ease of patching and all the community features of Steam make it a good deal.
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