Review: Empire Total War
My men are spread across the continents of the world. In India I have secured a small province and am beginning to work my way into the heart of the country. An alliance with the Maratha Confederacy has given me the chance to expand without problems, but that alliance might break soon depending on how the next siege ends. In America, my large regiment has secured a province I lost to Indians more than twenty five years ago. With my technology now allowing line of fire, bayonets and diamond formation cavalry, the Indians who were foolish enough to declare war with me are now being swept away by my superior forces. My grip in Europe, particularly the Baltic Sea, has meant that I have been able to build a strong Navy to protect the British shorelines. Many factions have now joined my as protectorates, fearful that I might choose to attack them. A steady relationship with Russia means that Poland has the threat of being attacked on two sides should it ever dare declare war on me or my friends. France, dear dreaded France, is surrounded by enemies and now I choose to attack it with armies that it cannot hope to match.
Ship overboard!
It sounds all glamorous, doesn’t it? Empire Total War successfully recreates the grand and epic stories of warfare during the 1700’s. Yes, it’s Sharpe all over again. You can’t help but hum the theme tune, can you? Though the campaign and warfare is still the same as its predecessors, the scale has now changed. Europe is a huge expanse of different faction, all with their own plans for domination of territories. As Britain, my job was to secure America and prepare for a war with France. I deviated from this however and chose to fight against the Swedish, who had attacked one of my ally’s. It was therefore a case of jumping in and defending my ally from the evil Swedish, but unfortunately before I could even start I needed to have control of a province on Europe. I therefore attacked Prussia, since I was already at war with them, and took control of one of their provinces.
The campaign map for Empire has changed; no longer are you expected to manage everything within your major city. Instead each province contains a variety of either industry based technologies, churches, universities, or public gardens inside them. These can accumulate wealth for your empire, or can bring stability onto the province by raising the happiness level, or allow you to add extra research tasks onto your research queue. Some provinces are void of such things, and as you play you soon start to learn which province is likely to supply you the riches you so wish for your kingdom. In the end, it’s all about wealth and research, for with money you can start to build larger armies and maintain your ever expanding empire and with more Universities under your control you can start to research into more options. Taking a page from Civilization IV perhaps, Empire Total War now allows you to research specific technology trees for the Empire. These range from Military technologies, to ones that can advance your industries, or can cause revolutions to create different governing systems in your country.
"Does anyone know who is winning?"
Other methods of gathering money include controlling trade nodes on the coasts of Brazil or South Africa. Controlling these can be highly advantageous, but also run the risk of being blockaded by navy ships that belong to countries you’re at war with. Naval warfare plays an important part in this; trade routes connecting to and fro between your nations can be attacked by warring factions, simply by sitting a ship on the trade route in question.
Naval warfare is the new backbone of this game, and things have changed much like in history. You can now fight in beautiful scenario maps against other opponents, and you’ll soon learn that a large navy nearly always beats a small group. Where you might be able to perform stunning feats of commanding with a small band of forces against an impossibly large force on the land battles, in sea battles this is highly unlikely. The objective of sea battles is to work with the wind and place your warships in such a position that they are constantly firing volleys of cannon shot at the enemy. Doing this though is a very difficult task, and players might become put off by the difficulty of attempting to work around the wind and set up your ships to shoot properly. My experience though was quite good; I successfully managed to destroy an entire fleet of pirates and capture a couple of boats as well. If you play the naval warfare, there’s a higher chance that you can capture ships than not playing the scenario. In the end though it’s up to your experience of the combat, and I’ve found many a time that larger fleets will always win against smaller ones.
Land battles meanwhile have also changed, particularly in formation methods. With the earlier games it was simply a case of rushing your men into large battle lines of swords and flails and death and blood, and then just praying your men are more than up to the task. Empire Total War though is different; most infantry use rifles from the very start of the game (this is the 1700’s after all, none of that bows and arrows, what what!) and direct combat is usually performed by your cavalry who sweep in from the flank or rear of an enemy formation and cut down the force until it surrenders and retreats.
Must be Britain we're in, it's pouring.
Suddenly it’s no longer a case of rushing your men into the fight with archers behind giving you covering fire. You now need to deal with setting up formation lines. Luckily Empire shows your line of fire with a transparent arc shooting out in front of the unit. Set up your formation to the direction you wish to fire at and away you go. It sounds easy enough, but the AI has improved in how it reacts. It will attempt to set up formations that will shoot into the side of your formations. Suddenly you have to consider creating zig-zag formations to stop bullets being fired into your men from the flank.
In a way, Empire has become more interactive than its predecessors. You constantly have to move your lines about for a slight advantage in combat, especially if you’re fighting against a faction with equal technological power. Artillery plays an important part in attempting to block or shift the enemy force to a desirable location. Or you can always switch the ammo to a shot that can bring down an entire unit. Personally my favourite tactic so far is using grenadiers, large riflemen with grenades. These men can cause a large amount of damage to one unit via there grenades, and it’s great to see an enemy unit disperse because of them.
Sadly, Empire Total War isn’t without its glaring and frankly appalling faults. Entire sections of the game seem broken and it begs the question as to whether or not Creative Assembly employed a proper testing team to find these bugs, or if they simply didn’t care. The obvious technical bug of the game is that the AI is still quite stupid on the campaign map. In navy situations it seems to suffer from amnesia, one province sending wave after wave of ship to block one trade route when only one unit is necessary. Other problems include trade nodes being bombarded with other faction ships around them, expecting you perhaps to move off the trade node. Nobody attacks though, and similarly you can’t move off a trade node once you have control of it. A bug I noticed when playing was one that can break your game and force you to have to go back a couple of saves to restart. Graphical bugs also exist. Moving about on the campaign map with the keyboard makes the movement jittery, while the mouse movement is slow to respond. Combat maps sometime slow down to game breaking speeds of five frames per seconds, a pretty slide show in the end. It’s infuriating and stupid considering that this is the fourth iteration of a Total War game. Surely Creative Assembly knows what to do now?
Graphically the game does require a recent computer to run. The computer used for play testing was a 3 GHz quad core processor, 2 GB RAM and an 8800GT graphics card, and everything ran quite smoothly on high settings.
In the end though, E:TW is all about the stories, the grand glory of fighting against a foe, the knowledge that you performed a decisive formation tactic against enemy units on the battlefield. Whether it’s in the name of Rule Britannia or France of Russia or the factions you can play, Empire Total War is a captivating vast game and a worthy if somewhat unpolished edition to the Total War franchise. At them lads.
Categories: Gaming
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