Seems most people say that napoleon was the better version, and basically what Empire should have been in terms of stability, AI and general un-wonkiness.
Personally I find the game a mess, but I’ve iterated that enough times I think to start yelling out my complaints again.
Co-op campaign, goddamnit.
Wouldn’t co-op just exacerbate the game’s most glaring fault, the bad AI?
It’d distract from it, because I’d be messing around with a friend, having a great time.
I’d like to read it.
As requested!
I went into Empire: Total War (“Empire”) with very low expectations. I had read the horror stories about bugs and horrendous AI, heard the jokes about “Empire: Total Crap”. My interest in the game’s concept made me throw it in at a hefty discount when I bought my new PC, but even as I sat down to install it, I wondered why I had been so quixotic.
I was very pleasantly surprised.
Disclaimer: I have not played one turn of vanilla Empire. Virtually all my experience with the game has been with the Darthmod Ultimate Commander mod (version 6.0, “enforced edition”), whose forum is here: http://www.twcenter.net/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=1126, installed over the 1.6 patch. I have played a couple of custom battles and a single campaign as Great Britain from 1701 to around 1730 (I put the game down after I captured all my victory provinces).
Now, my previous experience with the Total War games was that the campaigns were incredible fun early on; I really did feel a heroic general when I led small kingdoms and hastily improvised armies to victory against overwhelming enemies. Then the games abruptly wore out their welcome, as the horrible AI (papered over by a cheating computer player), hassle-filled strategy layer in which it took forever to build up cities, and an excessive number of tactical battles (it was that or allow your armies to be chewed up by the auto-resolve) took their toll.
Empire changed that. The battles have less impact, literally and metaphorically. Battles are now principally decided by fire rather than shock, and while still splendid to behold, seeing lines of infantry volley at each other nonetheless lacks some of the thrill of watching hastati tear into a barbarian horde. Yet I grew used to this soon enough – and a cavalry charge to the flanks is as spectacularly decisive as ever. The AI is bad, yes, in that it almost invariably attacked my positions in every battle (even sometimes abandoning its stakes and trenches!)… but then again, I almost invariably showed up with artillery superiority, and the one time I had no artillery and the AI was the defender, it was perfectly happy to sit on the defensive. So I wonder if this was a deliberate way to avoid the problem in previous Total War games in which AI armies would sometimes be happy to stand around as you decimated them with archers or artillery.
But the really big improvement is the strategic layer. I love how so many of the annoyances have been streamlined away: reinforcing armies now takes only a single button-click, a fistful of gold and two turns; agents now automatically spawn; and there are fewer buildings in your cities (no more separate buildings for infantry, archers, and cavalry!) with the income-producing buildings now located around the countryside. Building up settlements no longer takes ages, and I think it helped that I used a Darthmod campaign which starts each player off with a fat war chest, which I promptly invested into my economy. I love the fluidity and emphasis on manoeuvre of troops around the strategic map, given the importance of pillaging said income-producing buildings. I love the emphasis on naval warfare and securing overseas trade routes (again, I think Darthmod helped – ships can move very far, from the British Isles to the edges of the European theatre, in one turn). I love that now it is perfectly viable to focus on the strategic map and auto-resolve most land battles (though the naval auto-resolve still seemed screwy). Again, the AI is bad. When I came roaring into Quebec with a full stack of British troops, I found several half-stacks scattered around the province. If they had combined, they would have outnumbered me by a perilous margin. They did not combine. I crushed them one by one. To counterbalance this, I have seen the AI target my hip pocket by raiding my ports and trade routes, and it does go after lightly held settlements.
Perhaps most significantly, Empire captured the fact that history is so much more than shifting lines on a map. It conveyed to me the sense that I was seeing the dawn of the modern world, and that made me enjoy Empire’s in-game narrative on a deeper level than its predecessors. The Civilization-style tech tree, a new addition to the Total War strategic layer, was a key part of this. Available for research, there are not only better ways of killing others, but also the new doctrines of the Enlightenment. Social progress will speed up research and strengthen your economy – but it will also make the common people unhappier now that they can imagine better lives. Then there are the concrete steps the tech tree provides towards the Industrial Revolution, as you invent the steam engine and the spinning mule. And while pop-ups about historical trivia associated with the current game year are not new to the series (remember the establishment of Buddhism in Rome: Total War or the invention of the clock in Medieval 2?), telling me about the development of something we take for granted nowadays, such as the thermometer or the fire brigade, took it to the next level.
What about the bugs? They actually weren’t so bad for me; I had a couple of CTDs during battles, but that was no different to Medieval 2. Loading a particular saved game would invariably also result in a CTD, but I fixed that by rolling back to the previous turn’s auto-save. The most annoying issue was blurry text, which seemed to be caused by the aspect ratio of my chosen resolution (1440 x 900).
Overall, I really enjoyed Empire: Total War, warts and all. And there were warts, most glaringly the AI – though I haven’t been convinced that the patched and modded AI is any worse than in the previous Total War games. But I think that the improvements to the campaign, in particular, make Empire shine compared to the previous entries in the series, and I think that if two people tried the multiplayer campaign beta as countries that would be natural rivals (e.g. Great Britain and France) in order to mitigate the poor AI, they could have a blast.
Pros: The strategic game is now fun, courtesy of better settlement-building, fewer hassles, the new-found viability of auto-resolving land battles, and last but not least, an improved “in-game storytelling” experience as the world inches towards the modern day.
Cons: Bad AI and bugs.
Conclusion: If you could stomach the bad AI in the previous TW games, or if you can play the campaign in MP (to ameliorate the AI), you could have a blast with Empire.
Thanks guys. Might have to try that DarthMod Mind Elemental, although maybe I’ll just wait another day for Stardock’s Elemental to come out. That should keep me occupied for a while.
That was my strong suspicion, but I am extremely reluctant to give them more money when they haven’t fixed their previous game. I was disgusted at how they announced Napoleon before they had fixed Empire.
Last time I tried Darthmod I couldn’t get the game to start. Sucks, but there you have it.
Just as a heads-up, the latest version of Darthmod, 6.2, is now available.
Thanks Mind Elemental.
I tried loading the game up in my new computer, to see what the darkmod does… and once more the text is pretty much unreadable… I gave up at that point.
Was the text blurry, Razgon?
aye, I’ve had that issue since…1.4 I think - but never before, which is really wierd.
I was wondering whether we could likely trust Stardock to fix Elemental after initial ship. It looks like Empire: Total War is one data point to indicate that, indeed, some games never really get fully fixed.
Fortunately for me I absolutely suck at these games – I don’t play them nearly enough to really become an expert – so broken AI is not actually that much of a negative for me :-)
I already own it and it sounds like the 1.6 patch plus this DarthMod thing would be worth a shot. Maybe I’ll try it out this fall sometime just for grins. Or maybe I’ll actually complete that first game of Civ 4 that I never really got going…
FWIW, after more than a year of being unable to actually play Empire, it now works for me. That said, I haven’t tried modding it and I found vanilla to not quite be my cup of tea, but to each their own. I’ll be cautiously looking forward to TW:Shogun 2, which I’ll probably buy well after release and patching even though I’m sure that means (with their idiotic system of preorder bonus schemes) that I’ll be missing out on the coolest units because the jerks who market this stuff don’t care about customers ;)
(please note the “wink” because the above was a mostly tongue-in-cheek rant; I do understand the financial drive to use such techniques even if I can’t stand the use of them on a personal level)
I just got Empire/Napoleon last week, and I’ve been having a blast. I started with the America campaign, and with vanilla was having a great time. No crashes, and only wart was the insta-turn ships in the naval battles. I only went as far as Bunker Hill when I saw the Darthmod. Loaded it up, and played a bunch of standalone battle and just started a campaign as the Russians. With the Darthmod the land battles were even better with many many new unit types (far exceeding the preorder bonus stuff), and the ship battles where much more challenging with the reduced turning rates.
Overall I agree with Mind Elemental, with the exception that I like the tactical battles better than Medieval. The reason is there is more choice. In Medieval you have manuever of course, and the rock-paper-scissors of the various units. Regardless, many battles ended up as big scrums. In Empire I have more decisions on field of fire, line of fire, and when to stop the volleys and show them the steel.
Anyone else still playing?
I go back to it from time to time. Unfortunately the AI is not great, and made less competent by the better realism mods IMHO which I like to play with, so it’s not so challenging. I do like to play multiplayer when I can arrange it though.
Nope. Too many shitty memories of that game to be willing to give it another chance. It remains one of the worst full-price purchases I’ve made in 35 years of gaming. Almost up there with ET for the Atari 2600.
you’re still reading the thread though.