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By Joe Robinson
After years of wait, Empire: Total War has finally invaded PCs around the world. But did it deliver as promised? The Wire finds out...
For the uninitiated, Empire: Total War is the fifth and latest in the Total War series from the British-based developer: Creative Assembly. Set in the 18th century, Empire takes the series to new heights as you once again take control of a faction of your choosing, leading them to prominence and eternal glory. Like Rome: Total War back in 2004, Empire completely re-invents and revolutionises the series, using another new and improved engine, an expanded game world, and a whole host of other features make this the biggest and the best game of the series.
As the name suggests, the theme of this game is ‘Empires’, and as such you get to choose from 11 of the more prominent European powers of the time, and participate in great land-grabathons that take place in the newly discovered areas of India and the Americas. (Although the Americas will pretty heavily colonised by the time the game actually starts in 1700.) Unlike previous Total War games, where the map was all squeezed into one section, Empire divides it up into three separate theatres – Europe, The Americas, and the Indian subcontinent, with each area nearly as big as each other. The sheer scale of this new iteration can be a bit daunting at first, as you have to watch over your holdings in three separate maps. In addition to these, you have smaller ‘trade theatres’, where there is no land up for grabs, per say, but you can use your fleets to fight for control over valuable trade nodes.
Thankfully, Creative Assembly has streamlined certain areas for ease of use, especially when it comes to empire management. Instead of setting taxes, for example, for each individual province, you set them for the whole theatre. This may sometimes make it hard to balance things between happiness and income, especially in newly acquired provinces. To counter this, extra controls where you can exclude provinces from paying taxes, giving them a temporary boost in morale whilst you wait for your influence to truly take hold.
Whilst the campaign map itself has grown, in some respects it has also shrunk due to the fact that provinces are larger, so in reality it balances out with previous games. Whether this is a good or a bad thing remains to be seen, but it may first be helpful to know what CA has actually done with the provincial system. Instead of in past games, where provinces consisted of a town/castle, and a port for seaside area, this game is split between provincial capitals, towns, and other specialised settlements. Each new ‘town’ can be given a specific task depending on what you build, whether it be research, happiness, industry or religion. There are also other settlements in the form of resource ‘nodes’ which are predetermined and can only be upgraded for better yields. These ‘outlying’ settlements can be taken over temporarily by invading armies without them taking the province, and any benefits that are gained are nullified. Take the big city that serves as the regional capital, and you take the region. The whole point of this set up, as far as can be seen, is to open up the field, as it were. In the age of gunpowder and infantry lines, battles were more often than not fought in an open field but focused on population centres. The new regional set up allows for this, forcing players and NPCS alike to station troops in all of the intractable areas, or send out armies to stop invaders trampling all over the place.
However, old habits die hard, and whilst the AI is programmed to interact with provinces in this new fashion, player habits are hard to shake, and you may, more often than not, find yourself going straight for the ‘heart’, so to speak. This can mean that the lack of provinces makes conquest too easy, especially on the European theatre where this is more prominent.
A lot of other things have been streamlined in Empire as well. Agents, for example, have been reduced to two types, and they are automatically generated so you don’t have to worry about training them yourself. Rakes represent a combined spy/assassin unit, and is one of the few surviving traditions of the previous games. Gentlemen represent another new addition to the game; helping with speeding along research, and duelling/eliminating other gentlemen so that you can stay ahead of the curb of your enemies.
Research is actually one of the two big changes that has come to the series. In previous Total War titles, technology was a very limited concept. Various buildings would unlock various units, and in order to get better units, you would simply build better buildings. This was a simple, yet restrictive method of advancing your civilisation, as it meant you had to make sure your domestic affairs were in order; otherwise you wouldn’t be able to raise the funds needed to train the high-end units. Whilst on one level this hasn’t changed – you still need to upgrade your buildings to get better units – the newly added technology tree helps spread the burden of improving your civilisation, without being tied to expensive building sets. It is a very integrated system, as a certain level of building unlocks a certain level of research items, which in turn can unlock the next level of building, and researching costs nothing but time.
The tree is split into three main areas – Military, Industrial, and Philosophy, and these are in turn split up into certain subsections depending on faction. The improvements are small, but they help diversify nations and help set them apart. In the past, the only thing that separated you from another faction was your unit roster and your colour. Now nations can utilise more subtle and less expensive ways in order to gain a leading edge over one’s opponent, through either increasing economic might, to increasing the effectiveness of one’s army or navy, to more thought-driven advances.
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