War Has Changed

You can fiddle around with the campaign over-map as much as you want of course, but sooner or later there’ll come a time when diplomacy will break down.

Empire: Total War has a very robust system for stopping you declaring war accidentally, namely by forcing you into a diplomacy system where you exact trade agreements instead of war, but it won’t last. No matter how many missionaries you send to convert heathen nations to your own idea of the true religion, sooner or later you’re going to have bust some heads.

There are basically three different types of battles, all of which have quick versions that you can jump into from the main menu if that’s your thing, as well as a few historical scenarios. There are land battles, sieges and naval combat – each of which is pretty much exactly what it sounds like.

Ostensibly the way that land and siege battles function hasn’t been changed all that much from previous Total War games. You still have to have an intricate knowledge of your units and how to use the environment to your advantage. This time round it isn’t enough to know just that cavalry is better than infantry or what a phalanx formation is either. This time you need to remember reloading times; melee strengths and which units can use grapnels as well, for example.


When you get right down to it though, the land-based combat is fundamentally unchanged since the older games in the series. At the start of the each battle you’re dumped into a bunch of fields and given a chance to deploy whatever resources you have at your disposal. You’re unable to see the enemy forces though, so scattering your army over the landscape is equal parts of paranoia and clairvoyance.

Where should you put your mortars? Your dragoons? Your cavalry? You’ll need to anticipate the movements of your enemy and play the battle out in your head a dozen times over before you ever get a chance to actually launch an attack.

Even when you do actually start the fight, you shouldn’t expect it to be brutal and quick just because there are guns and cannons on the battlefield either. In reality the battles are much slower paced than they were in the likes of Rome: Total War, mainly because primitive guns take so much longer to reload than arrows. To counter this you’ll need to learn how to use custom formations and firing lines to maximise damage before charging in and switching to melee.


To hardcore strategists this is all going to be fabulous news, of course. Even in the most fierce battles, things still move at a more leisurely pace than they might of in the older, melee-focused games, so there’s more time and focus on strategy than success by superior numbers.

In sieges and land-battles the AI is very much up to scratch too, each time seeming as if it has a very well-established plan for your destruction and only deviating from that when needed. The computer player can’t be easily lured into re-directing cannon fire or cavalry charges just because you’ve managed to get one unit secretly behind their lines – not until it actually poses a threat. At the same time though, one well-placed unit is often more than capable of turning the tide of a battle.

Compared to previous games in the series, it does seem that Empire’s selection of units does suffer from a lack of imagination. There are plenty of different soldiers and artillery at your disposal, but unless you’re willing to get stuck into the real microscopic details then they’re all pretty much the same.

Granted, the selection of units is true to the setting, fits well and is decently balanced even with the slower pace taken into account. Still, we just can’t help shake the feeling that the series has lost something since it abandoned the idea of Elephants versus Flaming Pigs that helped make Rome: Total War so memorable.