I Wannabe A Pirate!

The big addition to Total War this time around though isn’t actually formed around the idea of land battles, siege warfare or gunpowder. It’s based on the high seas, with naval combat.

Naval battles aren’t a small thing in the game either. With the campaign spread across three continents and the obvious requirement for some nations, such as the British, to spread their armies over the water, naval warfare is about the most important facet of the game to master.

Well, unless you have a penchant for playing as the land-locked Austrians anyway, as I do. Don’t ask me why, I just like their flag and have had hours of fun just building huge forces and then throwing them against French fortifications as hard as I can. Flaming pigs may be gone, but the eccentric can still find hilarity in an army of demicannons against a line of cavalry.

For other nations though, boat-borne battles are something that require attention, even if you avoid direct battles and only go so far as blockading ports to disrupt trade or transporting armies and agents across the Channel. Be warned though – if a ship goes down at sea then there’s no way to recover the crew, so valuable agents are best off being protected by a proper fleet rather than ferried large distances in lone sloops.


It’s at this point of course that we expect our readers to be quickly divided. One portion of you will nod your heads, hum sagely about the validity of our wisdom and pause to reflect about how awesome and handsome we are. The other portion will run straight to the forums and ask what the hell a sloop is. You’ve never heard of it or, if you have, you’re not sure what the specifics are. You’d be totally thrown if we asked you which is likely to be hardier in a battle; a third rate ship or a second rate one.

This distinction sits at the crux of one of the naval section's weakest points; that it requires either a fair deal of commitment or previous knowledge from the player. Not at the start maybe, where you can usually assume that the most recently unlocked items in your shipyard are going to be better, but by the later stages it can be crucial to know which ships are good for what.

Newcomers to ship-battles may be tempted to try a brute force approach of course; building multiples of every longboat and grouping them into one single, indefeatable fleet – but it’s not something we’d recommend. For starters, that’s just going to start crippling your framerate more than your enemies and, secondly, your fleet will easily be too cumbersome to control.


This is the second and most crushing problem with naval combat in Empire: Total War; controlling large numbers of ships can be more difficult than trying to explain to the Vicar why you came to church with no clothes on this morning. Jesus told me to, honest.

There are two main ways to attack enemy fleets; the standard method where you right click them and let your ships handle the details themselves, or controlling the cannons more directly and learning how to broadside your opponents. The latter method is more effective and satisfying, but you’ll need to be able to manage the nuances of all your ships individually. Because of the wind your boats can turn at different speeds too, which doesn’t help matters.

If there are just three or four boats in your fleet or if you’ve only got one or two targets to tackle then things are fine, but if you attempt to wade into larger battles then you can be easily overwhelmed by the sheer size of the battle. Pausing the game and pressing space to see where all your crews are moving too helps matters somewhat, but greatly impacts the sense of real-time tactical drama that had always made Total War battles so thrilling.