Video game of the week: Empire: Total War
Cry havoc, and let slip the dogs of 18th century imperialism
Winter, 1778. Four hundred raw recruits shiver atop a snow capped peak, a seething horde of Huron tribesmen streaming from the foothills to drive the hapless invaders from their ancestral home. Wave upon bloodthirsty wave force the desperate men into ever thinner ranks, a sudden cavalry charge threatening to shatter their fraught formation into full blown rout. From nowhere, a counter charge from a handful of exhausted horsemen buys some valuable seconds – time enough to rebuild the line and push the savages back; a scent of victory drifts across the corpse-strewn hilltop.
Meanwhile, across a distant ocean, a faceless ruler toys artlessly with taxation levels, knocking up a shallow menagerie of opera houses and theatres in an attempt to coax the bickering populace into ending their workers’ strike and get back to pumping money into the bottomless pit of the imperial war machine.
This is Empire: Total War, and this example is nothing but a tiny fraction of the delights on offer in this expansive strategy from The Creative Assembly.
The award winning Total War series has long been a jewel in the PC real time strategy crown, but its latest iteration has taken the series into a bold new era – the 18th Century – and has escalated the sheer scale of it all to utterly epic proportions, while somehow managing to retain the kind of accessibility that see many RTS franchises running for the consoles.
Empire: Total War is basically two games in one. Or maybe three. First and foremost there’s the turn based campaign, where you’ll manage the administrative and logistical issues faced by a sprawling global empire. Populations must be kept happy (or at least silent), through careful taxation, the creation of entertainment facilities, or keeping appropriate numbers of troops on hand to keep their pesky revolutionary ideals at bay.
The key to it all is finding the balance. Go too hard on them and you’ll be squawking Libertie, Egalitie, Fraternitie in no time; make their lives too easy and you’ll never have enough cash in your coffers to field an army large enough to protect your pampered populous.
But the meat of any Total War experience is the real-time warfare. The turn-based campaign merely serves to put your RTS endeavours into a perspective, so you become acutely aware of how crucial a victory is when the barbarian masses are tearing down the gates of your last stronghold.
The unique Total War engine is capable of handling land armies so vast they make the Battle of Helm’s Deep look like a gaggle of inbred yokels out for picnic. The widespread adoption of gunpowder in the 18th century transformed the face of warfare then, in much the same way as it now diverges from the more melee orientated designs of the previous games – and is considerably better for it.
Empire: Total War still has the same minute attention to detail, but seems to operate considerably better for it – careful positioning of your troops, their formation and using available cover is essential for ensuring that your soldiers, cavalry and artillery maintain morale when fighting off their enemies. You can still fix bayonets and close for the kill, but there’s an art to keeping your enemies distant when the odds are stacked against you, slowly whittling away until you can snatch victory.
The death of individual troops is not something to worry too much about, but you need to keep a close eye on their flanks and ensure they are sufficiently well supported to ensure that their confidence is never shaken so badly they ingloriously flee the battlefield.
The third part of the game is the real time naval warfare. This is a brand new addition to the series and one that falls furthest short of expectations. You can direct each individual ship in your fleet to combat enemy ships – a task that you may frequently depend on to protect vital trade routes from piracy and rival nations.
Compared to the land-based combat though, it’s fiddly and never leaves you feeling precisely sure of why one move was more tactically viable than another. After a few minutes of trying to use the wind direction for some kind of strategic advantage that never quite reveals itself, you’ll be tempted to give up and use the auto-resolve function instead, although sometimes even this seems peculiarly weighted in favour of even a single, badly damaged ship against a fleet of smaller, faster, fully manned vessels. In battle these too have a tendency to give up and surrender with barely a shot fired, presumably getting scared off by the coarseness of the rival sailors’ language or something.
There are other niggles too, sadly too many of them to just sweep under the carpet and ignore. Long load times are the game’s main issue, often leaving you to reach for the auto-resolve button once more, just so you can get on with playing something. Siege warfare can be a royal pain too, especially when a legion of your troops belligerently refuses to leave alone the single handful of enemies on top of the wall, while other ones are merrily opening the main gates and inviting all their cavalry mates in for free beer and pillaging.
The sheer size of the game might sound more than a little daunting to a new player. Hell, in 900 words we’ve barely scratched the surface – there’s still the technology research tree, agents and spies, and a wealth of diplomacy options that we haven’t mentioned. Fortunately, The Creative Assembly has wisely included a new mini-campaign to ease you into the game. The Road to Independence Campaign gives you a little taster of each of the games various features set against the iconic backdrop of the American War of Independence, steadily increasing the scale of battles and the size of the map, and talking you through the various gameplay mechanics until you get a firm grasp of what’s going.
Series veterans may feel inclined to skip over and dive straight into a Grand Campaign, which is the where the majority of your time with Empire: Total War will be spent. Here you'll undertake a campaign for a nation of your choosing and of varying difficulty, tasked with fulfilling a set of plausible goals before time runs out. A normal undertaking will last for the whole of the 18th century, where one turn is six months of game time.
The Grand Campaign map covers the whole of North America, Europe and the Indian Subcontinent. It’s utterly massive. Suffice to say, it’s going to take a long time before you really feel like you’ve seen even half of what there is on offer. And then you’ll still have the opportunity to play it back with a completely different approach and get completely different results.
To anyone (and we suspect this will include quite a lot of you) who has considered, or even gone as far as buying a previous Total War game but was ultimately put off by its scale and complexity, we strongly urge you to give this one a go.
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The unique Total War engine is capable of handling land armies so vast they make the Battle of Helm's Deep look like a gaggle of inbred yokels out for picnic
| Our Rating |  |
|---|---|
| Price |
WE LOVE
Vast, highly detailed land battlesEpic size and scale
Accessible, but still deep and engaging
WE HATE
Shaky naval combatGameplay bugs
Having to stop playing to write this
WE SAY
Series veterans and budding armchair generals will adore the vastness, detail and accuracy of this ground-breaking strategy. The Creative Assembly may be singularly responsible for a new generation of megalomaniacs.Essential Mobile Apps
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England and Wales company registration number 2008885
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4|09|2009 11:22
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This part is a lot easier than it seems, especially now with free gift sites getting so popular. There's lots of people online who want a free iPhone, Touch or macbook too, so start referring them! You only need to get a few signups before you'll be finished. You can ask your friends or your online buddies. I already got a free iPhone without even having to ask my friends for help - there's lots of people online who want a free iPhone like you! One of the easiest ways to get a referral is to do a favour for a friend and ask them to sign up in return. That way, you both can get a free gift!
Basic rules
Don't break these rules! This is the only reason that you won't get your free gift, so make sure you follow these rules!
- One account per household - don't use a public computer to sign up!
- Use real information - this is a proven legitimate site and they will not give out your information.
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- Don't try to cheat the system. This site has been proven legitimate, and they will catch you if you try to cheat. If you do everything legitimately, by following this guide, you will get a free gift!
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