Savegamer

Empire: Total war



So for a while now we have had the great pleasure of looking forward to the next chapter in history, filtered by the frequent need to main burn and kill everything on a scaled down map of what we in the west consider to be the "relevant" parts of the world. Nonetheless as this game is mainly focused around the era of colonialism it is not without surprise. Politics aside, there are some important changes to the core of the game that seem more than interesting. I'm suprised to see there has been a fair bit of ups and downs in the communities expectations, many revolving around the decision to not include the US in the main campaign.

We will now have real-time naval battles, at last! Should your armada collide with another on the turn based strategic map, the game will appropriately present you with a 3D simulation of the battle as have been the case for all other military engagements in the previous games. I predict that this feature will either make or break the game depending on how well they do it. The problem is of course that if you make it too advanced you will alienate a majority of players who are not familiar with the fundamentals of maneuvering ships, Ie taking winds, currents and the poor "handling" these vessels into account as compared to troops or vehicles who go where you click without further ado. The wiki article states that "dynamic weather has a major impact on naval battles", suggesting that it might be quite good.

Make it too simple and you will have a quite bland experience not unlike RTS games where you just drag a box and click the opponent. It will be interesting to see how they manage this. In any case it will be an impressive sight to see multiple ships unload a broadside on the opponents, turning the enemy to woodchips while ramming enemy ships with your own that have been lit ablaze. They key here is to make it properly dramatic and explosive (not literally). Artillery fire has in general been quite a boring part of Total War so far and I found myself frequently pushing the fastforward button, waiting for the ammo run out. They just have to ammed this somehow in a game that focuses mainly on musket and cannon fire.

I'm actually not that excited about the political aspect of the game and nor have I been in any of the previous games. Total War has always been ambitious but in the end, the game is about amassing armies and moving from country to contry conquering. I often found diplomacy to be quite an obstacle as oppoed to a tool when it came to winning. The main villain here is the incredibly random and twofaced AI that would make pacts and alliances one day only to stab you the next turn as soon as you thin your forces on a front. Put bluntly, diplomacy is worthless if your the only one using it.

Aside from that and the battles comes treasury and managing your population as the other half of the game. We used to have some arbitrary control of the taxes in cities, but this was more of a tedious routine rather than a policy. Ie you would click through you cities, trying to push your taxes as high as possible while retaining at least a yellow half-smiley in the happiness field. You then checked against your income charts to see how many more units you could train while still making some cash.

Now we will be givent the possibility to manage taxes for different social classes, of which there will be three different ones. How this will work and effect gameplay remains to be seen, as in the end it still should amount to quelling rebellion while making money rather than some sort of interactive social study where we try to fuel or prohibit different ideologies, as it should be.

The game now also introduces three different types of government that will in some way change the way you play. These are absolute monarchy, constitutional monarchy and republic. To my knowledge, no details have been released on what exactly the gameplay differences will be. But I assume Monarchy will mean more control but angrier people while republic is the opposite and constitutional is the middle option.

But the meat of the game is as always total war. In battles we will now be able to field music playing infantry and on the less merry side, a plethora of artillery, guns, muskets and other ranged types of ranged death. Armies will leave severed corpses and blood splatter, unlike previous games. Hopefully they will capture the total chaos the guns introduced to the battlefield. Historians often talk about how battles in the 1800s usually looked like a huge cloud of smoke and dust with people shooting randomly in the direction of the enemy. Friendly fire and the like was very frequent.

Historical characters will be introduced, such as Charles the XII and while that's a slight taboo in Sweden, it should be interesting to see if capturing Moscow is as hard as they say.
Overall I am thrilled that they introduced this era but of course, it was quite obvious ever since we left Medieval 2. Many are now speculating on what direction CA will take with this franchise, some are thinking early 1900s while others are speculating on an Asian setting with a return to Shogun or ancient China, the latter I think would be more likely an interesting. Will get back to you on that in 2010 or so.