Empire: Total War review - experience thread

[Brother-Captain Gaius]

Well, if you're taking a sloop up against a 6th rate you might as well just give up and scuttle your ship to save yourself some time. It's like attacking a destroyer with a speedboat.

That said, dismantling shot is pretty wonky. I have had some success with it at times, but usually only when I already have a massive firepower advantage and I'm just trying to take some enemy vessels intact.

[Thanas]

Man I suck at naval combat. Has anyone ever managed to demast an enemy ship? I tried it as a Sloop vs a Sixth Rate (I was the Sloop) - I don't think that fucker ever took any damage to his sails whatsoever, no matter how many close range broadsides I used.

Yes, it works. Even with a sloop against a sixth rate. You just have to shoot a very long time in an inferior vessel, but you can get the job done. Just remember that when dismasting, rake her from the bow or stern. Also, don't use the manual broadsides, just let your guns fire as they bear.

[Nephtys]

Naval Combat is a complete mystery to me. How do you do it?

I try to maintain line of battle when using more than 3 ships, and it just doesn't work. I can't maintain range, and my ships clump up and get in each other's line of fire.

Then, I try to manually set each of my ships at an opposing one. They sit there and get pounded by maneuvering enemies, only turning in place.

Then, I said 'screw this' and manually managed each of 4 sloops against a large galleon. The damn thing takes out every gun I have with a single volley, while my concentrated fire from my ships against her port side only knocks out four of her forty guns before my fleet is crippled.

Is there ANY advantage in manual broadsides? I can't see any.

[Thanas]

Then, I said 'screw this' and manually managed each of 4 sloops against a large galleon. The damn thing takes out every gun I have with a single volley, while my concentrated fire from my ships against her port side only knocks out four of her forty guns before my fleet is crippled.

Is there ANY advantage in manual broadsides? I can't see any.

Taking sloops against a galleon (effectively a small ship of the line) is suicide and you rightly deserved to get your ass kicked.


I always arrange my fleet in two lines and then box the enemy in. It works very, very well. I never lost a single SOTL in the last three battles I had.

[Brother-Captain Gaius]

To expand on the sloop thing...

As any long-time players of the TW series know, half of winning a land battle is bringing a decent army to the table in the first place: you won't win against that stack of Egyptian chariots with 5 units of peasants. Naval battles in Empire are the same.

Strategically, the only occasion I have ever had to bother building an unrated vessel (sloops, brigs) is for transports of bad agent spawns or handfuls of troops around the Caribbean and northern Canada, and these vessels are usually disbanded after they serve their purpose. They are not suitable combat vessels.

6th rates are your fast, light, long-range combat ship and should be considered the "minimum" when building a combat squadron (much like, say, Hastati in a fresh game of Rome - you would not build a field army out of town watch or peasants). Use them for raiding trade routes, blockading ports, and running down unrated vessels. Also good against indiamen.

5th rates are the 6th rates' bigger brother. Long-range and fast, but significantly more powerful and capable of engaging most rated vessels to some degree (just don't expect to win a broadside-to-broadside engagement against a bigger ship). Squadrons of these are useful in the trade theaters and the Americas both for raiding and defense, and for screening your ships of the line.

4th rates are a stop-gap measure. They're technically ships of the line and can serve in that role as your front-line "battleships" in the early game before the heavy duty stuff is available. Also important to use against those damned Spanish/pirate galleons. Otherwise, they become obsolete once 3rd rates are available.

3rd rates and up are your dedicated warships. In this class, speed and maneuverability are consistently inversely proportional with strength and firepower, with 3rds being nimbler and 1sts being stronger. These should form the bulk of your forces in the Atlantic and Mediterranean.

The variants and support vessels are mostly self-explanatory. Of biggest note are the carronade frigates, which are effectively 6th rates with some nasty close-range bite - very useful.

Build your navy accordingly. The general rule of thumb when it comes to naval combat is that bigger is better. Big ships with lots of guns are usually superior in virtually every way (even speed, often) to smaller vessels.

Is there ANY advantage in manual broadsides? I can't see any.

Yes, albeit rarely. They are really only useful on ships with a sufficiently meaty broadside (at least 20 guns per broadside, so generally 5th rates and up) engaging in point-blank line combat, using round shot. Timed properly, they can pack a real punch and do a lot of morale damage.

[Artemas]

Yeah, but they look differently with all the upgrades iirc. One gets better armor than the other.

Just checked England, and they are identical for both number of upgrades and the appearance of the upgrades.

M2TW has a advantage in that not only is there a armour upgrade system, but there are also different weapon models. EG, the HRE's zweihander unit uses the same model as a fully upgraded Halberd Militia unit. The only difference are the weapons model, and animations. This sort of thing permeates the game, where fully a third of any one factions' units use the peasant model. Most have different weapons though. Bows, pitchforks, spears, axes, shields, daggers, et cetera.
Only one unit model. 5 different units.

With that said, there is plenty to harp about in Empire with unit diversity that isn't whether or not the units use the same models. Names are one, but perhaps more tellingly are unit descriptions. In M2TW, most of the units had distinct discriptions if they had a distinct names, France had Chivalric Knights (with generic description) England had Armoured Swordsmen, and Hungary had Hungarian Nobles (or something). But they were the same unit. The difference is that they had different names, but more importantly, different descriptions. In ETW, they have at most 2 descriptions for each unit category.

Reading the unit cards, numbers aside, there apparently is no difference between Greenjackets and Ferguson Riflemen. Or the various types of line infantry.

[Thanas]

Yeah, but they look differently with all the upgrades iirc. One gets better armor than the other.

Just checked England, and they are identical for both number of upgrades and the appearance of the upgrades.

Hm. I stand corrected then.

M2TW has a advantage in that not only is there a armour upgrade system, but there are also different weapon models. EG, the HRE's zweihander unit uses the same model as a fully upgraded Halberd Militia unit. The only difference are the weapons model, and animations. This sort of thing permeates the game, where fully a third of any one factions' units use the peasant model. Most have different weapons though. Bows, pitchforks, spears, axes, shields, daggers, et cetera.
Only one unit model. 5 different units.

That is certainly true and was lost in Empire. Which might be why I am so irked at this and feel like they just cloned units en masse.

Reading the unit cards, numbers aside, there apparently is no difference between Greenjackets and Ferguson Riflemen. Or the various types of line infantry.

I do not mind the line infantry that much. But I mind that the special units are not...well, special. Take the expatriate infantry - they are a unique unit that can only be built once. But, like you said, they are all written the same way with a generic expatriate unit card. Heck, if I get such a special unit, I want to know about it. I want to know about their history, their campaigns, their structure etc. Not generic blabla that could just have been copied from wikipedia.

[Darth Wong]

Why is it so outrageous for different units to have the same model? Just how different are these models supposed to be? Were there special forces units with an extra limb or something?

[Thanas]

Why is it so outrageous for different units to have the same model? Just how different are these models supposed to be? Were there special forces units with an extra limb or something?

Different uniforms, for starters, I think, would go a long way.

[Vympel]

Well, if you're taking a sloop up against a 6th rate you might as well just give up and scuttle your ship to save yourself some time. It's like attacking a destroyer with a speedboat.

Yeah, the game doesn't really convey that sense of difference. I did pretty well, all things considered, but I still died horribly in the end. I'll keep the Sloop I've built and build a Sixth-Rate as well, and send them both against the target

(I've hardly played until now)

[Darth Wong]

Well, if you're taking a sloop up against a 6th rate you might as well just give up and scuttle your ship to save yourself some time. It's like attacking a destroyer with a speedboat.

Yeah, the game doesn't really convey that sense of difference. I did pretty well, all things considered, but I still died horribly in the end. I'll keep the Sloop I've built and build a Sixth-Rate as well, and send them both against the target

(I've hardly played until now)

Just get one of the bigger shipyards built in a reasonable amount of time, and you can build a bunch of 3rd rate ships that will sail around kicking ass.

One of the strange things about the game is the inexplicably low maintenance costs for sailing ships. A huge sailing ship with hundreds of men onboard seems to have no more upkeep cost than a couple of units of basic infantry.

[Thanas]

Less actually.

Line infantry upkeep is around 280, meanwhile a third rate ship of the line clocks in around 180-240.

[Brother-Captain Gaius]

So the patch is out. Looks like a good round of fixes.

Plus the cost for most units has gone up significantly, which is definitely a needed change.

[CaptHawkeye]

Well, I hope they didn't raise the price of line infantry too much. The whole point of musket equipped line infantry is that they're supposed to be cheaper and easier to produce/support than melee infantry.

[Minischoles]

I prefer the increased cost to be honest, very early on in the game you can get to the point where you have so much trade and tax income you can pretty much build full stack armies from scratch and not even notice the cost. Making your armies a bit more valuable through being more costly does help, but not that much. It just pushes back that point a few turns.

[Thanas]

Looks like they screwed the spanish even further with that patch. It is hard enough to survive the Native spam with all the resources pushed towards that, put now that the cost has gone up....

[ray245]

Who the hell suggested that if the AI is too passive in general, we need to make the AI more aggressive in general?

It's not about the AI being too passive or too aggressive in general, but when should the AI be more aggressive, and when it should be more passive.

[Phillip Hone]

I lost interest in the Total War games because I found that depending on which difficulty you were on, the AI either cheated excessively or lost every battle by impossibly large margins. Is that the case with ETW? I'm not demanding brilliance, but I'd like to see AI generals who can occasionally win a fair fight, or at least put a decent dent in your armies every once in a while.

[Darth Wong]

I lost interest in the Total War games because I found that depending on which difficulty you were on, the AI either cheated excessively or lost every battle by impossibly large margins. Is that the case with ETW? I'm not demanding brilliance, but I'd like to see AI generals who can occasionally win a fair fight, or at least put a decent dent in your armies every once in a while.

The problem with the Total War games is that the AI is stupid, and so in order to make the game competitive, the programmers resorted to simply allowing the AI player to cheat. So you need to work really hard to build your economy to the point where you can recruit and supply even a single full-stack army, while an AI faction with only one territory under its control seems to have no problem building full-stack armies.

PS. After the patch, I tried a new campaign, and I have to say that the money situation is aggravatingly tight. I really don't find it entertaining to spend all of my time carefully balancing my economy. I wanted to play Empire: Total War, not Accountant: Total Balance Sheet.

[Darth Wong]

Where the fuck does one report these CTD bugs? I've got a fleet that CTDs whenever I click on it. I saw a death notice for the admiral many turns back, yet when I mouse over the fleet, it still says he's in command of the fleet. Maybe that's why it always CTDs when I click on it. Admiral Zombie makes the computer lose its marbles.

I wonder if this zombie admiral is due to the fact that the fleet was blockading a Spanish colony which turned into a pirate colony when I conquered the Spanish home territories.

[Vympel]

For some reason I can't place I've barely played the game - I'm too busy either playing LEGO Star Wars on PS3 or Mount and Blade on PC - I've got to say I was about to FINALLY play the game in earnest with my little free time this weekend, but if the money situation is too damn tight I might get the shits and just leave it.

It's no problem once I open the game and start playing, but for some reason I keep putting it off. I don't get it.

[Samuel]

For some reason I can't place I've barely played the game - I'm too busy either playing LEGO Star Wars on PS3 or Mount and Blade on PC - I've got to say I was about to FINALLY play the game in earnest with my little free time this weekend, but if the money situation is too damn tight I might get the shits and just leave it.

It's no problem once I open the game and start playing, but for some reason I keep putting it off. I don't get it.

The game is currently in a state of quantum flux where it can be both shit/not shit to you. You fear that it is shit but enjoy imaging that it is not. Sort of like how alot of us have idealized versions for shows that we substitute in for the actual one.

Of course your mind may work entirely differently so mileage may vary.

[Darth Wong]

It's simpler to just say that the game has so many annoyances that they suck a lot of the fun out of it. After getting those CTDs I quit my game and probably won't play again until I hear that they've released another patch. It's just too aggravating. I only started playing again because a new patch came out and I was hopeful that it would improve the bug situation.

Seriously, I tend to be critical of people who leap down game developers' throats at every turn, but this game is one situation where the developer really did drop the ball.

[Lonestar]

After getting those CTDs I quit my game and probably won't play again until I hear that they've released another patch.

I've done the same. I haven't even completed a campaign. Once you reach a certain point the game begins to become really sluggish...A problem I never had with MTW2 or RTW.

It seems as if it only plays well in the early rounds.

[AniThyng]

After getting those CTDs I quit my game and probably won't play again until I hear that they've released another patch.

I've done the same. I haven't even completed a campaign. Once you reach a certain point the game begins to become really sluggish...A problem I never had with MTW2 or RTW.

It seems as if it only plays well in the early rounds.

Amen. After the latest patch, my fleets that CTD still do, and most importantly, thanks to the rebalanced costing, i am now LOSING 50000 gold a turn when i was earning 34000 a turn before. I'm sure I am just casually disband a full third of my army without any impact whatsoever on my empire, eh?