Empire total war walkthrough series#

Since armies can raid and destroy these structures, it forces players to get their armies out into the field more often. Moving economic structures out of the city now makes maneuvering and army influence on the grand campaign map much more important. The implications of these seemingly simple changes are pretty profound. Merchants and diplomats, on the other hand, are no longer seen on the map, and both functions are handled via an information screen. This makes the city interface itself simpler by only allowing up to five different development slots that will determine things like population happiness, economic output, and the types of military units that can be recruited there. Each of these areas can also be used to draft military units, as can a player's generals. One province, for example, may have spaces that can be developed into an iron mine or a college or a tea plantation or one of several different kinds of ports. Instead of doing all economic development from a province's cities, each map region now has economic hot spots that can be constructed and developed separately. The secret to Empire's success is the way that the developers slimmed down the interface, shifting much of the data required by the player to more sensible locations.

Empire total war walkthrough series#

This, in a nutshell, is what makes Empire a brilliant game, easily the best of the Total War series to date. What makes these games work is not only how well each side works as an individual unit (either might have been released on its own and been a quality product), but how well the two sides are married to one another. Then there's the overarching 'metagame,' a classic turn-based 4X empire builder in which players conquer provinces in an attempt to place their iron boot heel across the face of the world. There's a traditional real-time strategy component in which players marshal their armies and proceed to maneuver, charge, shoot and stab one another until one side either retreats or surrenders. The key to understanding a Total War game is realizing that it's not really one game, but two.