Trigger Finger

Total War with extra musket!

Time to try something new, I thought. Maybe it will suck, maybe not, who knows, who cares?

A live blog review of Empire Total War starting with my pre-release expectations through to some point in the future where I get bored of the thing – genius right? We will see, but here it comes

2nd March 2009 13:00 – Expectations
I am a big fan of the Total War series, not to the point of building my own mods and doing the virtual equivalent of painting my own soldiers, but I have thoroughly enjoyed almost every one of the series.

Starting all that time ago with Shogun Total War where my breath was taken away by SO MANY stick figure soldiers on the battlefield and being introduced to that seemingly vast campaign map. I think I am probably similar to most of the Total War fans in that I have enjoyed the Medieval and Roman variants more, typically just because of the sheer joy of watching gangs of catapults, trebuchets and cannons demolishing castle walls and pounding handfuls of soldiers into pulp. The second most beautiful moments have been any night battles involving 100’s of archers firing legions of fiery arrows in their beautiful arcs. Aside from the asthetics of destruction, the campaign map is to me the ultimate rendition of a true strategic game with probably more hours spent there plotting vengeance on neighbours, or weighing up the consequences of tackling the crusading armies for my own gain than in the actual battles themselves.

What I haven’t like so far in the various episodes have been most of the add-on packs. I have found them mostly lacking in depth and they have rarely provided any significant differences to tactics, or battles. I have found that most Total War series have eventually boiled down to dominating with cavalry to win battles with only a support role from the other unit types. So I really hope that the core game is as brilliant as it can be without any need for too much modding or the need to be propped up on the longetivity by the addons.

I am not sure what to expect about the setting, I can’t recall a civil-war era strategy game that has caught my interest as much as the more barbaric eras where pikes are gouged clean through a man’s chest, but then I had never been much interested in the setting of Shogun Total War before that was released. Naval battles are something that I am on the fence about too. From the demo it seems the combat is incredibly similar to PotBS which I was less than impressed with, but if it’s not too repetitive or essential in the game then I am sure I will be happy taking on the important battles at sea whilst automatically resolving the minor scuffles.

3rd March 2009 14:30 – Will I get to Play Tonight?

Crap! I just realised that I have football training tonight and won’t be able to start my Steam download at 18:00 when it is released. A quick email to my wonderful wife with instructions to start my PC at 17:30 and how to start steam takes care of that. If I am lucky it should finish downloading by about 10pm when both the wife and baby are asleep.

3rd March 2009 20:14 – OMG 15GB?

I get back from football training and check on the download progress before hopping into the shower. Disaster! (well if I am being melodramatic about it!). The game is a 15GB download AND I only had 11GB free on my games drive so the download didn’t even start! Bah… I delete two games (Crysis and Football Manager 2008) which gives me plenty of space. But even in my most optimistic estimates of downloading with the full force of my 8 mbit connection, it’s going to be many many hours before it’s done

3rd March 2009 22:14 – No Empire Tonight

Steam is getting battered it seems. The download keeps starting, then stopping, then starting again. even when its downloading it’s only coming down the pipe at around 350kb/s. By the time of my final check when I go to bed at 12 it seems to have done better and is 70% downloaded.

5th March 2009 00:30 – First Impressions

I installed it from steam itself (pre-order) and it wasn’t too painful. Glad I didn’t go down the disk route as it seems like I would have ended up battering my PC with the nearest blunt instrument such was my eagerness to play . Lots of people complaining of problems with the disk install.

Anyway, I’ve played 2 hours or so on Hard, and in that time been utterly defeated trying an ultra-aggressive approach within 3 years So have restarted with a somewhat more conservative (sane) approach.

Anyway basic impressions are:

• Love the land battles, they look beautiful
• Love how the land battles seem to be so tactically different from the previous total wars
• Love the campaign map – looks great, and it’s HUGE!
• Little bit disappointed with the game modes, they all seem locked to 99 years which doesn’t seem long enough to me? What I like is a “no-time limit, no-holds-barred, last-nation-standing-is-the-winner” mode. World domination is the mode closest to what I am looking for. Small complaint, it just seems like 99 years would not be long enough to achieve what I wanted – especially when the three theatres combined are so huge.
• Naval battles I can see myself tiring of pretty quickly, though I may not understand them enough. Having just read that you can board ships and set them on fire has rekindled my interest.
• If a naval battle is near a coastline, shouldnt I be able to see the coastline rather than just a big square of water?
• Annoying graphical glitch where it seems like the top row of pixels is flickering all the time, very distracting.
• With ‘Show CPU moves’ enabled a turn can take fooooorrrreevveerrr
• Love the introduction of cover behind walls watching cavalry charges hurdle those walls as they pummel the line of soldiers hiding behind them
• The land battles do not feel so slow paced as the demo.

Overall I am desperate to play again tonight

6th March 2009 08:30

Sitting in work, bleary eyed, after playing for far too long last night. After several more hours of play I am appreciating really how much harder this game is than previous Total Wars. A completely new way of tactical thinking is required, and cavalry seems to be generally weak as a kitten compared to the all dominating unit type it was in the past. That isn’t to say it’s not effective at the right time and place but in previous TW’s, even on the hardest levels, you could generally just swarm the enemy with unit after unit of cavalry with a little bit of missile backup. In ETW it’s far more important to have the right balance of units for a given situation.

Most battles have gone the way of superior numbers though so far and that is something the British don’t have at the start (on land anyway). The Prussians have declared war on Austria who were an ally, so I took the opportunity to engage with them. It takes a couple of years to build up a full 20 unit army and send them by boat to engage them in Berlin. The moment I landed they wipe me out with an immediate assault from two full armies. So I try a different tactic with the next boatload of faithful men and land in Holland and harass the Prussians by repeatedly taking an outlying town near Berlin, waiting for them to assault it and retreating back to a fort in Holland when it gets too hot. It seems to be an effective way of wearing down their numbers whilst giving me the opportunity to rebuild the army each time it gets depleted.

Overall it seems like it will be a real uphill struggle to expand in Europe. It’s also difficult to expand in Central America without pissing off the French and the Spanish, but a decent size army is enough to start taking a few of the surrounding islands such as Cuba. The fiercest resistance is up in North America where it seems there are an endless supply of defiant Native Americans willing to fight forever over their land, and the logistics of such a remote place make it very difficult to mount a sustained assault on any of the regions around there.

Then of course there is the nagging feeling that I need to establish the Brits in India before everyone else is to dug in there… but money is tight and I am already raiding trade routes just to stay afloat.
The technology tree is a very nice addition and I have concentrated a lot of time on trying to prop up the economy with lots of the non-military research, but it still feels like everyone else is better funded and better supplied. I am not sure if you can trade technologies ‘Civ4 Style) but it’s definitely time to find out.

The more I play, the more I realise that ETW is not just a new skin on an old game, it really has added even more depth and need for strategic thinking on top of what was already one of the deepest strategy games out there!

9th March 2009 09:00

Many more hours have now been spent in this great game and the pieces are all finally start to come together.

Fast forwarding to the to end of the weekend, I was doing pretty well (I thought). I had taken out the pesky french when they were at a weak point distracted with a conflict with Austria, I pounced with two armies and stormed into Paris. The battle for Paris was pretty intense, two very evenly matched armies that were almost identical in make up, I noticed their general sitting back some distance. I turned my 3 cannon units to take aim, sent a single volley at them and took out the general himself as well as half of the unit. Almost immediately all their other units started to panic and flee. Victory was mine! I also rid the planet of pirates, and took pretty much all of Canada and the Carribean. The Spanish were desperate for my newly conquered French regions and were offering me as many as four of their own regions, unlimited military access and money in exchange. I refused or counter-offered repeatedly and they kept offering more and more. Strange that they never tried military means to wrestle it from my grasp, especially when they are so hostile according to the diplomatic panels.
Anyway, it was something like the year 1729 by the time I was hit by my first real disaster, and it was nothing to do with my strategy. The damn game crashed to desktop mid turn. I sighed, refilled the whisky glass and relaunched the game fully expecting a recent autosave to be available but ther was only one autosave from turn 1718! 11 Years of play wiped out! This I find pretty unforgivable! I tried looking around for an option where you can set the frequency of autosaves but found nothing… maybe someone can help me out!

However, having learnt so much during those 29 years, and thus learning how much I had done wrong, I took the opportunity to start once more feeling confident that I had a good grasp of most if not all of the mechanics of the game. Boy what a difference it has made! For example I now have plenty of cash as I realise that taking control of the trade regions right at the start is far more important than anything else. Spending all of my early money on just trade ships and navy support to take control of both coasts of Africa has given me a great cashflow. In turn I have invested all of these early profits into improving the farms, fur encampments, etc which in turn has increased my trade values even more. The AI is very passive and unlikely to attack you at any point so there seems to be no need to build up any armies of significance within the first 10 years. With a sound financial base though, I can build really big armies and many of them, which is a complete contrast to my earlier games where I was scrimping and saving and pushing up taxes just to be able to field one or two armies on the whole map!.

As well as the game crashing, I have noticed a few more bugs such as the time I fought the pirates over control of Jamaica, they put 4 units in various buildings. For a couple of those buildings (having no cannons dammit) I surrounded the buildings and through superior numbers eventually wore down the numbers inside whilst taking heavier, but expected, losses. But two of the buildings seem to keep the inhabitants completely invulnerable! I mean 12 of my units surrounding and peppering their building, yet they didn’t lose a single man in 20 minutes whilst my numbers went down from thousands to dozens. That can’t be right, can it?

11th March 2009 09:00

I think I have totalled around 15 hours of play now, so its about time to start wrapping up the initial thoughts on this game. but I will come back and post anything relevant in later days and weeks.

Of course I cannot post much news on the end game, as I am nowhere near it yet! It seems like me initial fears of 99 years being too short might be unfounded. I am at 1719 on my third game now and I can see that with the proper thought placed into each turn, 99 years is a very long time. I think at this point I have at least 2/3 of the trade regions under British control, rolling the coin directly into my war chest. However it is quite expensive to maintain navies to guard all of these places so I have cut back to one navy floating around the trade regions ready to pounce on anyone who looks like trouble!. The best measures you can take to protect your trade routes seems to (quite obviously really) wipe out the pirate faction as quickly as possible.

I am cutting a swathe of blood through north america, have taken the pirate strongholds in the carribean, but am finding the prussians (who declared war on me) pretty hard to kill off. I am blocking all the prussian trade routes, they are down to owning only 2 small regions (the swedes of all people took Berlin) yet they seem capable of producing new armies at an alarming rate.

Another important step to get right early on is to establish 3 schools so that you can research 3 technologies at the same time, and I have spent a lot of time researching the naval side so that I can get some of the truly humongous ships on my side >).

I will say I am getting a little (very little) bit bored of the same unit types, the different variations just don’t seem to offer much in terms of tactical variety. So once I finish mopping up the Prussians and the Canadian regions, I am going to research all the military techs to see whats available further down the line.

But overall, my conclusions are that Empire Total War is at least as good as the best of the series. Whilst the graphical beauty may initially make it seem like the pinicale of the series, its going to be the long term that really determines whether it is Creative Assembly’s finest hour. Expect an update in about the week on the mid-game and another week for the end-game. But so far my recommendation is this is the best game of 2009 so far to be sure!

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