Product Description

Control the sea, command great armies, forge a new nation and conquer the globe. Empire: Total War takes the Total War franchise to the 18th Century and the Age of Imperialism—a time of near perpetual war. This latest installation in the award-winning, multi-million unit selling Total War franchise introduces a host of revolutionary new features, including true 3D naval combat. Players will be able to command single ships or vast fleets upon seascapes rich with extraordinary effects. After pummeling enemies with cannon fire, players will close in to grapple enemy ships and prepare to board, taking control of men as they fight hand-to-hand. With an entirely new game engine, Empire will see further enhancements to the 3D battles and turn-based campaign maps. Empire lets players experience combat on the high seas, India, Europe, and, for the first time, the United States of America.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #843 in Video Games
• Brand: Sega
• Model: 85229
• Released on: 2009-03-03
• ESRB Rating: Teen
• Platforms: Windows XP, Windows Vista
• Format: CD-ROM
• Number of items: 1
• Dimensions: .40 pounds

Features

• New Real-time 3D Naval Warfare. Players control single ships or vast fleets with fully destructible sails as well as cannon and musket action, boarding raids and more. This is the complete naval combat experience.
• All-new Game Engine. With a newly created Windows XP-compatible DirectX 9 graphics engine, players will experience real-time seascapes, dynamic weather and a new advanced landscape and flora system.
• Episodic Campaign. Improves accessibility to the game by gradually introducing advanced features over time.
• Massive Scope. Over 30 in-game factions encompass all of the World's major powers including the United States of America.and dodge pursuers using the stylus.
• Brand New Multiplayer Modes. Players vie for a place at the top of the rankings and join leagues and ladders for even more gameplay challenges.

Amazon.com Product Description
Call the shots in epic battles all over the world and expand your realm of influence throughout the tumultuous eighteenth century with Empire: Total War for your PC. Set against the bold intellectual landscape of the Enlightenment, this extension of the Total War franchise brings you out of the middle ages and into a realm where guns, gunpowder, and naval warfare have a dramatic influence on the face of combat.

Realistic landscapes and weather add drama to your campaigns. View larger.

Dynamic, 3D naval warfare expands the combat zone. View larger.

For the first time, North America is open as a field of battle. View larger.

Ships boast destructible sails. View larger.

Historic Factions, Expanded Horizons, and an Updated Campaign Map
Total War's detailed, turn-based battle system has received some serious upgrades that will have an impact on both seasoned commanders and newly minted combatants. The UI has been streamlined, and the systems for handling trade and diplomacy have been updated. You have improved advisors at your disposal, and realistic espionage techniques can be carried out using agents.

Empire puts a variety of major political factions into your hands, including France, Spain, Great Britain, Sweden, the United Provinces in northern Europe, Prussia, the Ottoman Empire, and Russia. Detailed strategic elements come into play, whether you're fighting in the heart of Europe, warding off Mamluk horsemen in the middle east, or working to capture the wealth of India. Beyond all this, for the first time in Total War history, the continent of North America is an open field of play that portrays the unique strategic problems encountered by the founding fathers during the revolutionary war.

Dynamic 3D Naval Battles and Forces of Nature
Total War's signature 3D battle scenes are paired with a new graphics engine and improved technology, allowing war and conquest to take on an even more realistic feel. Advanced landscape and flora systems add both realism and depth to the world stage, while dynamic weather consistently threatens to throw a wrench in your attack plans.

Whether you're coordinating platoon firing or supporting a defensive square formation, the musket and the cannon take center stage as newly developed implements of war. And they're not just for use on land. Real-time naval battle set on dramatic seascapes help shape the balance of power and determine the scope of your Empire, and they're rendered in the same impressive 3D as battles on land. You may find yourself directing a vast fleet through intricate maneuvers, controlling the helm of a single tall ship, or grappling to the enemy's boat and dictating the course of hand-to-hand combat on deck.

New Multiplayer Action
Additional updates to the Total War model include a multiplayer component that provides player rankings for competitive commanders, leagues and ladders, and a selection of entirely new modes of game play.

Customer Reviews

Empire: Total War = EPIC FAIL
(For the most recent comments see the updates)
Let me begin by pointing out that I am a HUGE fan of the Total War series. I started with Rome, continued with the Barbarian Invasion, segueyed into Medieval II and the subsequent Kingdoms expansion. Needless to say, I was eagerly anticipating this game. I even bought a top of the line Mach V rig with all the bells and whistles and a 30in monitor to take in the beauty of it all. My machine has no problem handing the graphics settings on Ultra and I can tell you that visually, this game has the potential to be stunning (provided your computer is up to the task).

Now the negative. The game comes with Steam software which introduces its own complications to the process of enjoying ones game. Granted that the auto-patching feature is pretty sweet, but almost everything else about this system is not (See other reviews here for more details). But thats not even the meat of my beef.

Creative Assembly (CA) released this much anticipated game KNOWING that it was a beta version. After reading countless posts on various message boards, it is more than apparent that this game was not ready for release but for some reason they went ahead with it anyway. This in effect made everyone who bought it an unwitting beta tester (with all the frustrations and none of the salary). As I see it, Creative Assembly has spent all of its credibility capital from the prior installments on this piss-poor shell of a game. Thats not fair, it is 90% of a game but that missing 10% makes it unplayable (frequent crashes to desktop, white screens of death, and corrupted save files are the major issues with a few minor issues sprinkled in for good measure).

This will be the last time I purchase a game from Creative Assembly within the first six months of launch and I would advise others to do the same. Not to send a message to CA (though they deserve a swift kick to the junk for this scam), but to save yourself the money and the frustration.

5/21/09 UPDATE: Two and a half months after release, CA is still frantically attempting to patch this game to make it playable. However with every step forward, it seems like they are taking two steps back. The Battlefield AI has gone from acceptably bad to unacceptably bad. Lingering issues related to crashes still persist though the White screen of death and save corruptions seem to have been resolved. The economy system has been tweaked to make the game more difficult, some prefer the change, some do not. Modders are doing their best to put a polish on this game but some fundamentals still remain broken. My original advice to wait for fixes before purchasing still stands, this game is still in post-market Beta testing but should be fun once its completed (probably 3 months from now).

7/01/09 UPDATE: A week after the 1.3 patch, it is time for an update. Personally, the game works much better now than before. This is subjective since some people have had new CTD issues with the latest patch that were not there before. CA released a hotfix tonight to address the CTDs introduced with their latest patch. While the game is generally more fun and playable now, there are still some elements of the game that will likely require an expansion pack-sized update to address (these issues include siege battles being totally broken and unrealistic still, no cross-theater naval invasions, crap diplomacy, and Campaign AI that never retreats EVER even when outnumbered 10 to 1, just to name a few). Adding to my concern is that patch 1.4 will seek to introduce a multi-player campaign (which, if you were paying attention, was supposed to come with the game 4 months ago). That's like building a house on a unfinished foundation, bound for more Failure. Additionally, CA has decided to tweak naval units so that the biggest/tallest ships with the biggest guns and best crews will have a shorter range, lower accuracy, and slower reload times than the smallest/shortest ships with the smallest guns, despite the overwhelmingly negative response from the hardcore community that would like at least some adherence to the laws of physics. CA hears but does not listen to its most dedicated fans.
Despite all of this (which is really just most of the negative points), If you cannot wait any longer, I think its worth the current price.

If I had to rate this game again, I would give it 4 stars for fun, and three stars overall. Too bad it took four months to achieve mediocrity. Oh well, new engine, new problems, I bet future installments will have much smoother releases. Still, I advocate hesitation when it comes to purchasing future CA/SEGA collaborations.

My next update will come a week after the release of patch 1.4.

A Very Buggy Release
EDIT (April 5th, 2009): Like many others, my opinion of this game has gone down with time. I only ever made it through one short campaign, which only lasted a few days, and I have now uninstalled it. The more time I spent with it, the more glitches and bugs I came across, to the point where it just wasn't fun any more. They've released a number of patches, but these only addressed the Crash-To-Desktop issues which many people had, and which didn't affect me too much (the game REALLY was not released in an acceptable state). If they ever fix it up it will be a superb game, but there's a LOT to do. Be warned that for now the fun has FAR less staying power than the last two Total War games, Rome and Medieval II.
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I've been a loyal follower (and buyer!) of Total War since the first Medieval. Unfortunately, this game, in its current state, is more a step back than forward. Still, I would give it a 3.5 or 4, but when you take STEAM into consideration, 2 stars is the best it deserves. Other people have written about STEAM; I'd just like to add that it's nagware - ads for other games pop up on my PC every couple of days.

Steam aside, the game is decent, but below the Total War standard. I'm running it on a PC which is well above the system requirements (e.g., 2.8 GHz dual core processor; 3GB RAM), but the sound chops on and off during videos, there have been temporary freezes and two complete crashes, and plenty of other minor technical annoyances. Can't imagine what it's like on a PC that merely meets the requirements. There are major gameplay issues. The AI does some really stupid things - among many others, it doesn't seem able to put troops in a ship and put them on your coast, something which didn't hurt Rome or Medieval II too much because they were continent-based, but this is a world-empire game that boasts naval battles. Finances are sufficiently limited that it seems next to impossible to maintain very large armies in multiple theaters, even with high tax rates, cities with all kinds of improvements and 11 Indiamen in trading ports. The game also has long-wait issues, whether between turns or while loading new sections. I'm not going to go on and list all the other annoyances; suffice to say they do a lot to keep this from being an addictive game.

My advice? Don't buy now, but wait a few months, monitor the forums, and wait until they've made it the game it ought to have been. If you're new to Total War, get Rome or Medieval II, which are among the best PC games ever made.

CA has overreached itself - clearly they either needed a bigger team from the start, or another 6-12 months to playtest and debug.

I haven't decided whether I'll buy future additions to this series. Depends on what they eventually make of this one, and whether STEAM, or anything like it, is there next time. I'm quite upset at having to put STEAM on my PC. It does say, on the bottom of the back of the box, in very small print, that you will have to use STEAM, but obviously I didn't read that before buying. Having paid $[...], I feel that for once the people who get pirated copies have something better - they don't have to use STEAM.

Inexcusable
"The Steam servers are currently too busy to handle your request. Please try again in a few minutes" This is ridiculous. I have wasted hours upon hours attempting to install my recently purchased game "Empire: Total War".

I am veteran of two foreign wars currently serving in Iraq. I have very limited internet bandwidth through some no name internet service provider whose employees know as much about access controls and firewalls as my dog does. Why is this a problem for someone who just bought a hard copy of this game and has no intentions of playing it online? Why are these factors are no longer unrelated?

Apparently there is a new fad in the States that prevents software piracy. Installing and authenticating to an online server to reduce the ability to steal copyrighted software. This doesn't suite my situation very well. Oh don't get me wrong, I have internet, yes after I received the game it promptly told me I needed to be on the internet to authenticate - ok, too easy. I purchased a month of internet for $65 so it could register my serial key. Well apparently it needs more than that. Several ports open, no Anti Virus running, Several of my applications disabled or uninstalled - and it still does not work. And best of all, there is absolutely no customer service support. Creative points me to Sega, Sega summarizes Steam's piss poor support site, and no on offers me an opportunity to post on a forum or contact a representative. I have been hoodwinked. Total War, you took my money and ran, and I had to register my serial with Steam so now I cant even sell it to someone else.

Let me tell you; This is the third game in the Total War series that I have purchased, it's the latest of many games by Creative Assemblies and even more by Sega. THIS WILL BE MY LAST!

By employing an authentication system (STEAM) that does not work means that, though I have paid for the game and have the software in hand; I have no access to it. Therefore I will not be purchasing another game affiliated with "Total War", "Creative Assemblies", "SEGA", or "STEAM".

I don't want you to miss understand me though, I enjoy your products and I have plans on perpetuating that enjoyment with your future products, but I refuse to reward this business tactic with my hard earned income. No, I will now be taking a less monetary route to procuring your games. There are apparently many with similar views as the whole reason you did this was to prevent it. You figured that you had to take the protection of your software and whore it out to Steam. You figured wrong, I was willing to pay for your games, but I will not take this injury lightly.

That being said my point is that I will not be searching for your products on Amazon anymore, no; It seams there are many other web sites run by individuals sympathetic to my newly found ideals. I did actually find a site that should work much more efficiently than Steam and without the financial hindrances of honest merchant sites like Amazon, the site I'll be shopping at flies the Skull and Crossed-bones.