GOL Cast: Aggressively Expanding Sweden In Empire: Total War

Feel like going back to the old times of gun powder and armies standing in straight lines on open fields? Well, here's a good candidate. Let's make our dreams of glorious empires true and see how this game works.

Empire: Total War by Creative Assembly is a strategy game that combines turn-based “grand” strategy and real-time battles. You take control of an 18th century nation and dominance over your neighbors is your sole objective. You need to create and manage your armies, keep any uprisings under control and fight over the control of seas and provinces on your quest for glory. The Linux port was handled by Feral Interactive.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LBLjEhfpTHM

Empire: Total War is a hybrid of two distinct forms of strategy. Games are divided into turns and on each turn you can recruit soldiers, move your armies around, conduct diplomacy, research technologies and manage your empire's taxation. This “world view” is not awfully complex and it certainly won't be any Europa Universalis and it's not really the focus of the game but it's still an integral part of the experience.

Once you enter a battle you get into what the game truly is about. When two armies collide with each other the game turns into a real-time strategy game. You have various kinds of units at your disposal, depending of course on the units you have recruited and deployed into battle, such as traditional line-infantry, cavalry and artillery. It's not just about running a lot of soldiers into your enemies lines, however. Instead you need to be careful about the placement of your units. Line-infantry, which is the most common unit type found in battles, needs to be deployed in wide lines to provide the best possible firing angle and they need to be properly facing the enemy, otherwise you lose some of your firepower. This means that flanking your enemies becomes a main priority.

The key to victory in these battles is to combine different kinds of units and tactics. For example, you might want to keep the enemy busy by deploying a couple of regiments of line-infantry and once the enemies engage those soldiers you send your cavalry to flank them from behind and break their lines, causing them to flee in terror. For some added mayhem, you could also deploy some cannons on a nearby hill and let them tear the enemies apart.

Troop morale is also an important factor in these battles. If a regiment comes under heavy artillery fire and takes enough casualties, its morale will start to break and eventually the soldiers in that regiment will simply run away. There are a lot of factors that affect the morale of your troops. Nearby units and fortifications will improve the morale, as well as having your general next to the troops. A lone regiment with unprotected flanks with a cavalry regiment running directly at it will on the other hand suffer morale loss. The general's death also negatively affects your troops' morale, so you have to balance the risk and reward of having your general next to your advancing soldiers. A battle ends when all of your or your opponent's soldiers have been killed or are running for their lives.

At first Empire: Total War seemed like a complex game and threw a lot of hints and tips at me. But in the end it's not really all that complex. While you can spend a lot of times tweaking the tax rates of your provinces to prevent rebellions while getting optimal amounts of money to support the war effort, you can simply set the game to handle those things for you and you can completely focus on recruiting troops and sending them to the desired locations. It's not necessarily an easy game, mind you. While the AI isn't the best and you can quite easily fool it with flanking maneuvers, and often it mindlessly sends troops into obvious traps, it does exploit weaknesses in your defenses and will mercilessly intercept your weakened armies. In my Swedish campaign I'm currently facing furious counter-attacks, heavily fortified positions and strong alliances.

The biggest problem I've had with the game has been the performance. Most of the time the game stays at around 30 FPS or above but sometimes the game tanks massively, even in the world view for unknown reasons. It's a strategy game, so the framerate isn't that big of a deal. But the experience would still be better in 60 FPS. Now I'm not sure how well the Windows version runs but I do hope that it's something that can be fixed at some point. Until then I'm just going to enjoy it with some occasional cinematic moments.

All in all Empire: Total War is a neat strategy game that you can easily get hours and hours of fun out of. There is a lot to see, a lot to do and a lot to conquer. It's very detailed and the battles can get really epic. I totally recommend it but do mind the performance. You might not be able to crank every single option in the settings up to eleven if a smooth experience is a must for you.

You can buy the game directly from Feral here (it still uses Steam): https://store.feralinteractive.com/en/us/games/empirecollection/

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.