The AI is bad, yes, in that it almost invariably attacked my positions in every battle (even sometimes abandoning its stakes and trenches!)… but then again, I almost invariably showed up with artillery superiority, and the one time I had no artillery and the AI was the defender, it was perfectly happy to sit on the defensive. Yet I grew used to this soon enough – and a cavalry charge to the flanks is as spectacularly decisive as ever. Battles are now principally decided by fire rather than shock, and while still splendid to behold, seeing lines of infantry volley at each other nonetheless lacks some of the thrill of watching hastati tear into a barbarian horde. The battles have less impact, literally and metaphorically. Then the games abruptly wore out their welcome, as the horrible AI (papered over by a cheating computer player), hassle-filled strategy layer in which it took forever to build up cities, and an excessive number of tactical battles (it was that or allow your armies to be chewed up by the auto-resolve) took their toll.Įmpire changed that. Now, my previous experience with the Total War games was that the campaigns were incredible fun early on I really did feel a heroic general when I led small kingdoms and hastily improvised armies to victory against overwhelming enemies. I have played a couple of custom battles and a single campaign as Great Britain from 1701 to around 1730 (I put the game down after I captured all my victory provinces). Virtually all my experience with the game has been with the Darthmod Ultimate Commander mod (version 6.0, “enforced edition”), whose forum is here:, installed over the 1.6 patch. My interest in the game’s concept made me throw it in at a hefty discount when I bought my new PC, but even as I sat down to install it, I wondered why I had been so quixotic.ĭisclaimer: I have not played one turn of vanilla Empire. I had read the horror stories about bugs and horrendous AI, heard the jokes about “Empire: Total Crap”. I went into Empire: Total War (“Empire”) with very low expectations.

Darthmod empire campaign types