Empire: Total War

Total score
Game play
Nuts & bolts
Bells & whistles	N/A

 

Periodically, probably every year or so, I try out some of the alternatives to the things I’m used to using.  I’ll download a copy of Linux for my desktop just to see where they're up to. And I’ll buy an A list “strategy” game from a high street store, just to see where they’re at too. Just to confirm my prejudices, if nothing else.

The Total War series of games keep straying close enough to being actual wargames that the newest one seemed an obvious candidate to be part of this year’s alternative-things effort. So if you’re a fellow grog who’s similarly tempted let me save you the trouble.

The first game in the Total War franchise – Total War being a trademarked term mind you, and not by Dr Goebbels – was Shogun, set in medieval Japan obviously. And Shogun was in unusual enough a setting, and new enough an idea to have been worth the money; but Rome followed and was a joke, and this current game really isn’t much better. I didn’t see any of the others, like I say there’s usually only one  of these experiments a year, and often my choice is made for me, coming along bundled with a video card. But to cut a long story short, if you paid for any of the earlier games then there’s no real point in getting this one: the improvements are mostly minor, and the failings are mostly the same.

DRM infected

Before you read any further be aware too that this game requires online activation & for you have the Steam virus, (ahem) trojan, (ahem) client installed on your computer to play. It doesn’t matter if you buy the on-a-disc version in a bricks & mortar store, you’ll still need to activate it. If such things matter to you then you have been warned.

Scope

ETW covers the eightieth century, pretty much in its entirety. Well, the entire “strategy game” version of the eightieth century in any case, but it’s still an impressive effort content-wise. There are three theatres (Europe, India, & America) and the maps for each theatre are big. Whole game big. In addition there are a few chokepoint locations between the theatres and all up I’d call it a comprehensive enough world map.

A lot of effort’s been put into building a strategy game for that map – but it fails, for many of the common reasons RTS games fail, chief amongst which is the comatose AI.  Big armies almost always beat small ones, but despite that the AI will hardly ever mass its troops, instead sending them out in penny packets. Technology (the usual canard of a tech tree indeed) makes a difference, but not enough of one to matter much. And all up the strategy game is the same slow drudge of building & expanding whichever country it is you choose, without ever meeting any serious obstacles, without doing anything new or different, no matter which country you have. It’s all so samey.

And while the maps are pretty it’s hard to zoom out far enough to see much while retaining any detail, and on matters graphical: the giant men who stride across the map representing units & individuals in the game look just plain stupid. Fee fi fo fum … But despite the obvious effort that’s been put into building a strategic game, and its equally obvious failings, the meat of this title is the tactical combat. Always has been in this series.

Thankfully you can jump straight into tactical battles without enduring the strategic game too,  but they’re random battles, none of the really famous eighteenth century battles are here. Poltava, Plassey, Montenotte (with Napoeon!) … Blenheim for goodness sake, there’s a long list of famous ones that should be included but aren’t. The only historical land battle included is Brandywine Bridge, and then only as a very, very simple lesson that perhaps you should look for an undefended ford before charging across a defended one. Ho hum.

The tactical maps are all in 3D of course. And they’re lavish. To a 2D kind of guy like me the battles on land as well as at sea sure look pretty, but that’s as heady as my praise is likely to get. There are just so many things they could easily have got right, but didn’t seem to bother with. The speed for starters.

Run!

On land units charge about. You can run or you can walk, but everybody runs. All the time. At Olympic speeds - full packs & heavy weapons notwithstanding. The pasty faced programmers who produced this nonsense have very clearly never lifted anything heavier than a keyboard, nor walked at faster than the slightly hurried pace needed for them to get to their nearest Coke machine. As with the other games in the series the speed of everything is just plain risible. People reload at Olympic speeds, sight & fire at Olympic speeds. Everything is just too fast. It’s the eighteenth century on amphetamines & crack.

And they charge around in formation what’s more.  Everybody on the planet’s in formation, because all of the armies in the game are really just clones of one another, varying simply by the different skins that’re painted on top. The Indians (both sorts) line up in neat ranks just like the Prussians, and so too does everybody else; Frederick really would be proud of the reach of his influence in this game. Of course as even broken formations stay in fairly ordered blobs it’s probably not that much of a surprise. That’s not to say you should expect the linear warfare of the period though. As everybody’s running all those neat lines of troops quickly overlap into meaningless blobs.

Messing about in boats

At sea it’s much the same, plus your ships will sail to wherever you click for them to go.  Their speed and course don’t seem to relate to their trim, or to the wind at all, and their ability to turn on a dime, even to spin almost on the spot like a top, well, it’s bewildering to say the least. What point strategy when all of your units can just manoeuvre at will?

And this is (vastly accelerated) “real” time combat – so lots & lots of frantic clicking back & forth is rewarded, and hand eye coordination matters much more than any sort of a plan, especially when all of both sides’ ships usually end up spinning about in another meaningless clump of fail, just like the land battles.

Maybe some or all of this is fixable in a mod – but as it is, it isn’t worth much more than a look, and certainly isn’t worth spending serious time or money on.

Closest living relative

In many ways this game is the mirror image of Crown of Glory (COG) – the last game I reviewed – COG has a much better (though still fatally flawed) strategic game with a worse tactical game bolted onto it.  ETW is a promising tactical game with a less than stellar strategic game bolted on, also it seems almost as an afterthought.  If only we could get the two games to mate somehow … or the designers … (eww).

Despite the realism problems in the tactical games, it’s the strategic side of this game that’s its real weak point. The “advanced” economic rules I detested in my COG review? They’re here in spades. Build a road, build a farm, build a … type 1003 province improvement. Meaningless detail that some kids will think is depth and “strategy” (it makes me sad, it really does) but which you and I can safely do without, I think.

The oversimplified attrition & supply rules I disliked in COG?  Picture no attrition & no supply, & no penalties imposed by extreme weather, & no (the list of what’s missing just goes on & on) … The more I think about it the more I think the strategic game really was just put in as an excuse to fight the tactical battles, and is something they could happily have left out entirely.

In summary

I give this game one star, it’s stable if a little unwieldy, and it has great potential for a realism mod to come out and fix the tactical game. But that's potential mind, whether it’s possible & whether it gets done only time will tell. As it is, the game as is eminently miss-able.

On the strength of ETW I’ll probably skip the next few sausages in the franchise myself. My RTS desire has been well and truly sated recently, and not in a good way.

Crown of Glory: Emperor's Edition

Total score
Game play
Nuts & bolts
Bells & whistles	N/A

 

Crown of Glory Emperor's Edition (COG:EE) is  the second sequel to the original Crown of Glory. Sadly the improvements although they’re promising at first glance turn out to be mostly minor, and one or two major things are now just plain broken as well.

It’s not about the economy (stupid)

Gone by default is the crazy pseudo economic game that so spoiled  the original COG, where players had to waste their time building mills & other generic “strategy” game improvements in their provinces, & waste yet more time trading the wine & corn & handful of other generic “strategy” game goods that resulted from this. It’s not how any nineteenth century economy worked, and it’s not a good model of anything other than how production & trade get handled in the mass market “strategy” games (that so richly deserve those annoying mocking air quotes that I seem unable to resist). 

You can still turn the mock economy on as an option, but I didn’t, and frankly don’t understand why anyone would.  It’s not a question of detail, or of the rules being advanced, so much as it’s a matter of the rules being stupid and rather than adding anything to play, how they manage to substantially subtract from it. (I cannot say enough bad things about the economic game in the original COG, but you don’t want to read it, and I don’t much want to write it, so please let’s both imagine several more paragraphs that heap abuse on it and we’ll move on.)

With the mock economy out of the way you do get a good chance to look into the details of the rest of the game. This is great. Except unfortunately it turns out the rest of the game has some fairly daft rules too.

What’s different? What’s new?

The new map’s a bit different; there’s the turnings off of the <expletive> economy game I’ve already mentioned one or two thousand times; there’re a few more scenarios & events; and there are a few more screens that somehow manage to look quite bolted on.

For example there’s a diplomatic overview screen now. This screen could have been good, it’s a map of Europe with pictures of the leaders with lines in between them indicating whether they're friends or foes.  Except no effort seems to have been made to line up the pictures of the leaders with their appropriate geographical orientation to one another, so it’s left with the impression of being an afterthought rather than an improvement.

And … ummm … Other than that I’m left scratching my head, it looks like not a lot else has changed in the main game, but …

A grand strategy game with extra extraneous tactical fiddly bits

Like the original COG this game is still weighed down with a tactical land combat game that players can use to resolve the combats that arise in the main game, should they choose to, and to that’s been added a new but very similar tactical naval game.

Apart from dragging the length of the game out to unmanageable proportions I never really saw much point to this. For me tactical sub games usually only work in a game like the old Avalon Hill boardgame Titan, where there really wasn’t anything very much going on in the main game. (In Titan there was choosing your path around a circular board, and that was pretty much it). So I was always of the opinion that the strategy game didn’t need the tactical game, and should really be able to stand up on its own merits, and also that the tactical game might well be improved mightily if allowed to go its own way too. That opinion hasn’t changed.

One of my main criticisms of the original game was that while it had everything and the kitchen sink thrown in, it didn’t do any of those things particularly well. It seems these guys just can’t let go of enough of the dud parts of their first brush designs. Once they think of it - it’s in, and it stays in. More trimming rather than more trimmings is what’s still badly needed here. Less would most certainly be more. They’ve made a start with the economics subgame, now it’s time for a few more cuts. Chop chop.

As far as I can tell the land tactical game is still pretty much the same one it used to be. Having a combat brings up a hex grid of generic wooded land, or mountain, or whatever the case may be. Units are the counters you’d expect on a hex map, so they all have the same footprint on the map, and somehow as is usually the case a few hundred men take up the same space as several thousand men in a game without stacking. So perhaps for tactical think small scale operational. But with facings. And formations. And other small tactical considerations, like: why can’t I change my initial setup, or more importantly: why is there an objective in a lake …

There’s unrealised potential here – all the elements of quite a good game in itself are present (misinterpreted orders, changing formations, as well of course as all the usual terrain considerations), but the interface is really clumsy. You can only move one unit at a time in a forced order (presumably some sort of index order). If this game could be hived off the main one & improved it might go somewhere. As it is there’s the option to fight at brigade level too, which gives you the same sized map but with even more units that can’t stack. But that’s just plain weird, and that’s all that’s been added that I can see.

As it is you can’t leap straight into playing a tactical game like you can in many of  the mainstream “strategy” games, battles arise in the main game or not at all. There’re no quick battles, nor any historical ones. Both of which would be have been nice.

There’s also a limit to how many units can appear in the tactical game (both the quick resolution version & the tactical map version), which is awfully reminiscent of those other “strategy” games’ twenty a side combats, which gets to me too.  If I put a hundred units in Vienna I want the game to act like there might have been some point to my decision. But no.

The naval game is similar.  Very similar in fact – it’s quite obviously a derivative of the land combat game, right down to telling you how many men were killed on each side at the end of a battle, but not telling you anything about how many ships were lost, captured, or damaged. It’d be nice to know.

The ships themselves are pretty generic. There are big ones & small ones and all sorts of type names are there, but they’re just slight variations in crew & damage numbers, the scale seems wrong to have much scope here for early nineteenth century naval strategy. Trafalgar can’t happen for a start, not only were there probably too many ships involved, but there’s not really enough of a distinction between the lighter but more disciplined Brits & the clumsily handled Spanish giants, and to cap it all off the tactical map is just way too small – There’s no real possibility of manoeuvre when one side occupies all one side of a  map and the other side all of the other from the start of an engagement. And there’s no real point to crossing the T any way when you can pretty much always move a hex and change direction, when speed & rigging seem unrelated, when there are no formations, & when you can stop dead in the water by the simple expedient of passing after you fire, rather than moving on. As for Hornblower-esque combats where the plucky sixth-rater Atropos struggles with the Dons while avoiding the ire of their shore batteries ... forget about it. There’s land, but I didn’t see any forts.

You can easily choose to pass on the detailed battles, on land and at sea, and concentrate on the core of the game – the strategic game. So for me the tactical shenanigans are merely icing on the cake.  COG:EE game stands or falls on the strength of its strategic game.

The bulk of that strategic game is actually pretty good, which is why it took me quite a few plays to make my mind up about it, but it’s let down badly in one or two areas that really spoil the whole thing. You can manoeuvre & concentrate appropriately, and while a little clumsy the interface is OK. (I’d like to be able to take back more than just my last action, but I can live within that limitation, and if that was the worst problem the game had it would be a fine game in my book.)  But judged by the strength of the strategic game the game still falls down, because …

Sing me a song, a song of supply

Supply doesn’t work. For a grand strategy game about a war where the turning point was the Grande Armée finding itself at the very end of a tenuous supply line in Moscow this is simply unfathomable. If there’s anything a Napoleonic strategy game should handle it’s supply. You’d think. But no.

IN COG:EE once a chain of supply depots is up & running any city along its path with keep it going. The supply line has to be started off in friendly territory (the French side of the Russian border, say) but once supply is flowing it doesn’t really matter if that link to friendly territory (and you know, the source of the supply) ends up being cut.  Any city along its path will keep the supply pumping.  Any city.  Including the city at what’s meant to be the receiving end of the supply line. So if the French set up a supply line to Moscow for example, it doesn’t matter if those dastardly Cossacks cut it, cause now the supply can flow the other way: From cut off Moscow to everywhere else along the supply route.

This kills the game as any sort of serious wargame for me. Fixing supply would get this game a second star, but without a fix I can’t call the results I’m seeing in any way historical. And don’t hold your breath for a fix, according to discussions on Usenet & on the Matrix forum it seems they did this on purpose.

And the AI just did what?

Sadly the AI is borderline insane. It seems to occasionally get things right, like lunging at Vienna as the French in the opening game, but only presumably because things like that are scripted somewhere; most of the time it doesn’t seem to understand which war it’s fighting. As the Austrians, Prussians & Russians it’s much more keen to pick off weaker members of its own coalition than fighting the French.  These guys should be seething with arch-conservative Ancien Regime rage at the Corsican upstart, but instead they’d happily chuck that fight in in exchange for one more province carved off one of their once & future allies.

Similarly something needs to be done about the boundless naval ambitions of Russia & Turkey in this game.  They’re land powers, but they don’t seem to have got that memo. Turkey was boxed in by Venice (Venice!), but if it ever did break out into the wider Med, or if for some crazy reason Russia were to up stakes & abandon the frozen Baltic, I’m pretty sure neither of them should ever, no matter how things transpired on land, ever, ever be fighting for control of the English Channel in 1812.  No, no, no.

A gateway game?

COG:EE neatly highlights one of the many problems with the ‘gateway wargame’ theory, which by way of a quick summary I can say takes its name from the equally implausible gateway drug theory.  “So you tried click & twitch strategy game X, but found it not quite realistic enough?  Well, why not try wargame Y”, we should be able to say.  Except that there often isn’t a directly comparable wargame Y to point to, and when there is it’s often not one that’s any good. Which is the case here.

That’s a pity, because there’s got to be more than one teenager playing Empire Total War right now who’ll get tired of the spinning tops that make up his navy & the Olympic sprinters who make up his army. And the leap from the the eighteenth to the nineteenth centuries is small enough for this game to have qualified nicely for the role of gateway game. If only it had been any good. Better hope for a realism mod for ETW instead.

The future?

The original Crown Of Glory started out as a buggy mess, it barely stayed running long enough to see what was wrong with it, but it was patched repeatedly and I believe more or less successfully. (I don’t know that for sure, I gave up on downloading the patches. It’s supposed to have stayed running at least.) So I wouldn’t be surprised if this game gets patched extensively too. Whether or not the patches fix what ails it though, well only time will tell.