Never played it, heard it's buggy etc, get Napoleon instead, but I'm digging the global map, the era, native american nations... Would I regret my choice by getting this instead of Napoleon?
Never played it, heard it's buggy etc, get Napoleon instead, but I'm digging the global map, the era, native american nations...
just pirate it ffs it's a 100yo game
It's pure jank. Napoleon is better in every single way, except having a more contained map.
All you're missing out on is
>naval battles over trading theatres (admittedly not bad - but napoleons naval battles are just as good)
>watching India become an orange blob without European influence, and then becoming totally irrelevant for the rest of the game
>some minor scraps with pirates in the Caribbean
Also - the AI is absolutely incapable of conducting naval invasions. This makes most of the new world shit and unfun. Once you take an island, your only real threat is rebellion.
You can pick Britain and spam hundreds of turns, and you'll be lucky to see the AI even attempt to attack you with land forces. Also - if you decide to attack the AI - prepare for things like France being a single province, or Spain being similar.
Damn, that seems pretty lame. No chance of fixing any of that with some
mods?
Yeah, Napoleon fixes nearly all the issues.
No, CA killed modding on purpose so they could sell dlc units.
It's been a long while since I've played it, but Darthmod is a reeeeally good mod for it that does fix and improve on a lot of stuff. Check the features out and see if they interest you.
This guy summed it up pretty well.
ETW is unfullfilled potential The Game. Honestly if any game deserves proper new gen remake it's this one.
You also forget:
>Ottoman AI doesn't understand straits crossing, ensuring that when it's their turn to do moves, It'll take 10 minutes for them to move a bunch of 2 units stack back and forth across Istanbul
>watching India become an orange blob without European influence, and then becoming totally irrelevant for the rest of the game
in my empire campaigns they turned into the invading evil army from the mysterious east, wiping out factions one-by-one until they arrived at my strongholds, leading for a world-war that lasted longer than the rest of the game combined.
Also really helped that they used to many unique units compared to European factions, felt very appropriate.
>Would I regret my choice by getting this instead of Napoleon?
Nope, it can be fun in it's own way with some mods
If anything playing empire first helps you appreciate NapoopaN more.
Both are regularly very cheap, I'd say choose both. I agree with others here that Napoleon's battles are generally better but it's not like it's immune to the same species of jank. Honestly I find Empire's jankiness sort of charming in parts.
i went from Rome 1 to Empire recently and uninstalled it after like 15min when i saw how weightless and shit the battles were compared to old games
Melee units really are one of Empires low points. I tried to play an Ottoman playthrough awhile back, but I couldn't stomach the jank. It's a shame though, because it's one of the factions that Napoleon poorly represents.
Napoleon/Empire feels to manage gunpowder in a much better way than Med 2 though (but I can't remember if they ever fixed that bug where cannons would only target the corner of units - I think it's still broken, as FotS has it too).
Empire had so much potential - it's sad to see it wasted. It's sadder to know that CA are a dumpster-fire now, so we'll probably never get the game we all wanted.
Probably yeah. You gotta be really into the whole colonial Empire idea to be able to excuse that almost everything including the AI, the map, the gameplay in general, the bugs, are all worse than what you would be getting with Napoleon.
Both are worth playing. I'm biased towards Empire though because I played it as a kid and I love the time period. There are several overhaul mods that make the experience a lot better. The bugs don't really bother me all that much.
>played it as a kid
Leave, zoomie.
that feeling when trying to rule the waves with an actual proper navy and trade fleets at Britain, but iq89 Spanish just spam extremely cheap trade fleet galleons, and each battle turns into a half our long kiting session to remove them. Even later in the game, they're still top of the tier list.
There is a mod to rebalance them.
In the unmodded game Galleons defeat second rate ships in a 1-on-1 battle while costing less than half the upkeep.
Empire feels like it was originally meant to be 1600-1800 or even 1500-1800 but they couldn't figure out how to make pikes work properly in warscape.
Darthmod fixes most of the issues and is quite fun. The scale of Empire is one of the coolest things about it. My 1300 man defence of Ahmadnagar against 12,500 mughals was one of the most epic and enjozable experiences I have had playing Total War.
Making battle AI more aggressive but equally dumb and introducing million different flavor units for clutter fixes nothing. Empire is still trash
I played Darthmod and it was pure trash that I'm pretty sure was constantly being shilled by Darth for a decade until morons actually believed the lie that it "fixes the game"
>adds 40 unit armies with 300 unit sizes
>except battle maps are still vanilla sized so you just create a huge fricking line from one edge map to the other (and it still is not enough) and just watch pretty explosions
>shitty flavor units that add absolutely nothing to the game (bro, but you get like 30 different line infantry units which do the same fricking thing lmao)
>AI is still garbage, can't do formations and just launches attacks piecemeal until it just routs
I hate total war and the plague it has brought. I'm happy for its downfall. Same gameplay, no innovation.
It's a way better setting than napoleon even if napoleon is a more polished game. darthmod fixes a lot of the issues with empire so napoleon loses it's main draw. play empire for a european gunpowder total war and play napoleon for the great war mod.
>play empire for a european gunpowder total war
Nothing spells 18th century european total war like single province Spain and France, and every AI behaving like mongols the game.
And what most of gaygs here forget to say is that mods have to remove sieges because AI cant handle them despite cities like Paris, London and Istanbul being rendered as 5-house villages.
I'm currently playing a less known mod that seems to fix some of the problems. "Pirates ûber alles". It's a bit slavjank but I'm a STALKER fan so I just find it endearing. Unit bloat is not too bad. I like historical named units so your opinion might differ. However the big thing is the better CAI and invasions. I'm playing as the US and holy shit defending the eastern seaboard against naval invasions without a large navy is annoying.
The mod has some stupid design choices like for example overpowered pirates so that you cant just trade in peace. Which kinda makes sense but is also fricking annoying. The combat is okay. The mod does away with the special firing types (by rank, platoon etc.) to smooth out the gameplay but also re-balances gunplay around this. So it works out okay.
There's no way these are still expensive enough that you can't afford to get both.