Civ IV v Empire: Total War

The Game Room
1

I consider myself an amatuer gamer. I have a lot of other things to do. I had some fun with Civ IV. It has the advantages of having come first and of belonging to a significant computer game franchise. The on-line community seems pretty witty and posts plenty of UCC for download. It is a fun and thought-provoking turn-based strategy game. No?

Well recently I got a new computer, something up to the year 2011. And then I installed Empire: Total War. My inner eternal 13-year old is like :eek: Empire seems to combine every game of the genre into one, then adds understanding the philosophical advancements of the time as a pre-requisite for victory. And on this new machine, the hi-res graphics of cannon blowing away ranks of line infantry or cavalry are exquisite. The mathematics of the economics of such activity are also believable. It tries very hard to maximize the use of modern chipsets to immerse a sensitive person in the realities of the era.

I feel like gaming acquired a new order of madnitude. I’m happy to have enjoyed the last one. So, is one better than the other? I wonder if Empire would have developed into what it is today if Civ IV had never existed.

2

I have the same basic complaint about Empire that I’ve always had: the factions feel identical. Each faction boils down to the same strategy; control the trade nodes with the exactly identical naval units at your command and use the profits to fund your armies composed of a couple of artillery units (identical to everyone else’s artillery), a couple of cavalry units (similar enough to be indistinguishable from everyone else’s cavalry) and fill out the rest of your army with line infantry (again indistinguishable from everyone else’s), with a couple of light infantry units if you feel like it. Previous Total War games actually required you to behave a little differently to win; in Medieval II I had to command English, Venetian, Danish, Russian, and Egyptian armies quite differently to win, and I had to change my tactics significantly to compensate for the different armies I faced. Medieval II had a host of its own problems, but I did appreciate that the factions were really different in substance, not merely in the territories that had been decreed as the goals.

Of course, the only game with factions more similar than Empire is Civilization. Certainly the Total War series has drawn from Civilization, especially on the strategy map, but I’m not convinced that it could not have done so without Civilization IV. The original Civilization revolutionized the industry; I don’t feel that way at all about the sequels.

3

They’re both fine games, and very different. One of the things I like about Empire is that you have to decide which goals to set for yourself before you set about accomplishing anything. Is it time to invade India, or should you concentrate on the Iroquois Confederacy first? Of course, if you take the Iroquois territory, you’ll probably have to fight the Cherokee, too; not that difficult, that that’ll leave you with a lot of turf adjacent to French holdings to both the north and south. If France attacks you, Spain is sure to join. Can you gain control of Iberia and Flanders and Naples and Milan before Spain mobilizes, with all its New World holdings? Maybe it would be best to try something else; maybe take care of those pesky Caribbean pirates. If you grab north Africa, you won’t have to worry about the Barbary pirates raiding your partners’ trade routes. And so on.

I take it you never played as Prussia, then?

4

I have to say, I hate Empire. I could barely get through the tutorial mode, and I loved previous and later Total War games. Empire is a running disaster. The graphics are insultingly bad looking about five years older than they should, the battles are barely tepid, and the strategic AI dim at best.

CIV4 all the way, and even better, it has a vibrant mod community.

5

Really? :dubious: Each Civ leader has two specialties, which most certainly affect and guide the growth and development of his or her empire. They also have (at least in a comprehensive mod like Rise of Mankind) several unique units. I’ve never played anything in the other series, but from your description of them I don’t buy your assertion.

6

My gf will be glad to hear that it gets boring once you figure it out. So far I am not there yet. This is the first game I’ve tried since I had the computing power to handle it- at least at first there seems to be a lot of depth, and I like how seamlessly everything runs. And Empire came bundled with Napoleon: Total War, which is the real reason I chose this one. Two titles in one, and I know next to nothing about the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars. Hopefully I’ll learn something! I haven’t installed it yet though. I started playing Empire and for the last week or two that is pretty much what I do for fun :wink:

I do find the speaking tutorials a little embarrassing though. They feel like they are addressing a child.

7

That’s true; as Prussia, you don’t bother with the naval half and move directly to building the armies that are functionally identical to everyone else’s armies.

I will admit, though, that the diplomacy system in Empire is a giant leap forward from diplomacy in Medieval II. I tried to go back and couldn’t; protectorates are impossible to get and running diplomats around the map is mind-numbing. The initial set-up and the AI afterward do a good job keeping you caged in by allying with one another without resorting to the you-versus-the-world scenario that many other strategy games wind up with.

I haven’t played IV, but unless it’s wildly different than III, the factions just aren’t that different. It sounds quite similar; each civilization has a couple of traits (in III they might be militaristic and gain combat experience more quickly, or industrious and build things more quickly, or so on) and a single unique unit. Those are pretty similar factions compared to even Empire; in Empire the stats for units are tweaked slightly compared to Civilization where they’re identical unless it happens to be your UU. I’m not speaking of mods for either game; there’s a vibrant modding community for both Civ and Total War games and I agree that modded versions of each are often superior to the original.

8

It is wildly different from 3. So much so that it would be fair to say that 3 is not even of average quality, while 4 is a masterpiece that has raised the bar for the entire genre.

9

While the unit diversity in Empire (where every major faction’s line infantry is different*) isn’t as great as even Napoleon, starting position guarantees a completely different game when you pick a new faction. As Britain you can, as mentioned above, decide where to focus. They also have the advantage of starting as a constitutional monarchy, which doesn’t get public order penalties for upgrading factories. Prussia is beset on all sides by enemies (or potential enemies) and has to wade right into the thick of mainland warfare whether it wants to or not. France and Spain each don’t have to worry about running afoul of the France-Spain bloc, but as Catholics the landscape of Europe is much different in terms of religious unrest. The Ottomans not only have a lot of catching up to do economically, but their line infantry is really crappy. They can, however, move into Mughal territory with minimal unrest, and they can maintain good trade relations with the European powers when they do so.

*For instance, Russian line infantry is much better suited to charging into melee than it is to exchanging volleys. If a Russian player tries to kill British line infantry using only bullets, he’ll regret it.

Napoleon’s unit diversity is quite pronounced. France has great cannons and good infantry. Britain has even better infantry but crappy artillery. Russia has lackluster infantry (and IIRC a crummy selection of ships) but can eventually build unicorn howitzers, and all of their units are immune to winter attrition. It would be foolish to play those factions identically.

10

You could also play as Maratha, ignore all the European politicking while you take over India, and eventually steamroller your way into Europe. Plus your generals ride elephants!

I have to agree that Empire is probably the weakest of the series. The scope is properly vast, but there was so much unrealized potential like the missing royal family trees. The AI does silly things, like cavalry always making a beeline for your artillery. Forts don’t repair, so if you take over a fortified city you’re stuck with broken walls unless you tear them down and rebuild them. Napoleon fixed a lot of this, though it’s understandably more limited in scope. All that being said, of the whole Total War series, Empire is the game I spent the most time playing. There’s something about this style of warfare that I enjoy.

Of course, I’ve been playing a lot of Shogun 2 lately, which seems to fix even more of the previous games’ problems while returning to the roots of the series. It will probably soon take over from Empire as my most-played game of the series.

11

Just want to second this. I don’t know if I’d go so far as to say the factions are all wildly different- I found the same strategies worked in most cases- but I thought IV made a lot more sense and simply had way more going for it. And the music in Civ IV was really great, one way Empire doesn’t stack up.

I have noticed some glitchiness with Empire. It seems to switch back and forth between a mode where clicking on a formation in a battle de-selects the last active formation, and another mode where clicking on different units adds them to a group so that you end up sending your whole army will-nilly before you figured out what happened. Is there a patch, or is this something that I’m turning on and off without knowing it? (I probably should read the manual, huh?) And sometimes keyboard commands stop working altogether for moving the camera around. How can I appreciate this new graphics chip if I can’t zoom in on those dead soldiers?!?

And, what is so much better about Shogun II? I’ll never have time to play out a lot of different games, so if there is one that is even more fun maybe I should take a look.

12

Shogun 2? Talk about every faction looking the same…

Pick a diamyo, any diamyo. Build a bunch of Ashigaru that won’t fight, in order to keep public order with big cheap units. Then build a huge samurai army and steamroll the other diamyos with units that are identical (except for color schemes and occasional +1 accounting bonuses) to theirs.

Generals can’t even reach the final tier of abilities before the game is over, if you’re playing naturally. Each faction will end up with a few giant provinces where they can build the strongest samurai units, with the rest of the empire stuck at level 1 buildings pushing Ashigaru due to food consumption concerns. Literally every faction will play exactly the same way! Shogun 2 isn’t even good for two playthroughs, while Empire was a brand new experience with every faction.

13

Except for those of us who shrug and just build Ashigaru. Samurai are surprisingly cost-ineffective…

14

*Shogun *is a very different beast from Empire. For one thing, most of the fighting is hand-to-hand rather than at range (well, Ashigaru machine gun archers notwithstanding :D), and there’s next to no artillery to rain down on unsuspecting suckers.
For another, the scope is much narrower and more detailed. Instead of thinking in terms of which wide general direction to conquer, you’re more concerned about which particular mountain pass seems like a good defensive stopgap and so forth. It’s “closer to the ground”, as it were, especially considering the geography of Japan. Everything is smaller, so you don’t feel quite as lost as to what is important and what isn’t.
Finally, the tech tree is at the same time more extensive and more limited: there’s not much in the way of unlockable units or entirely new fighting techniques, instead you research bonuses and multipliers to existing ones.

Oh, and the naval combat is much shittier in Shogun, I feel.

ETA: oh, I forgot: Shogun also makes you care more about your generals and your king, not only because you can’t just pop a new one whenever you want, but through a sort of RPG-ish ability tree as well, so you’ll have a cavalry guy, a bridge holding guy, a killer income guy etc…, which in turn make assassinations less useless.

If you think *Empire *is awesome, however, you should probably give *Napoleon *a try. Everything *Empire *does, *Napoleon *does too, and in more elegant fashion (except the colonization aspect which is missing, but then fighting neverending hordes of overpowered Injuns wasn’t fun or interesting anyway).

Yup, they went back to the roots - the first Shogun had even fewer unit types, too.

But frankly, it was enough - when MTW 1 came out it had something like 200 unique unit types, but mostly they were redundant. Who needs 50 different types of spearmen ? They spear stuff, OK ? That’s what spearmen do. And of course, all of them performed that basic job more or less equally efficiently (and with an overwhelming advantage vs. cavalry), so the only real difference was when you used them against each other, i.e. when you were being an idiot because you should have used swordsmen instead ; or marginal survivability vs. fatigue concerns against archers.

15

IO have long wished that instead of handing out random basic units, they gave each unit useful AI and made that a primary point of distinction. Sure, anyone might be able to hand out spears to random people, but only then X faction has courageous spearmen who stand up in a fight. Anyone can buy swords, but only the Z faction has swordsman who charge fearlessly. And so on, with the effect intended that everyone focuses on their preferred units - able to fill any gap, but never relying on units with poor AI.

16

Certainly varied positions on the strategy map make for somewhat different strategic games, more so that previous installments in the series. Still, while Prussia and Austria are fighting line infantry battles against similar forces in Europe, Britain and France are doing the same in the Americas. The Indians are simply too weak to offer resistance after the first two dozen turns; once you have a decent force built up, you steamroll them. I simply don’t buy the premise that all of these minor differences in line infantry make for a wildly different game. Sure, in the early game the Ottomans and the Marathas have weak line infantry, but by the end game they’re right on par, with similar cavalry and identical artillery. And everybody’s navies build precisely the same ships, except for Britain and France’s slightly boosted stats. I don’t think we’re going to agree here; I can see that the stats are somewhat different in the unit cards but I have never felt in-game like it mattered very much which faction I was controlling on the battlefield level after the first twenty turns of play. After the Eastern factions catch up line infantry-wise, the game just doesn’t feel that different to me. Don’t get me wrong; I still enjoyed the game and am playing it at the moment, in fact. I just don’t think that it has the depth that Medieval II had because the factions’ units are so similar.
I haven’t played Napoleon, and I have heard that it fixed many issues in Empire. If the unit diversity is as dramatic as that, then I may have to give it a try.

17

The problem here is that you’re thinking of the game only in terms of the tactical battles, and ignoring the strategic element. The strategic element is huge. Most battles are won well before the war is even declared. Those battles where you steamroll the Iroquois are going to lead to you getting creamed by the French if you haven’t taken the necessary precautions.

And no, Maratha line infantry never catches up. They can’t ever fire by rank, and that’s massive.

18

Can’t they? I thought that Sikh infantry could. Nevermind, then.

Yes, the strategic game has a leg up on previous versions. I’ve said as much. We’re not going to agree on this.