Andrew Tucker

How it got such good reviews is beyond me. I guess lack of options has something to do with it because there are hardly any 18th century strategy games that are decent out there. Empire is one of them but by no means is it a 9/10 game. The AI is broken and it makes playing the campaign a chore. The AI doesn’t follow the same rules as you, the player, does. If it needs money, it magically gets money. Needs a new army? One will spawn at no cost for them. If it’s losing a battle, it will magically spawn more troops for itself despite the battle info saying that the army had no reinforcements. If you destroy their navy at your port, another magically spawns and attacks you even though it was nowhere to be seen on the map before hand. In other words, it will spawn in the middle of the ocean where you had sight instead of it clearly coming from another continent. They were unable to make the AI challenging in a fair way so the difficulty had to be artificially manufactured by way of cheating. Even with mods, it’s still not great. I would not buy the game. Pirate it first then if you can deal with it, support the company and buy it after.