u/Theynalzada

After playing almost every TW, I can say that the Empire is the most ambitious game in the franchise. Being able to fight in multiple theaters of war is what makes this game the most special. I also believe that the sandbox wise, the game also offers the most as there is no limit for what you can do with every nation. You can also have completely different campaigns even with the same nation, just take a look at these scenarios.

1. Playing as the Ottoman Empire, you can take the traditional political expansionist strategy to expand into Europe.
2. Playing as the Ottoman Empire, you can take a more “European” way, transform your nation into a maritime empire and colonize Americas, and India while staying put in other theaters of war.
3. Playing as the Ottoman Empire, you can decide to change the government type and establish the Republic of Turkey to have more reliable relationship with other nations.

Just imagine other scenarios with nations such as Prussia, The Great Britain, France, Russia and others. In addition to this, I also believe that Empire has the best technology tree in the franchise. The armies you have at your disposal and you fight against at the beginning of campaign will not be the same with ones you will have late campaign.

- Your cavalry regiments will be replaced by Dragoons/Light Dragoons/Heavy Curassiers
- Your fixed artillery will be replaced by howitzers with quicklime shots
- Your foot artillery will have a shrapnel shot capability to shred enemy infantry into pieces.
- Your early game skirmishers will be replaced by light infantry mid game, which will be replaced by riflemen late game.
- Your irregular infantry will be replaced by a more disciplined line infantry that can fight in square formations.

More you play the game, more love it. Despite the flaws everyone knows such as braindead AI, broken diplomacy, and terrible siege battles, the game offers more to get you going, and I am saying these as someone who has been playing the vanilla game.

I also believe that the game was too early to develop for CA. This is the game that they developed right after the Medieval 2, however, I also understand the urge and determination of the good old CA to develop game that takes place in 18th century. To be honest, I was a little bit frustrated that CA announced Medieval 3 before Empire 2, but I also understand the reason why they did that as it was the safest route to success for CA to get on good terms with historical TW fans. Despite this, I have got my hopes high for the upcoming entry to be the Empire 2.

I have over 1000 hours in this franchise as it is my favorite, however, we need to talk about the optimization issues regarding the legacy titles starting from Shogun 2 up to ToB. In the last decade CA delivered games that are not supported by the modern hardware, and they seem reluctant to update their engine to 64-bit which is criminal by the way. The fact that they have only a single dedicated developer (ToB guy) just shows the way they treat these historical games. My PC specs are RTX 5070Ti with 16GB VRAM and yet I am unable to get 30-40 FPS during campaigns in Rome 2 and Attila. In Shogun 2, even though the campaign is optimized the battle stutters when I zoom in. The only games that are much more optimized in comparison to these games are Troy and Pharaoh but those games are not as addictive as the others. In my opinion CA has already outstayed its welcome and it is time as players we raise this issue so that they start putting more developers to handle optimization issues, otherwise I do not see a reason to come back to play a TW game that looks garbage with a performance that is even worse.