What Total War: EMPIRE is
Total War: EMPIRE puts you in the eighteenth century Age of Enlightenment, a period of political upheaval, military advancement and radical thought. You work on a turn-based campaign map that covers Europe, India and the United States, managing trade, diplomacy and espionage with agents while you move armies and fleets. When two forces meet, the game switches to a real-time battle where cannon and musket dominate, so formations and positioning matter more than in earlier eras of the series. Naval fighting is fully 3D: you command single ships or whole fleets, use cannon fire to soften an enemy, then grapple and board to take the fight hand-to-hand on deck. Water and weather effects play a real part in how a sea battle plays out.
The Definitive Edition content
This edition bundles every DLC and feature update released for the game. The Warpath Campaign adds a more detailed North American map with a new start date and five playable Native American factions: the Iroquois, Huron, Plains, Pueblo and Cherokee nations, each with their own winning objectives. It brings new units such as Mohawk Elite Warriors, Cheyenne Dog Soldiers and Navajo Scout Warriors, two new agent types in the Shaman and the Scout, and a tribal technology tree with 18 technologies including Spirit Medicine, Call of the Wild and Dreamwalking.
Three elite unit packs add more than 50 units in total. Elite Units of the East gives the Maratha and Ottoman factions 12 units and pushes the map further east than any previous Total War game. Elite Units of the West adds 14 units across the major Western factions, and Elite Units of America adds 15 units to the American, British and French rosters, tied to the events of the American Revolution. The Special Forces Units and Bonus Content packs round out the roster.
Playing it with friends
The game supports online co-op and online PvP. In multiplayer battles you can take the Warpath Campaign's new factions and their unique strengths onto the field against each other. Co-op lets you and a friend share the campaign, dividing the work of managing the map, trade and diplomacy before fighting the real-time battles together. PvP is where the gunpowder tactics get tested directly: formations, flanking and the use of terrain decide whether a line holds or breaks.
Before you start
Expect two distinct rhythms in one game. Campaign turns are slow and deliberate, built around agents, technology and positioning across a very large map; battles are fast and demand constant attention to unit facing, range and morale. Gunpowder changes the arithmetic compared with melee-focused strategy games, so a well-placed line of infantry with cannon support will beat a larger force that approaches carelessly. Sea battles have their own learning curve, since wind, weather and boarding actions all factor in. The scope is large — the store text describes hundreds of hours of gameplay across the base campaign, Warpath and the unit packs — so starting with one faction and one theatre keeps the first sessions manageable.