BIT LATE, but I got this for free the other week with my new graphics card, and it's taken ages to download. Anyway:
It's not that great really. I often find mysself just autoturning the battles, I'm only really interested in the strat layer. It's not much of an improvement over the first 3 games in the series (shogun, medieval, and rome. I didn't play medieval II and only played the demo of rome). Speaking of the strat layer, syncing the armies movement is a bloody pain. Making two armies arrive at the same battle at the same time, without starting the battle before the other units get there (or before you've had change to move them) is a shit. Why the hell is the armies movement realtime and not-undoable?
What I find more interesting, however, are the following statistics from the steam achievments:
http://steamcommunity.com/stats/EmpireT ... hievementsOnly 76% of people bothered to conquer another region....what the hell did the other 25% do with the game? Only play the tactical battles, possibly? Buy the game and not play it?!
Only 16% of people played it online.
5.2% of all people (that's around a third of the above) bother to play more than 10 games online.
only 2.7% of people have actually WON 10 multiplayer games.
Only 7.4% of people used the quick battle option -- clearly this is a game for people who like their slowness.
More people completed the game on medium that on easy
Not a single person has massacred a million enemies.