Total War: EMPIRE – Definitive Edition combines a turn-based world map with real-time battles and 3D naval combat. If that blend of campaigns and tactical engagements is what you want, the offer from Eneba costs $4.48; whether it fits your budget depends on how much you expect to play now.
The next announced Steam sale window is Dec 17, 2026 – Jan 4, 2027; the game is not guaranteed to participate or receive a discount.At $19.99 from Eneba, you can weigh the price against the next announced Steam sale window, Dec 17, 2026 – Jan 4, 2027, though participation or a discount is not guaranteed.
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89%Steam Reviews21.4K reviews
Released: Mar 4, 2009
Strategy · Historical · Military · Grand Strategy · Turn-Based Strategy
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01About Total War: EMPIRE – Definitive Edition
Total War: EMPIRE – Definitive Edition takes strategy into the Age of Enlightenment. Manage trade, diplomacy, and espionage across a turn-based campaign map, then lead real-time battles with cannons and muskets. At sea, command single ships or entire fleets in 3D naval engagements.Steam player rating: 89% positive from 21,413 reviews.
Is it worth dozens of hours? That depends on what you are after. If you want a strategy game with a fierce story, fast feedback, and all its fun spread out for you in the first few hours, Empire: Total War - Definitive Edition is not the right fit. Its pacing is old, its systems are thick, and it does not hide the marks of its era.
Who It Is Not For
More than five years after release, coming back to it today, you will definitely feel a certain design clumsiness, and that feeling is real — it should not be erased by the rose tint of a "classic" filter. The opening hours ask a lot before they give much back. If your patience runs out when a game refuses to flatter you early, this one will lose you, and there is no shame in that. It is genuinely demanding, and it does not apologize for it. The interface shows its age, the systems do not hold your hand, and the feedback loop is slow enough that a bad opening session can feel like wasted time rather than a learning curve. Players who want their strategy served fast and legible, with clear arrows pointing at the optimal move, will bounce off the deliberate, almost stubborn pacing. This is not a game that meets you halfway in its first evening, and being honest about that up front matters far more than any wave of nostalgia could ever justify.
Who Should Sink In
But if what you are obsessed with is the other kind of pleasure — the causal chain that runs from taxation to transport, from diplomacy to recruitment, and all the way down to battlefield positioning and a morale collapse — it still holds real value. It does not rush to please you the way many modern works do. It is more like a slightly difficult book that reads more smoothly the further you get. The front takes adjustment; the back is easy to fall into. Set against series benchmarks like the Rome entry, Empire is not more pure but more complex; set against Civilization, it adds the real-time tactical pleasure of cashing out your management with your own hands. That hybrid route still has a distinct identity even today.
So my verdict is this: it is not the kind of absolute classic everyone should feel obligated to catch up on, but for people who love historical grand strategy and are willing to accept the temperament of old design, it is still worth the time. Do not come in expecting a breezy thrill ride. Come in ready to burrow, and it fits much better. It rewards the player who wants to live inside a campaign rather than be carried through one — and on those terms, with the patience it asks for, it remains one of the more rewarding old maps you can still get lost in.
Selected helpful reviews in this language show both recommendations and criticisms. This selection does not represent the overall positive rating; opinions reflect the version reviewed.
RecommendedSteam player
Have you ever wanted a fresh cup of tea made with the freshest and finest of Indian tea?
Maybe you wish to invade India and create an empire of tea and corruption?
Maybe you just hate the French with such an unreasonable passion that you want to invade them for nothing?
Or becuase they are French?
Have you ever hated freedoms and liberties?
Maybe you just want to crush the American Revolution and Tax the ♥♥♥♥ out of them for high quality tea?
Ever wanted to sink a Spanish Armada just becuase its too Catholic for its own good?
Or maybe, just maybe you want to demonstrate the beauty of gunpowder to the savages of the Americas?
Maybe you want to murder a people in order to force them to grow you opium? Maybe you want to murder a people in order to force them to buy said opium? Either way the Chinese and Indians won't mind another Opium War...
At the end of the day, if you are a war mongering, tea drinking, bayonet using, people oppressing, gentleman of Her Majesty's finest of British Empires then this is probably a good game for you...
And if you like RTS's then this is a good choice... Worth every penny... every penny you made selling opium to the Chinese...Show moreShow less
41.1 hours at review548 people found this helpful
Not recommendedSteam player
Easily my favorite Total War game. But ten years later and this game should be dirt cheap. It was full of bugs the day it launched and despite labeling the game "definitive edition" most bugs remain. Raising the price without fixing anything is a blatantly greedy move and shouldn't be tolerated. Don't buy this gameShow moreShow less
1,457.7 hours at review265 people found this helpful
RecommendedSteam player
This review is written with Total War players in mind. As such, it will not adress basic gameplay that is inherent in all Total War games, such as turn based production and real time battling, but rather will compare Empire: Total War with other Total War titles.
As a Total War fan, my personal preference goes to this title, Empire. I like most Total War games, but Empire stands out to me. For one, I enjoy the historic time period. For two, it plays the most 'different' from the other titles.
Older titles, such as the first Rome: Total War game and Medieval II, heavily favour an agressive play style, with a lot of chaotic melees. Later games, such as Rome II and Shogun II, lean more towards a balanced stance between agression and response, depending on how superior your battlefield position and force is.
Empire: Total War, in contrast, is a game of patience. Instead of charging into melee, the gameplay entails meticulously positioning lines of infantry and laying down volleys of fire. Mirorring the idea of the age, it is the 'gentleman's edition' of Total War. The Fall of the Samurai expansion to Shogun II comes closest to the Empire style of play, with rifle armed infantry and gatling guns, and keeps the option to go into melee samurai charge mode, but Empire remain the only edition (excluding Napoleon: Total War) to favour a line to line exchange of fire.
Another difference is the naval battles. Granted, later editions in the Total War series incorporate these as well, but Romans or Edo era Japanese boats firing on one another with arrows pale next to the awesome power of a multiple deck ships of the line wailing away at one another. Again, Fall of Samurai introduces ironclad ships that approach this somewhat.
Of course, later titles have more recent, better developed versions of some of the aspects of Empire, and there are some other downsides to Empire. As usual with a Total War title, Creative Assembly has a tendency to leaving things not as smooth as they could have been. Most bugs have been smoothed out after release, as they usually are, but some small problems remain here and there (such as batteries of cannon simply not firing unless directed to do so in a very specific way).
Additionally, while the battles themselves offer some of the most unique Total War battle experiences, the map campaign improves little on previous editions. Not that this is necessary, because the region based resources and capture cities work well for the entire series. However, there is one significant improvement to me here, and that is that the map spans the most territory of any Total War game. Where Rome II limits itself to Europe and North Africa, and Shogun II is set in Japan, Empire scopes the entire Western dominated world of the Elizabethan age: Europe, North America, Africa and the Indies. The later release Napoleon: Total War does not nearly reach the score Empire does, and its campaigns are focused on smaller scale conquest rather than the world theatre of Empire.
As for the research system, it seems that the Empire title marks the start of an overhaul, where the series starts mimicing the more traditional 'tech tree' idea that prevails in many strategy games. This is not a bad thing, but it is an addition that was perhaps not entirely necessary. All the more so because sometimes it seems like a shoehorn to introduce the game's traditional late game obstacle. Every Total War game has some sort of hindering mechanic that makes the game prgressively more difficult as time advances. In Empire, research (which you need to keep up with your modernizing rivals) introduces squalor, which makes for an unhappy populace, which makes you either have to sink money into keeping them happy or have to deal with rebellions.
If you prefer a more agressive slugfest in a game, I would suggest Rome II, Shogun II, or if you don't mind some more antiquated aestethics and graphics, Medieval II.
If you like your games new and crisp, the more recent titles are sure to be your thing as well. If you want a more modern game that still uses line infantry and gun batteries, Shogun II's Fall of the Samurai expansion is your ticket.
But if you want a true, professional standing army of line infantry that knows how to hold under fire as well as deliver it, if you want to be a gentleman general of standing, if you want an 18th century battlefield, then this, my friend, this is the game for you.Show moreShow less
441.6 hours at review455 people found this helpful
Not recommendedSteam player
After 10 years CA made a patch that don't do a thing for the game, but breaks every mod. So the great mods that made this game live for so long are unplayable. And since the modders, as the mods, are old, they will not get an update. But i think this is CA intention, so that everybody stops playing their old great games and go buy those terrible, and expensive, new games like Pharao.
I'm done with CA, played since the first Shogun. Now, after they droped the ball with TW Warhammer 3, and destroyed the mods for their old games, i'll never buy something from them again. I just hope some other company start doing those types of grand strategy while CA sinks in it's own greed.Show moreShow less
270.5 hours at review232 people found this helpful
RecommendedSteam player
Plays as the mighty Prussia
*2 turns into the game Austria declares war
*Defeated Austria in 10 turns
*5 turns later Austria rises once again as a rebellion
*Destroys Austria
*2 turns later Austria rises again *facepalm*
*Destroys Austria again
*5 turns later Austria for some reason signed there independence
*note i still control their capital city
*loses Austria *rages*
*Captures Austria
*Austria rises again *rages harder*
*Hungary rebellion appears in the map
*Rages as hard as possible
*destroys both Austria and Hungary
*10 turns later Austria Rises once again
*Rages and sells Austria to Poland
*Poland couldnt handle Austria
*laughs
*Tries to ally with Austria 10 times
*Austria allied with me FINALLY!!!!!
*peace
*Austria declares war once again
*Rages and destroys Austria
*sells Austria to Venice
10/10 would destroy Austria again
UPDATE****
*Poland destroys Venice
*Poland now owns Austria
*Poland has a very angry Austria
*Austria starts doing rebellions
*Poland Rages
*Poland and Austria have a nice fight between each other
*Poland defeats austria for the 10th time
*Poland sends 8 generals to Austria
*Poland cannot handle the Austrians
*Poland lost that entire army to a group of Austrian Rebels
*I start laughing
*I destroy Spain
*Karma strikes
*3 turns later there is 5 rebellion on my territory
*not Austrians (THANK GOD)
*Eliminates Rebels
*Now i have rebels spawning every 2-3 roundsShow moreShow less
33.1 hours at review361 people found this helpful
Not recommendedSteam player
While I love it, it must be said. This game is absolute trash. It's an unfinished beta of a game that wanted to be too much, in a time when development was harsh and unforgiving, under the direction of a new publisher that most likely moved all of the staff from Australia to Britain, cancelling a great deal of what was being prepared in the meantime, reorganizing personnel hastly and \ or with terrible timing and awful decision making.
While at its core Creative Assembly was still MTW2's old crew, many - including the battle mechanics programmer - went away mid development. This disorganization coupled with absurdly placed goals and SEGA's demands, created the perfect storm. Empire Total War is the result of a small studio being acquired by a greater entity and put on a forced march towards glory; they needed to literally touch the Sun, and just like Icarus, they failed and landed on their head back to Earth.
Up until mid 2011 - release was March 2009 - the game was borderline unplayable. For well over 2 years musketeers wheeling into the foreground with no AI, terrible campaign crashes, endless loading times, and a plethora of bugs and glitches made the experience awful. But the scope and the novelty of such an endeavour still attracted masses of casuals and the most hardcore groups of exploiters went on to form elite squads of competitive ETW gamers. I was in one too at the time, an international competitive group with a strong German presence. For almost 3 years we got together every week to ruin everyone's fun because winning in this game was - and still is - totally based on exploits. Units have godawful balancing, the speed and impact of all cavalry is all over the place; you can place 2 rows of light cavalrymen behind your infantry and have 3 volleys of instant fire that WILL destroy any unit present beside Guards. If you were a newbie, or even an intermediate player, you'd be completely screwed in a competitive setting, and even at a casual level, the amount of exploits was so atrocious you'd be a winner even in a 2 v 1 secnario just because you'd be making a 10 Guards 10 Artillery army and flood people with mortar fire. Ragequitting was the norm for everyone. Netcode has always been awful to the core. The few people that still play it in MP know every nook and cranny and can destroy anybody with a thought because all of these incredibly frustrating balancing choices are still there.
The SP side isnt any better tho. AI is an absolute mess of convoluted nonsense. Coding and optimization of the campaign map and battle maps is so bad that it hurts even modern PCs.
MP campaign was in development and testing phase but again, since this mess of a game came out rushing in through the door with at least 1 year of development left in the dumpster, the few lucky ones able to actually play any game got crashes upon crashes and loading a saved game even with perfect syncing would result in freezes as soon as you'd press the end turn button.
There is STILL an unavoidable, random crash in the Ottoman's turn after 11 years. Never patched, never fixed. The last patch they applied in 2011, while stabilizing the game a bit, completely destroyed the first person camera's coding. You cannot view the bullet trajectory anymore, not from muskets nor from cannons. The game just freezes mid-air.
Switzerland was planned and half finished in the code, but you cant enable it back. Pieces of development tools never given to the public were also half finished and thrown in the dumpster, waiting to be released only in late 2012 for Shogun 2.
I spent an ungodly amount of hours playing this game. I enjoyed it, but I wouldnt recommend it to anyone. It was amazing the first time I put my eyes on it back in 2009, and the few years I went nuts with all the exploits and a crew of dedicated companions to fight with. But now.... no, absolutely not. This game has been abandoned and left in a sorry state for a decade, the only thing keeping it somewhat alive are mods, and even those cant pull its butt up from the ground. There's no sendoff, no fanfare, and there never will be. The creators didnt love their baby enough, and put their necks on a yoke in servitude of SEGA's ambitions. There is no pity, nor remorse in here. Naiveté got their hands in the dirt. Few years later, with Rome 2, they'd prove themselves to be in the same situation. But that is a story for another time.Show moreShow less
638.3 hours at review171 people found this helpful
RecommendedSteam player
Started as Prussia , made a Prussian Empire by invading india and making it German India. I have surpassed what other people couldn't do in history which is to invade Moscow during the winter, I blitzkrieg through Europe like there was no tommorow. 10/10 would India again with germans.
http://steamcommunity.com/id/gabriel0221/screenshots/
German India as promised, should have posted earlier but good news is best served last
http://steamcommunity.com/id/gabriel0221/screenshots/
http://steamcommunity.com/id/gabriel0221/screenshots/
Started from the bottom , now we at the top. Long Live GermaniaShow moreShow less
41 hours at review276 people found this helpful
Not recommendedSteam player
I'd love to recommend this game, it is so much fun. But unfortunately, CA pushed one last update years ago that broke the game. Now, when you siege a fort and break the walls, the game practically freezes as the AI tries to figure out how to defend it. This wasn't even a problem until they released the last update. Then they up and left, leaving the game in a broken ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ state. I can't recommend this game until they fix it.Show moreShow less
262.1 hours at review83 people found this helpful
RecommendedSteam player
The only game where you can invade Russia , in the winter.Show moreShow less
9.7 hours at review271 people found this helpful
Not recommendedSteam player
Love this game do not buy it, you'll only be filled with the sadness that there will never be a Total War: Empire 2.Show moreShow less
1,325.7 hours at review83 people found this helpful
Source: original Steam user reviews. Helpful votes are an archived snapshot, not live data. Last collected: 08/15/2026.
