History VideoGame / EmpireTotalWar

* AndZoidberg: The Mughal Empire is the only one of the game's major powers that is not a playable faction (except, of course, by [=MOD=]).

** Portugal isn't so much a vestigial empire as most of its territory was located in Brazil and Africa, which do not appear in the game except as trade theaters you can't conquer or colonize.

* PowerAtAPrice: Enlightenment technologies provide you with passive (and quite substantial by late game) growth of wealth. They are also a source of raw unhappiness, along with further increase of clamour for reform generated by any schools and universities you have build, so the more you research into it, the harder it is to keep masses under control as a non-republic[[note]]Of course, if your ''goal'' is to become a republic, there is no price, as your goal is to start a revolution, but bar few countries, everyone else is better off keeping their starting monarch and the cabinet than go republican[[/note]].

* PoliticallyCorrectHistory: Game takes place in the 18th Century, with hardly a mention of slavery except that you can abolish it. The West African trade theater, which historically was at the heart of the Atlantic slave trade, is wholly an ivory market.

** France: Ships are faster but have less hull strength.
** Prussia: Superior infantry.

** Ottoman Empire: Inferior navy with dated ship designs that are poorly armed and fragile.
** Maratha Confederacy: Can field sword infantry which are excellent in melee combat. Inferior navy with dated ship designs.

* CrutchCharacter: Great Britain start with sir Isaac Newton, while Prussia has Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. They are ''significantly'' better than just about any other gentleman that can be spawned [[DiscOneNuke for next 30-40 years]], in turn greatly speeding up research for their countries.

** The steamships, at least in form presented in the game, never entered service in any navy, for plethora of reasons. Not to mention steam-powered vessels didn't show up until 19th century outside a small handful of (failed) experiments.

* VideoGameCrueltyPotential: Part of your job is going to be brutally quelling rebellions of people asking for voting rights or, frankly, any rights at all, along with opportunity to influence their own government. On top of that, once you have fully developed region, there is no downside to setting taxes to minimum, since you don't need population growth anymore, while doubling your income is always great. There is also the whole American and India theatre, where you can opportunistically join local wars or outright conquer indigenous people for your own profit.

* GoddamnBats: The Pirates faction can quickly become a pain in the ass at the start of Grand Campaign because they already have Galleons and Fluyts at their disposal while everyone else only has access to weaker ships.

* AntiCavalry: The square formation is the infantryman's very eloquent and persuasive argument against cavalry, but charging your cavalry head on into infantry is a bad idea in general. Cavalry are largely restricted to flanking and maneuvering when battling infantry by this time in history, and the vast majority of infantry can hold their own against any force of cavalry stupid enough to try a full frontal charge, thank you very much. Cavalry are best used as flankers; failing that, they are best concentrated against small segments of line to break units in detail while the infantry focus on keeping the other side's infantry from turning their guns on the cavalry. Some infantry units are also capable of placing a long row of spikes that are difficult to see and will shred any charging cavalry formation. AI-controlled cavalry regiments are happy to charge straight through the spikes and lose half their men.

** Some units can also be available before they were historically, if player has good economy and research. Although most notable example are steamships at the end of the naval tech tree.

** Line infantry, the most common infantry available to European powers, start the game with no access to bayonets. Three different types of bayonets must be researched in sequence before they can be used: the plug bayonet, the ring bayonet and the socket bayonet. However, in real life, the socket bayonet was already in widespread use by the time of the game's start (1700 A.D.), while the player likely won't have access to it until a few decades have gone by.

* Eurabia: This can happen if you manage a Muslim faction, especially the Ottoman Empire.

** Another vicious cycle covers AI inability to handle taxation and population growth. To unlock new towns and thus gain opportunity to speed up research or gain additional income, it takes first population to grow to specific level and construction of advanced farmland to support it, too. AI is eager rising taxes on lower classes to the max, providing ''negative'' population growth. In the same time, all possible ports (one of the most profitable town slots) will be used to build fishing ports, to offset the negative population growth. Since AI suffers from budget shortage because of this, it keeps taxes high, which means still negative population growth, which means no new slots, which means no money... And if more than single religion is present in the province, AI will fill ''all'' the towns with religious buildings, trying to convert the population to 100% of state religion - even if not suffering from any kind of religious unrest (it stops being a factor around 60% dominance of the state religion) and reaching the 100% value would take rest of the game.

* CycleOfHurting: AI will end up trapped in an endless revolt spam by mid-game. Since various technologies increase clamour for reform and so do higher levels of universities, while Absolute Monarchies by default suffer from highest clamour and industrial buildings provide their own discontent (unless one is a Constitutional Monarchy), this leads to just insane levels of unhappiness. AI will be unable to quell or control this, leading to a three-turn cycle repeating non-stop: unhappiness pop-up, riots (damaging building and decreasing population) and revolt. If the revolt wins, it will auto-raze the province, decreasing its wealth further. To make matters worse, AI will try to solve the problem by building inns and churches, which will be nowhere near the required level to deal with the unhappiness, but will prevent from generating money for armies. And if the revolt in capital province wins, then the new republic is very likely to collapse into the same cycle anyway.

* ArtificialStupidity: Your artillery captains may need to be hanged in ''Empire''. When told to cease fire, they tend to discharge their loaded guns directly into the line of battle. If they aren't relentlessly baby-sat, expect embarrassing friendly-fire incidents the second their target moves within musket range of friendly infantry. God forbid cannon arranged in a line, and the target moves to their immediate right or left. However unintentionally hilarious it is to see them shooting each other in the back from mere feet away, the fact that in many campaign battles friendly fire causes far more deaths than the enemy is frustrating indeed.