YMMV / Empire: Total War

• Artificial Stupidity: During battle, the A.I. will make numerous basic mistakes:
  • Sending cavalry on their own before the bulk of the infantry to charge you. They are easily fended off reducing the A.I.'s army somewhat. The cavalry will often charge right into infantry squares.
  • Ships will make no attempt to escape a battle even if they haven't a hope of winning. A single sloop will charge right into into your massive fleet.
  • A.I. infantry will hide behind a wall even if that wall is nowhere near the main combat zone. This means the unit cannot help out for the A.I's attack, and can be easily mopped up when they are the only unit left.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome: It's hard to find a player that doesn't engineer a revolt from the very first turn when playing as Spain to change the government to republic. The reason is simple - you start with Carlos II the Bewitched as your king. Republican government is so-so, especially for Spain, which as a monarchy gets a handful of special units, but anything is better than having Carlos as your king.
• Goddamn Bats: 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. They are by no means hard to handle (especially if you play as Spain and thus have access to galleons), but are extremely annoying.
  • Small armies, armies with left over troops and rebels. They come and damage your buildings and even if you have a big enough army to easily defeat them without too much loss, you're still forced to play what is a time-consuming sometimes tedious battle just to get them off your land. You could auto-resolve but this will probably lead to more loss on your side than if you play the battle yourself. This becomes repetitive if you fail to kill them all before they escape the field, forcing you into a rather unexciting "clean up" after every battle (which itself is difficult if you don't have enough cavalry). It is even more monotonous in a sea battle as it takes a long time to sail your ships to the enemy to engage. This is meant as a way to subtly encourage defense-in-depth — rather than concentrating all your forces into one big army, posting troops inside towns will not only prevent the buildings they house from being damaged, but outright deny these small bands access past the town without provoking battle. It's generally considered good practice to post one sloop inside each dockyard or trading seaport to avoid pillaging — a blockaded port can be freed on that turn, while damaged ports require one extra turn and money.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • Unlike just about any other Total War game, agents in Empire are randomly generated by related buildings, rather than hired. Players can often spend turn after turn waiting for a badly needed missionary, only to end up with one that already starts with a negative trait and simple Save Scumming won't fix that, as reloading might lead to no missionary spawning at all. And agents can't be disbanded - they can only die of natural causes or get killed by enemy agents, so if you are stuck with six terrible agents of given type, tough luck. If that wasn't enough, they are extremely limited in their applications. Most notably rakes (a spy-assassin) are virtually useless, due to very low base chances of success, non-existing skill progression and zero ability to replace them, while giving a steep diplomatic penalty when detected.
  • Gentlemen gain special traits related with specific type of research, each of them having four tiers. If you put two gentlemen that have the same tier of given trait, only one of those will provide bonus to research. Meanwhile, if they have the same trait, but on different tiers, you still gain bonus from both of them. This forces players to juggle their gentlemen around for maximum efficiency and often leads to situation where this or that researcher is deliberately kept under-levelled, because by gaining higher tier of his traits, he would stop providing bonus entirely. More importantly, modders found out none of this is bug-related, but instead a deliberate feature.
    • Similarly, if via save-editing an unique ancilliary is provided to two gentlemen and they are both present in the same school, only one of them will provide the bonus.
  • Those traits themselves, unless starting with them, can only be gained when finishing a research in related field. And higher tiers require multiple technologies to research for the trait to increase. So by the time a trait is maxed-out, there are barely any related technologies left... assuming your gentleman didn't die out of old age by then.

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