Because I have not played many turned-based strategy games in my life, one of the only comparisons I have for Empire: Total War is Civilization 6, which I played for the first time at the beginning of the semester. Much like my reaction to Civilization at first playing it, I was just confused by my first attempt at playing Empire. However, I think that the learning curve of Empire was a lot easier to get over for many reasons, and I think that these reasons also contribute to why Empire would be a better contribution to a history classroom than Civilization.
There are a lot more things to latch onto as a history student in Empire. There’s a design philosophy where designers make something unfamiliar to a user in an environment that is familiar to users. I think that this is one of the reasons why I was able to understand Empire better. The map was a real map. The countries occupy the actual places they occupy. The years are actual years. The countries exist roughly as they did in 1700 and advance as the game continues. All of this was sort of lost in Civilization, and I enjoyed that empire operated with this more realistic philosophy in the forefront.
This initial assessment is not to say that the game was easy to understand. The control scheme was odd, and I initially believed that you could not move the camera to be over other nations. I also had no idea about the first-round preparations one should make such as sending agents to study at universities. Much like civilization, I would highly recommend that anyone beginning this game be given a really strong tutorial round, which they can build off of in subsequent runs of the game. I think that I take for granted sometimes that I don’t understand some of this game, and I’m a college-educated individual, so expecting a high school classroom to be able to gain things from this game with little explanation would be unrealistic.
I’m wrestling with two different takes on which turn-based strategy game would be better in a classroom, and I can make good cases for both. Empire seems as though it would be the better game of the two for concrete historical thinking. The empires within the game were all real, and the attributes of them and periods all seem pretty solidly based in fact. Civilization seems as though it would better build the more abstract thinking that historians may do. In some ways, the worlds within Civilization are fictional, meaning that it is easier to analyze the differences between real civilizations and the ones portrayed in the game.
For example, how does a landlocked British Empire differ from one of the real-life island British Empire? You can do this with Empire, but with the differences less overt, it becomes harder. Activities like the one we did in class with the War of Spanish Succession are where this type of student analysis would shine. You could do similar activities with other conflicts of the period.
A question I would have for the developer would be why the game is so Euro-centric? It seems too focused on the European nations that operated during the period. However, I think that the game could benefit from having China as one of the playable nations. Specifically, China during the Qing Dynasty in which China was consolidating power among much of inner Asia. The reasoning could be that China would have difficulty interacting with European nations. Maybe this is why a game like Civilization has a faux map as it allows the developers to simplify how nations interact based on geography. Though they could have done some interesting stuff with the development of the Suez Canal, opening new routes to Europe for Asian nations, though, I guess this is out of the game's scope of time.
Overall, I liked this game better than Civilization, meaning that is my favorite turn-based strategy game I have ever played. Out of two.