Friday, 1 May 2009

Credit Crunch hits the Empire

I have a fairly advanced Grand Campaign going in Empire: Total War, heading towards the end of the 18th century with modest European holdings and fairly big chunks of India and America. With a developed industrial base and a few good trade routes I’m bringing in plenty of money every turn, though my territorial gains were sufficient to annoy pretty much every other nation into unfriendliness if not outright hostility so I’m having to maintain strong garrisons around the borders. Things have reached the point where I’m getting a bit lazy and can’t really be bothered to construct well-balanced armies, load them on to ships and shunt them around the place to maintain a single schwerpunkt, I’ve just been churning out whatever units have been available around the place and leaving conquering armies wherever they ended up rather than redeploying veteran units. It’s a bit like that point late in an XCom mission, where you’ve swept most of a map and are sure there can’t be many aliens left, there’s probably one unconscious but not dead in some shed somewhere, so you split your troops up to look for them, and start moving as far as you can without saving action points for overwatch fire, and then you open a door and get blasted by nine heavy plasma rifles…

A couple of days ago a patch was released overhauling many aspects of the game according to the patch notes, so after updating I loaded up my save, trundled around a bit, finished a turn… and was slightly surprised to find at the start of the next turn that I was totally broke. Checking the economy screens, I’d gone from making £50,000+ per turn to losing over £100,000 every turn, they weren’t kidding in the notes when they said “Economic tweaks have been made to campaign to reduce amount of money made in later part of campaign.” Obviously the global economic downturn has kicked in, presumably much of my military might had been financed on the basis of subprime mortgages; I should’ve been suspicious when I noticed my treasurer had very dark eyebrows despite his white hair, I thought it was just his wig as per the style of the day, but perhaps not.

I’m not too worried, the patch notes suggest starting a new campaign to get the full benefit anyway, so I just need to decide whether to play as good old Blighty again, or give it a try from a new perspective. Maybe I’ll see if I can get Prussia a decent empire…

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