Oriental Empires Review

By Marcus Jones  |  Posted: September 22, 2017

Fans of games like Civilization and Total War have a new empire management and strategy game to try out with Oriental Empires. Set in China's Warring States period (long before the Three Kingdoms), you control one of many clans vying for dominance. Historically, the Han Dynasty established control during this time and ruled for centuries, but you have the opportunity to reshape history if you can prove yourself a capable leader in this challenging world.

Managing your burgeoning empire presents numerous challenges. Each city functions as its own microcosm with limited available space (until upgraded). Farms are essential to ensure a steady food supply for population growth, while you need available citizens to construct these farms and new buildings. Throughout this process, you must carefully balance the unrest of both noble and peasant populations. Excessive dissatisfaction in either group can trigger open rebellion and rioting, threatening your control over the population and city. Maintaining a high authority rating through technological advancements, buildings, or character traits, along with carefully adjusting town priorities, is crucial for population stability. However, repeatedly losing faction leaders or overworking the peasants will quickly lead to trouble. Around turn 90, I lost three major faction leaders during an intense war, resulting in the loss of two cities and massive rebel armies threatening my homeland.

The empire management aspect can be overwhelming initially due to the game's steep learning curve. The game's hints, tooltips, and auto-manage system help mitigate this challenge. This assistance becomes particularly valuable when managing multiple settlements or navigating large-scale conflicts. My only critique of the auto-manage system involves its sometimes questionable resource allocation. For instance, while I was saving for vital trade-generating buildings, the system autonomously constructed a bowyer in another town. While not disastrous, it's important to monitor the auto-management settings carefully.

Combat in Oriental Empires offers more depth than Civilization but doesn't quite reach the complexity of Total War. Rather than utilizing separate battle screens or simple unit confrontations, combat unfolds on the overworld map. You can zoom in to observe army movements, flanking maneuvers, and tactical engagements. While battles are entertaining to watch initially, they ultimately devolve into armies converging at predetermined points with basic combat animations. Most encounters end with one army routing before the battle concludes, often requiring multiple pursuits to eliminate enemy forces completely. After witnessing this pattern repeatedly, I found myself using the fast-forward button during combat phases. Additionally, the various army commands - defend, ambush, outflank, support, or charge - seem to have minimal impact on battle outcomes, which typically depend more on troop quantity and quality than tactics.

Diplomacy represents the other facet of conflict management, though it proved somewhat limited. In a setting based on the Warring States period, political intrigue and shifting alliances should be paramount. While establishing trade routes is straightforward through specific city buildings, developing meaningful partnerships or alliances with other clans proves challenging. Despite typically encountering only five neighboring clans, two or three would invariably be hostile from the start. Even nominally peaceful neighbors would occasionally raid my territories without warning. In one instance, after finally securing an alliance with a faction, we briefly shared intelligence about common enemies before I accidentally became their vassal through the poorly designed diplomacy interface.

One particularly engaging aspect of empire strategy games is technological research, and Oriental Empires handles this well. The tech trees are divided into four distinct categories across different time periods. Advances unlock new units, buildings, and edicts. These edicts can provide empire-wide or leader-specific bonuses but often come with drawbacks like increased population unrest. While most edicts are permanent and require financial investment, making their implementation worthy of careful consideration, at least one is mandatory to progress to the next technology tier.

Simply Put

Oriental Empires is a competently crafted strategy game that nevertheless falls short in several key areas. The game rarely allows you to establish a stable foundation before confronting nearby hostile clans, and managing the delicate balance between noble and peasant populations can become tedious. Overextension quickly leads to precarious situations - as I discovered when facing external enemies on multiple fronts while dealing with two rebellious cities in my heartland. The necessity of maintaining a powerful army to deter external threats, combined with the challenges of unit upkeep costs and city expansion requirements, creates a particularly frustrating balancing act in the late game.