Giving quick and precise orders to your armies on land and — for the first time on mobile — your fleets at sea, can mean the difference between heroic victory and crushing defeat.

With that in mind, we designed EMPIRE’s new touchscreen controls to offer intuitive simplicity for common commands, as well as a suite of gestures for finger-tip control. So, if you thought you needed a desktop computer to take over the world, today’s diary aims to demonstrate how the tap can be mightier than the click!

Controlling the camera should feel completely natural. Drags, pinches and twists will pan, zoom and rotate, exactly as you’d expect:

Select your units with a tap on the battlefield, or the Card Bar at the bottom of the screen. Multiple units can be selected with subsequent taps. Then, once an order has been given, the next tap will deselect the occupied units automatically. This deselection behaviour is fully customisable in the Options Menu.

Speaking of orders; movement and attack commands are as simple as tapping on a destination, or target. If time is of the essence, order them to charge by double-tapping. Alternatively, you can tap and hold to draw a movement path for your units to follow:

You can also order them to halt, change their move speed and combat behaviour at any time with the buttons above the Card Bar.

EMPIRE’s gunpowder warfare relies on cleverly arranged ranks of infantry, and there are multiple ways to achieve this. The first is the quick two-fingered drag. This will arrange all selected units in the direction you drag, like so:

The game speed will automatically slow down while issuing this type of command. This is also true when using Positioning Mode:

Just tap and hold on selected units, and you’ll be able to drag the box to the exact location desired, adjusting its length and depth to create those precise infantry lines which are so characteristic of 18th-century warfare.

EMPIRE’s controls will soon feel like second nature, but if you long for something more akin to the desktop experience, you’re in luck! Total War: EMPIRE supports Bluetooth keyboard and mouse controls on Android and iPadOS! Just connect your peripheral of choice and take the field with all of the keybindings and mouse controls of the desktop game.

Next week we’ll be taking a closer look at the other side of the Total War coin: the Campaign Map, and all the shiny new interfaces and features you’ll use to forge your empire on it.

Keep your spyglass trained on Feral’s social feeds for more on Total War: EMPIRE until then:

EMPIRE’s campaign map spans three continents, and every turn offers new possibilities for conquest, trade and diplomacy on a grand stage. To ensure players make the right decisions, they need easy access to accurate information. 

That’s the guiding principle behind the revamped user interface. Whether it’s getting new players up to speed quickly, or presenting all the facts and figures you need at a glance — it aims to take the pain out of campaigning.

For fresh recruits (and returning players who need a refresher), there is now a First Time Help system and in-game Manual. They offer context-sensitive tutorials over the first few turns, and an ever-present guide to EMPIRE’s most important mechanics. Links throughout the game will also bring you to relevant entries, ensuring you are never out of your depth.

The Advisor system has also been reworked, saving screen real estate by making them considerably less chatty. They still let you know whenever farms and towns in your Empire could be upgraded, or when you could get away with squeezing more tax out of your people…

…but most of the time they’ll collate their memos into a handy Advisor’s Report, which you’ll receive as a notification at the start of every turn, with links that will take you right to the point of interest in question:

“That’s all very well for those new to EMPIRE!” we hear accomplished statesmen cry from beneath powdered wigs, “But what’s in it for us?!” 

Well, as someone accustomed to ruling a large empire, you know how daunting it can become to manage many regions, each with its own capital, as well as a crop of outlying farms, mines, towns and resource sites. 

In EMPIRE for iOS & Android, you’ll be shown the entire region’s building sites on the Card Bar, and can make your upgrade choices as quick as a tap:

Detailed information on regions, armies, fleets and agents is also shown on the Lists Panel — be sure to check it regularly:

Recruitment has seen similar streamlining. Now, you can train land units in your capital, and construct fleets in your region’s many ports, all from one, unified interface:

Those of you who love getting stuck into the business of management will also find some useful stats surfaced for the first time on iOS & Android. These include:

The maximum number of towns that can develop in each region, along with an approximate timeframe at current population growth levels:

The export capacity of your trade ports, so you know exactly when to upgrade to keep the wealth flowing:

Feral has been bringing big games to small screens for almost a decade now, and has poured all of that experience into EMPIRE. The result — we hope! — is an intuitive user interface that is simple to understand, and also presents all the fine details that enrich the game's strategic depth.

Next week we’ll be breaking out the alembics, retorts and, yes, the bunsen burners as the bold new frontiers of the Research system are unveiled!

Focus your microscopes on Feral’s social feeds for more on Total War: EMPIRE until then:

Total War: EMPIRE transports you to the 18th century, in the ‘Age of Enlightenment’. Monumental advancements in philosophy, economics, natural sciences and engineering were made in this epoch, by great minds who found patronage at royal courts around the world.

EMPIRE models this in its Research mechanic, where individual projects can offer you an edge both on the battlefield and the campaign map. Though it’s now a Total War staple, this concept was a first for the series at the time of EMPIRE’s desktop release.

And, in the spirit of progress, we’ve taken this opportunity to build on this innovation for iOS & Android. The result is a more transparent and less micro managerial experience, allowing for greater specialism with less wasted potential.

Now and Then

In the desktop version, to research a project it had to be assigned to a University Town somewhere in your empire. This meant that the number of projects you could advance simultaneously was constrained by the number of Universities you had built. It also made it impossible to focus multiple Universities on a single project and accelerate the research.

In the mobile version, research projects have been untethered from Universities. Now each University generates Research Points which are added to a shared pool. These points are then distributed (up to a cap per project) across as may projects as you wish. As you might expect, higher-tier Universities generate more points.

The cap on the number of points that you can assign to any one project can be increased by completing certain developments. This allows for further specialisation as you progress along a technology tree.

Any unspent Research Points are shown on the main campaign HUD, so there’s no excuse for falling behind your rivals!

A Gentleman and a Scholar

Remember those “great minds” we mentioned earlier? They are represented by the Gentlemen in your ranks (or Scholars in some cultures). Whatever name they go by, these smart alec Agents offer powerful bonuses to research — when they’re not too busy duelling each other.

In the desktop version, they could be found crammed shoulder to shoulder in your nation’s University towns, where their presence brought a bonus to the project being undertaken.

For mobile, they have been given leave to stretch their legs, and will automatically contribute points to your research pool (relative to their research skill) whenever they are in territory that you control.

With clever management, they can grow to become specialists in certain fields. For instance, if you were to send a Gent off to one of your factory towns for a few turns, they may develop the “Manufactory Owner” Trait, increasing the number of points they contribute to projects in the industrial tech tree.

Not So Gentlemanly After All

Gentlemen of lesser moral fibre can also sneak across international borders to tea-leave, half-inch, knick, purloin or otherwise steal research from foreign powers.

This used to be a simple dice roll, where your Gentleman snooped around a rival’s University, chose a technology, and had a percentage chance of stealing it each turn.

In the mobile version, even if a Gentleman fails to steal a technology outright, they now progress your understanding of that technology by a number of points proportional to their skill and the total cost of the project — after all, no one likes to leave empty-handed!

Not only that, but they can now steal technologies from other appropriate locations — for instance, naval technologies from foreign ports.

That about wraps up our treatise on Research. Join us next week where the topic of study will be glorious revolution and the mobile version’s new system for changing your nation’s government!

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