In 2009, I was an office drone pretending I gave a toss about insurance premiums, at least by day. By night I was carving up the world, fiddling with firing lines and worrying about getting hundreds of men blown up by cannons. At least when I wasn't dealing with bugs. I was playing Empire: Total War, now known as Total War: Empire.
Empire was Creative Assembly's most audacious strategy game, working at a scale the studio had never attempted before. A world at war, split into different theatres, separated by oceans that were just as full of conflict. It also flipped Total War on its head, where the emphasis was on firearms and gunpowder, not swords and spears.
