Empire Total War Delayed to March

SEGA, the publisher, and Creative Assembly, the developer, say that Empire: Total War will not be released on the initially announced date of February 3, 2009. Due to unknown reasons, the strategy title has been pushed back at least a month to sometime in March 2009. The delay will probably be exactly one month but there's always the possibility that the game will come out closer to April.

Empire: Total War is the fifth title in the highly successful Total War series, which mixes real time tactical battles with a turn based strategic layer. The first release in the series was Shogun: Total War and the mix managed to attract a lot of attention from players interested in both history and strategy.

Empire promises quite a few innovations. Creative Assembly has managed to create real time naval battles for the first time in the series. Players will be able to control a variety of caravels, sloops and barges as they try to take advantage of the wind while destroying or crippling the vessels of the enemy. The new game also boasts an improved physics model, which aims to simulate every shot fired and every cannonball, to make for a more realistic experience.

Various issues that have plagued the series, like the lack of efficiency of the diplomatic approach and the limited tactical prowess of the Artificial Intelligence, will also be fixed in the upcoming Empire: Total War. The theater of war is going to be extended to reach India and the Americas, giving the player more strategic options in developing his empire.

If the coming delay is devoted to fixing bugs and squashing potential problems with the final release of the game, then players will be more than happy to wait. Let's just hope that this delay will not be followed by others as the release date approaches.