In short, more frustrating than fun.

A single enemy unit can block the advance of an entire army, because the unit 'retreats' tactically before it is killed, and then doesn't move on the strategic map, so you can't move past it.

Sieges are incredibly time consuming, even when you have several units of artillery and the enemy has literally no defenders. Furthermore, numbers don't matter in a siege since once you take down walls, troops will only engage in a 1v1. Arrow-fire from the settlement seems to do more damage to the siege engines than the siege engines do to the walls themselves, since I had 10 of the best artillery money could buy and was losing them at 1 every two turns, while every battle I only managed to take down one part of the walls. My troops then calmly walked towards the breach and the battle timed out before they arrived. The walls repaired themselves next turn. This pattern repeated itself with every city i tried to take. And then, when you finally manage to bring some walls down and bring their garrison to 7 men, the battle timer runs out and before you get a chance to make another attack some random spearmen from another faction capture the city.

I wouldn’t mind long sieges if it were possible to easily take undefended towns or there were starvation mechanics, but it seems those mechanics only actually apply to the player.

Beyond my awful, painful, frustrating experiences with sieging, Oriental Empires is fairly standard 4x game, with only its setting to set it apart. I did like the farming/peasant population mechanics, and the peasant rebellions were the first time rebellions had ever posed a challenge in any 4x I’ve played.

But, since combat is like pulling teeth, I have to pass on a recommendation for this. I'll probably try again in a year or so and see if they've made the sieges any more palatable.

This game is fun but it is not balanced at all. Specifically, your populace reaches a point where they are always unhappy even with all of the things you can do to keep them well. In addition the AI seem to spam the living bees out of armies but they generally don't do much at all to conquer. ALSO the biggest problem in this game is that you have a maximum amount of cities you can have until your empire collapses on itself. The point of the game is to create an empire, isn't it? Can't do that when you only hold 10% of the map. The game has A LOT of potential, but as it currently sits, i do not recommend buying it until at least these key issues are addressed.

Purchased because the concept of Total-War-meets-Civilization is a good one, as is simultaneous movement resolution, but this is a very unpolished game. Both the TW and Civ elements feel stripped down and dated. Unrealistic behavior abounds, like chasing down tiny remnants of opposing forces turn after turn, or watching friendly formations march through enemy formations with no engagement. Strange bugs like ghost cities appearing on the map.

Since the developer claims the single-player game is finished, I have to disasgree and recommend that you do not spend money on this game, especially not $30.

At its current state, Oriental Empires is not worth the investment
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(Edited Spelling)

Summary:
The ideas are there, but there are tons of factors that make those ideas near impossible to experience.
The game seems to be designed to bloom at some point, making the one more turn feel come to mind. Yet there are a lot in the way, dragging the experience down to a slow, slow drag.
Almost like the developer is buying time, letting the gamer live on dreams and imagination alone.
I have to wait 200 turns to test other factions?
When I do get there, will the clunky animation, path-finding problems, lacking diplomacy and economic options be solved?

It would make for one of the best games of 2016, but the early access stamp whispers of yet another game being left in development: until pigs fly.
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Full Review:
It's a fun game, and it has potential, but potential has come to mean nothing for consumers.
Empty promises being the standard in the industry.

What I hear, is that the game is only lacking multiplayer, and that the single player experience is more or less complete.
Now, ironing out bugs and polishing, are what we can expect. Yet there are some flaws that go beyond polishing and bug reports.

If the problems are somehow fixed, I will of course make this a positive review, but as things stand, the game is lacking, and left as is, it is simply just another good idea that wasn't given the time and love it needed. It needs to go back into the forge.

What needs to be mended:

*Combat*
Combat needs to be reworked on many levels. It feels rushed and slapped together.
The combat AI is really bad. Making total war vanilla combat AI look amazing in comparison.
Path-finding is a big, if not the biggest problem. Units will run around aimlessly, run the wrong way: making the choices of "battle plans" (harass, charge, flank etc) seem to have no, to little impact at all. You don't control your soldiers like in total war, battles are fought in a cinematic fashion as you end your turn. You can decide what way your troops face, number or ranks, and each units “battle plans”. In theory it is awesome, but what unfolds looks like a pc game to movie by Uwe Boll with the budget of a bag of chips.

Beside clunky, limited animations and god awful path finding, combat also has some really bad design decisions lingering. Near game breaking.

As an example: single units can take a settlement of four units.

A city has four gates, but if a fight is lost at only one of those gates, the battle is over and the city is lost. Now if I have three good units, with one sad sack bamboo spear peasant mob tasked with guarding one gate, I feel hatred for the game when said, "sad sack mob" is defeated by a unit that could never best even one of the other three units guarding the other gates.
What the hell are the other soldiers doing?

Another example:
A large amount of solders should be able to interfere with one unit mobs in near hexes, in friendly territory at the very least. Having a large army of trained soldiers, just watching enemies burn the rice fields around them is always frustrating. It's their lifeblood, their money, and their people being savaged. Units jogging around the city, rice paddy hopping (in hexes), to catch looters is ridiculous. It makes no sense. As long as soldiers are present outside the city walls, or garrison, they should be able to defend the rice fields.

Why you might ask?
There is a meter measuring revolt risk in percentage. When you draft the peasants to fight off the looters, the meter increases. When the fields get burned around the sad sack mob you call an army, and the city lacks food, the revolt risk increases to the extreme. Then if you manage to handle all the damn looters, and ask the peasants to re-cultivate the burned out rice fields, the meter increases as they feel overworked. Making a few single unit looters, a very likely reason for a revolt and the city being lost.
If you're lucky you manage to re-cultivate in time without any revolts:
I swear, you will see bandits popping up as the revolt risk is high. And what do you think they do?
Paddy hex hopping until either your population, or your sanity turn against you.


*Actual look and feel of the combat*
This is important, as it is a very big part of the game. Cinematic war, you only look to see your men fight, you can't control them during the fighting, so this being poorly polished gives the game a really ugly feel.
Units facing the wrong way and shooting arrows through their backs. Chariots spinning to unheard disco tunes.
Soldiers running through each other. Zooming in to see fighting being clunkier than a made-for-tv-movie-vhs-tape that someone paid you to see. Units are either marching, or having no idea what animation they are supposed to do, as the swing, stop, spin, and run to the horizon, only to come back like nothing happened. Is this an example of a compete single player experience? The combat looks awful. Animations are lacking.
If this was an alpha, and not a game that will soon be released I would understand, but this feels like a cash grab. Is multiplayer with or without the civilization management?
If it's only the fighting and war part of the game, the clunky animations and sad sack combat animations will spell doom for multiplayer in a heartbeat.


*Diplomacy*
The ghosts of total war whisper my name.
It's limited to the extreme. This is a game about building a civilization and waging war. Add more options!

The diplomacy ai is clearly a b-stard child of total war sneaking into the production.
I ask for peace, and I'm refused by a stronger enemy. I get it, I'm there for the taking. What I don't get is why that enemy would ask for peace the next turn and add one single gold coin to the bargain. "I could destroy you, and that is crazy, here is a gold coin, call me maybe".



*Economics and the Tech Tree*
A lot of buildings cost too much to maintain. Soldiers too. Having markets and bazaars costs more than the economy they provide. While the maintenance of each building makes for a beggar king. The Tech Tree is there to suck the years out of your life with very little change. There's a lot of interesting text to come with each advancement. Fun to read once, but providing little impact.

TLDR: After 100+ hours playing it, this game is 4.6 at best. ONLY RECOMMENDING THIS TO 4X GAMERS WITH THE PATIENCE TO PLAY AND FIGURE OUT CONVOLUTED GAME MECHANICS AND NO TUTORIAL/GLOSSARY. Getting info on this games core mechanics is some next level Da Vinci code sh!t. Details below seem to be the consensus for this game.
Before you buy it, I would only read the reviews with more than 50 hours gameplay and after launch. Otherwise, good review or bad review, don't believe it.
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Update: After playing it for over 150+ hours, I can confirm that mid-late play through becomes increasingly tedious due to a limit cap on how many cities you can control and not anymore than that. Half the map will be vacant; the other half is game over when you reach that limit despite a "soft victory". Play Civ or an actual TW, which is what this game wishes it was.

I play games to have fun, not to work. Time and regret always come at a price.




Simple 4x game, complicated by a convoluted system that lacks explanation in most cases, even with a basic overview manual.

Information could be (should be) in the manual, but you will get stuck digging for the meaning of something not explained in said manual. Design flaws only due to a dev TRYING to make it realistic only to make it unrealistic. Your time is better spent playing a complex game that actually explains those complexities.

***12 major flaws in the 100+ hours spent playing it***

- Horribly designed and barebones manual. You will run into many cases first playing it where ♥♥♥♥ just doesn't make sense. Expected of 4X games. But with "OE", Expect alot of digging in threads to find out how/what/why things happen. The worst part about this game, period.

- Timing and distance are nowhere close to realistic. A town takes up 6 hexes, and a unit can move 4-6 hexes a turn, which is 6 months real time. That matters b/c in this game, rulers and officials age 1 year every 2 turns. That means most of your new young officers will live in a castle for less than a year, then die on the battlefield of old age before reaching enemies and making it back.

To put it in another way: its takes your troop units 6 months to cross the distance the size of a small town..
You can walk the span of a small country in 6 months in real life, let alone a major city. 2nd worst part and the most unrealistic aspect of this game imo.
(*BONUS*-these same generals you marry to court ladies will have children, but never once having met to "conceive" the child...???).


- Personal relationships are a thing in game, but the mechanic of it is very much flawed. What makes it lacking is that you can't see those relationships between enemy generals and enemy rulers. And should your officer defect, you can't see how they view your forces ruler anymore. This game mechanic could have been more universal.


- Your generals win battles, decimate an enemy unit to non-existence, in your territory, only to get an end of battle report stating he is captured. HOW? IS THAT EVEN A POSSIBILITY? Who was left to capture the general??? Happens often enough to kill immersion.


- Peasant units can/will defect in rebel territories. Here is the problem: my force ruler had generals with high virtue and a great relationship status to the ruler, sometimes holding one of several cabinet positions, only to constantly defect to peasant armies without any logical reason for it. It would be like Guan Yu betraying Liu Bei to join the Yellow Turbans. If dev were aiming at realism, it stopped there.


- Rebel defectors tally gets comical to see when a rebel city is surrounded by 2-4 different forces that keep sending peasant units only to defect ad infintum. If this isn't a bug, it's both horrible and hilarious by design. It made me chuckle, worth seeing in a playthrough.


- Game manual gives saltine cracker descriptions based on topics. No glossary, index, or tutorial, meaning if you can't find it in the manual, then shame you for not getting it. Without a clear way of finding information, you will be stuck learning the hard way: precious time looking up stuff. It's one of the worst parts about playing this game tbh. Did I mention this already?


- Game mechanic where enemy city settlements pop anywhere and everywhere (without regard for its historical location and proximity). This becomes problematic when a function of the game hamstrings you into taking it over at its current location, or destroying it and killing civilians (which I think affects diplomacy, but again "instructions not included"). This isn't a game where cities are preset (think ROTK series by Koei); you can only have so many cities. If the enemy force sets up a town in a crappy place, then well...


- There is a description at the start of the game on faction bonus/penalties when choosing a force, but you can't see that info in game once you start. No way to gain direct information on your opposing forces bios or anything (other than what forces are allies/enemies).


- It would have been nice if you could see other factions tech trees and bonus/penalties during a game and other opponents/rulers with more detail other than just the Virtue/Energy levels. I mean "know your enemy, know yourself" right?


- In the skill tree you are given basic info of what orders (edicts) you can issue and structures you unlock. What it doesn't tell you is what specifically these do once unlocked. Short of meta-knowledge or blind luck, not knowing what a building does for your force *before* acquiring them is poor design. 2-20+ years research time and then it is too late, you are stuck with it, and wasted crucial research time where turns matter . Early-mid game, these are crucial steps if taken incorrectly and will lead to a difficult playthrough. Think XCom, but with a much harsher RNG for events at end of each turn.

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Be warned: the dev who created the manual was lazy, and spending 5 minutes in the discussion thread will reveal that (and trust me, if you buy this game you will be searching the topic threads for info). You will come to the conclusion that it is not worth your time on your own. Play Civ or an actual TW game this tries to be.

This game is ambitious and falls flat. It is gorgeous, with some really interesting mechanics, good soundtrack, etc. and is frustratingly unplayable.

It tries to be simple, which in a game of this magnitude is just poor design. Take trade. Trade is core to the game, has interesting mechanics, etc. The problem is that you have, short of counting tiles, literally no way of knowing whether your trade network growing in size will get you more cities in it, let alone if those cities will generate more profit than not building a trade network. With a few simple UI adjustments (like saying what cities a market will reach, and how much will be generated) it would be fun. Instead, it's a blackbox of build markets everywhere and just assume it's good money.

Combat is also a blackbox. There is a huge amount of city building that can get you cool advanced units. Short of siege weapons necessary to pierce even the most trivial of defenses, I am not sure any of it is worth the investment. Huge battles between hordes of peasants versus elite troops resolve with comparable losses, and drag out over 10 or 20 turns. The combat reports don't help to explain that, just let you know that. Sieges can take anywhere from a turn to 20, with no real indiciation of progress or explanation for why. Even EU4's notorious siege percentage system is more informative.

Fun fact, naval transports are useful, but can only be put in stacks of 4. Since armies are in stacks of 8, you need a whole whack of micro to cross a river system without looping through a ford. Not to mention loading, unloading everything manually. See a feature, see it poorly/half/frustratingly implemented.

Fun fact, if your moves cause a One Army Per Tile conflict, guess what they do? Both armies sit there, with no notification to you. So two armies can be stuck, literally forever, both trying to go to the same tile. This happens a lot of with armies set to autoexplore.

Fun fact, sometimes your tax collectors just don't. No warning, no explanation, just rolling over a turn to discover that you incurred all your expenses with 0 income... So welcome to however many turns of debt, twiddling your thumbs.

Even the victory conditions are opaque. Conquest seems impossible with the city limit system, so short of literally razing all of China to the ground, you can't. The diplomatic victory is impossible unless you cut everyone down to size, see conquest problem. Plus, sieges take literally forever, and moving across the landscape is tediously slow. What doesn't take forever is accumulating a lot of money and spamming temples for a culture victory, which is at least achievable if boring. There is also a score victory condition, which is basically cultural victory but slower.

This game is probably a diamond, but it's still in the ground.

the unique "labor services" unrest mechanic is idiotic. it adds a ton of unnecessary micromanagement and is the sole reason i'm giving this game a thumb down.

the mechanic takes up a huge percent of your time; both in terms of turns and in terms of hours of your life wasted managing it. it works like this: for every turn you use labor, you gain peasant unrest. you need to do NOTHING in a city in order to get it to decrease by a single point per turn. in a game where the default turns is 300, 40 labor services unrest takes 40 turns to go back to zero. (that is 10 in game YEARS before you peasants forget how cruel you are for instructing them to build some farms)

i get the idea behind it. but what it means in practice is that you can't queue projects. you have to completely stop all city development every few turns or else the unrest will quickly get out of hand and create a variety of problems. not a big deal for the first few cities, but after 10? 20? 30? going through each one and checking to see if it is time to develop or time to rest is a huge pain in the ass.

an option to "rest when labor service unrest above x" would go a long way. or even a simple "rest" button so that you can pause your development without canceling your long term queue.

This game is somewhat fun, but falls short of being a good and enjoyable game. It's easy to build new cities, but they are fairly tedious from that point forward. You can build farms on land around your city, but you have to do this manually by clicking each tile as the city develops. This doesn't take too long, even when you have 10-20 cities, but it certainly is tedious. I've not had more than 20 cities in a single game yet, but I'd imagine this would somewhat wreck the game with how much time it would consume after that point.

There isn't really a lot to do in cities other than that. You can build some buildings, but most of these you don't want to build in most cities. Putting a grainery in each city will just drain your financial resources while providing no real advantage. Building Bazaar's can give you a financial boost, but only if you have tradable resources in that town and a sufficient number of other cities near by. In general, the only thing you want to construct in each city is a basic wall.

Mines can be built in certain areas to boost income, but this is only useful if you plan to play for an extended amount of time. On average a basic mine of any resource will pay for itself in about 60 turns. More expensive times naturally take longer. The result of this is that you only really want to build mines in the first half of the game or so. If your game is set to end at turn 300, a fully upgraded mine build around turn 150 will just barely finish paying for itself at the end of the game, which really makes it sort of pointless to build at all.

The absolute worst aspect of the game is managing the unrest in each city. Your cities start out nice and content, but after a while they all start to rebel. This might be preventable if you can obtain a high culture level, but otherwise it seems unavoidable. The game recommends giving the people a rest, but even if you cancel all work projects the peasants still end up rebelling. You end up spending more time trying to keep your own cities under control than doing anything else after turn 100.

The battle system also doesn't help things. If you are attacking a walled city you need archers or seige weapons. You can't just hold the city under seige and starve the town out, your only option is to tear down the walls and go through. If you just have a small number of archers, half the time they will succeed in destroying a section of the wall just before the battle phase ends. When the next battle phase starts, you get to watch your archers destory that section of wall all over again, as the city magically repared it between turns. Chariots are useless in major battles. Sending a chariot against a couple of units on a wide open plane usually sees the chariots defeat the enemy without suffering any casualties. In major battles, chariots often charge in head first and die. They appear unable to defeat even the weakest enemies in melee combat, and for whatever reason they often stand still in major battles and let the enemy murder them.

Overall, interesting game. I enjoyed it for a few days. But unless they fix it up, I'm probably done with it.

The game starts off well. It's Total War without going off the campaign map to do the real time battles. Instead, you watch them play out simultaneously after every player gives rather detailed marching orders. It does not have the depth of TW but if you love the strategic layer of TW more than you do the tactical then Oriental Empires could be just what you're look for.

Unfortunately the game has not been properly playtested, despite being in EA for a year.

I'll forego commenting on the lacklustre variatety of the game's many factions and the chaotic and unclear UI and go straight to where the devs really missed their mark:

The economic model comes with some really cool ideas - distance is a real factor and routes can be seen on the map. What the game does not tell you is that you should really only conduct trade for each good in a single town. If you build two pottery factories, each will only do 50% of what a single one would do. You're paying fully for the upkeep though. Eh... eh? Why doesn't the game simply disable these buildings? It's also completely unclear when and where you should upgrade your market or build the caravanserai to extend your trade distance. 40 hours in and I have yet to find a situation where building the caravanserai actually made more money than it cost. Oh, and why is the foundry a military building if according to the description its only purpose is to produce copper for trade?

The game could still be enjoyed even without trade being a modern day enigma machine though.

Sieging, however, takes that enjoyment away.

Battles can be a little confusing to watch but sieges are downright infuriating. When 1500 soldiers and 8 siege engines cannot break the walls of a city defended by 250 peasants for 20 turns there is something seriously wrong. I threw in the towel when I saw a totally undefended town with a wall withstand a full stack of units (8) for the 8th turn.

Without the trade and siege problems Oriental Empires would get a trong recommendation from me. With both there, it firmly falls below the recommendation treshold.

It's bad. Real bad.

At a bird's eye view, it's a Civ clone, but only in that you can build cities at various hexes on the map and make your way through a simplistic tech tree that effects one or two stats.

When looking deeper, it is an empty shell of a Civ game, chalk full of bad design decisions, illogical behavior, bad AI, and the most abysmal combat I've ever seen in a strategy game.

Battle is automated. The player has no control over what occurs during battle. That alone takes half the potential strategy out of a strategy title. They make you watch the battle take place in a scene like total war reenacted by your kid sister with stick figure dollies.

During those battles you'll see:
Troops run through each other, run away into the terrain, run in circles...
The AI runs through your full stack army with one troop and takes your city...
Your movement gets blocked by continual spam of beaten up worthless units....
and other various nonsensical behavior.

You'll be saying "WTF?" at your monitor over and over, not understanding the mechanics of movement, retreat, and combat, because they don't make sense and they don't match what the help says.

I made videos and asked on the forums to get to the bottom of it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4g-hUoKfZn8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2zaGIhq_JY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k9e8PaGHfjo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mqFgm26I7Uo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Mj7MbRfDT8

Just as an example of one "WTF?", in the last video, the developer explained to me that when an AI unit attacks a city, it doesn't matter that I have an army that outnumbers and out-stats the enemy attacker, that a single one on one unit battle takes place at the gate and if the randomly selected unit of mine loses, my entire army dies and I lose the city...
so 40 men, can take 10,0000 and will, completely obliterating your army and your game. You can't do anything about it, because you have no control over combat, you cannot retreat because a single man can block your army of 10,000 from moving. It leaves the player no options.

When I heard that, I lost all faith in the game. Such a shoddy, nonsensical design, means someone on the team over there is making decisions like that, that actually get into the game. Early Access or not.

I don't mind difficult games. I yearn for them, but being nonsensical is not the same as being difficult.

...and then there is this really scary blurb:
"What is the current state of the Early Access version?
“The English language single player version of the game is feature complete, although it may still contain some minor bugs. The game has had several months of beta testing to achieve a reasonable state of balance and tuning, but it’s likely that this can be improved further with feedback from Early Access players.”"

If they don't realize what poor shape the game is in after testing, I don't know what hope there is,