Overview
Many people have the re-occurring problem that I myself have decided to answer. Why isn’t there more communism in video games. Wish your woes goodbye comrade as I show you the way to get the Soviet Union in Empire Total War.
Start the Fires of Revolution
To start off with, the filthy capitalist scum of Tsar Nikolas II (If Tzar Nikolas is not in power, something has either gone incredibly well or incredibly wrong.) are holding our capital. Your mission in this chapter is to start the flames of revolution in the country and prepare for the seizing.
To begin with, you may or may not want to deal with the Ottomans in the south-east and take Crimea. You dont HAVE to do it now but it means you won’t have to do it later. afterwards you can sue for peace until later when you have the Red Army on your side. Patience is key, comrade. If you decide to fight the ottomans, try to take a bit of the balkans, will give you the beachhead for the second invasion (If you hadn’t done this it would be the first).
After peacing out the Ottomans, you should press on with starting the revolution. Raise the taxes for your lower class, not your upper class, angering your upper classes will cause a civil war, the civil war would change it into either a constitutional monarchy or absolute monarchy. You need to tax your lower class to get the revolution going. You also want to exempt all your regions from tax bar Muscovy, Muscovy rebelling means the revolution starts, any other province will just start a normal rebellion. While your taxing the poor, you may want to build yourself some line infantry in Muscovy and station it outside, this will mean you may get some extra units when the revolution starts. Do not station ANYTHING in the capital if you want this to go smoothly as any units in the capital automatically side with the current government.
With everything in place, let the people seize the means of production! For the Motherland!!
Seize the Means of Production!
The revolution is in full swing and the people are flocking to your brave Red Army!!! This section talks about storming the capital, executing the Tsar and forming the new Red Army!
So the revolution has begun, you may want to save just before the revolution starts as sometimes if you have the line inf. mentioned in the past section outside the capital, they still will remain loyal to the government, you can try and save scum it or just march on through, you start off with a small army anyways so it is not too big of a deal. Assault the capital, which will hopefully only be populated with armed loyalist militias if you followed everything in the last section which break EXTREMELY easily (They’re literally mobs of peasants with flintlocks, what do you expect? for them to win a brutal civil war?). You have successfully completed the revolution and Russia has been liberated!
Note: If you proceed with the revolution, Russia turns into a republic and has the modern day Russian flag, if this annoys you too much try installing a mod to change the flag to the good old hammer and sickle. Any info on a mod-page for this would be greatly appreciated.
If you paid attention to your army roster, you may have seen these guys crop up in your army:
Yes, you now have access to Conscripts (You see where I’m going with this 🙂 ). These hardened slavs will be the backbone of your military.
They are cheap, meaning you can build a heck of a lot more units than normal line infantry, they are militia and so get a bonus to public order on account of their hidden, but not often acknowledged settlement repression buff, they can also be used as much as you want without majorly impacting your economy and also the fact they are conscripts, enough said. But the trotskyites among you may ask, why not use line infantry Supreme Dictator Stalin? They’re better in a fight than militia and have better overall stats and so on. Well as you see here in this handy dandy picture showing the stats of all european line infantry…
Yeah, your line infantry isn’t much better mate. When it comes down to the stats, line infantry may have the better stats overall, but the conscripts are cheaper, have less upkeep, and are generally much more cost-effective. I would suggest you start to build as many of these guys as you can while simultaniously buffing your economy with techs. Once you have finished building up a sizeable army it is time to…
Freeing the Balkans
Our balkan brothers are currently being oppressed by many enemies, including the Ottoman empire and Austria. The Ottoman Empire are almost a cake-walk for our Red Army, with communist steel being vastly superior to the Ottoman’s vastly inferior troops. With numbers not on their side, essentially, their days are numbered. If you want to, you can just destroy them all, but I would advise against it, you should probably peace out with them after securing the Balkan territories, it will give you a possible future trading partner if you boost your favour with them enough times. Next, its a way harder fight. In the territories that belong to Yugoslavia, Croatia and some other slavs, Austria has a foothold. They are better than your troops in terms of quality, but you have the quantity, as Stalin said in the battle of Stalingrad ‘JUST HIT IT TILL THEY DIE!’. As soon as their lines break, destroy them. We do not need their input on the world stage anymore, anyways, we have our most difficult foe to the north…
War With Germany
By this stage, those Germans in Brandenburg will most likely have taken over rightful Russian territory in Eastern Poland, its time to take it back! While you have been fighting the weaker countries in the Balkans, they have secretly been building up a sizeable military and navy (This will especially be a pain seeing as they will most likely raid your Baltic trade routes which will hinder your economy to differing amounts depend on how much your economy relies on trade) and will most likely have control of some Austrian territories as well. Their line infantry are overall better than ours with extra morale and reloading capabilities (see earlier line infantry diagram). While on paper it might not seem much, but an extra salvo or two from their units might mean a unit of human shields conscripts will break, putting a major spanner in the works during open conflicts. You may need to train more conscripted battalions in order to counter this and with new territories in the Balkans this won’t be much hassle. This means its time for…
*Battlefield somewhere during the war*
Prussian Soldier 1: Hey, what’s that over there?
Prussian Soldier 2: Where?
P1: Coming over the hill
P2: Dear God!
P1: It’s… IT’S
THE HUMAN WAVE OFFENSIVE. By now you probably have enough of an economy to spam entire armies of conscripts, with the occasional unit of cav (I honestly use dragoons cause I think they’re neat) and artillery. Well its time to step it up a notch. If you are able to with you economy, switch all of your recruitment to conscripts. I mean ALL of it. Form as many armies as you can without going into the red (the irony) and form them all up, and stack them together. Hopefully, you have a few full stacks together. Now this is where the fun begins. Due to the reinforcement mechanic in E:TW, you are able to field 3 armies as reinforcements, regardless of size, and the spawn relatively close to your lines (correct me if I’m wrong. I know they changed it in TW Warhammer but I’m pretty sure its like this in Empire). This means that any unit of conscripts that routs can just immediately be replaced with a new one. That’s a lot of men. Especially seeing as normally a full army of conscripts consists of around 3000 men. And there’s 4 stacks of them. You can see that those Jerrys will have their guns jam before you rout from the field, not to mention the fact you can send your men in with wanton abandon. From this point on the Germans should be easy as you can overwhelm them with the sheer amount of bodies they have to deal with.
Pushing into Eastern Germany and taking Brandenburg should be enough to be able to sue for peace. I would recommend doing so as the projected casualties for this war are expected to be extremely high with all the shooting, stabbing, the screaming and such. Therefore you will be able to destroy our most hated enemy…
The Last Urah!
Finland, the pain in the Soviet Union’s side. Their stubborn tendencies mean that they resist being a part of the motherland, we can change this…
At the beginning of the game, the Fins have sought protection in the Swedes, who also have taken our territory in St. Petersburg. However, due to recent expansions and reclamations of the motherland mean that we outnumber the Swedes with our veteran and superior penal battalions conscripts. Retaking these territories should be quite simple with the Fins and Swedes being extremely weak.
Fun Tips and Tricks (And Side Missions/Achievements)
Fun tip: To get a REAL Soviet feel, dispose of your best military officers once every 4 turns and exterminate your most experienced units once every 6 turns. If a member of your petit bourgeois political council has a competency rating above 4 stars, eliminate them. Try to keep Ukraine in famine as much as possible.
Give yourself points for the quality of each officer/unit liquidated and number of Ukrainians starved and at the end of the game total up those points (1 point per star, 1 point per 1,000 Ukrainians).
Lastly, complain loudly and unceasingly about how unfair the rest of the world was to you and how they are actually responsible for the deaths of the people you killed, or alternatively deny they existed in the first place. Bonus points if your country fails due to its outlandish economic model! (Courtesy of Stephen)
Side Mission: Send a spy to Mexico (New Spain on the map) and conveniently trip with an ice pick and stab someone.
Fun tip to try at home: Pull a Bernie Sanders/Obama and campaign for affordable healthcare so people don’t have to pay $2500 for insulin.
I told you it was going to work Boris: Win the Russian Civil War
White Russian: Lose the Russian Civil War
Always watching…: Destroy a Counter-Revolution
Commissar: Disband a unit for routing
Zhukov’s Pride and Joy: Have 4 armies together made up of only conscripts
Attamerced: Establish a protectorate in Turkey
Turkpsies: Destroy the ottoman empire before 1750
Any creative achievements would be graciously accepted if you have any suggestions.
Carolus Decked: Establish a protectorate in Sweden
Slavic Union: Own all former Slavic territories or have them owned by a protectorate
You’re not getting away that easily: Retake Finland
Not One Step Back: In a war with Germany, never lose a single battle
Berlin Wall: Build a fort in Hannover and station it with a full stack of soldiers
Napoleon’s Nightmare: Seize Paris after destroying a French Army in Muscovy
Cuban Missile Crisis: Become Hostile to the United States while owning Cuba
McCarthy’s Nightmare: Have a spy in every United States territory
Red Alert: Destroy the United States before they can take over the entirety of the Americas
No Mujahideen This Time : Control the province of Afghanistan
Ruszkik haza!: Crush Hungary after having revolutionaries successfully rebel against you
Prague Spring: Crush a revolt in Bohemia and Moravia
Eternal Revolution: Own every Province
We are all equal: Complete the game after never researching “Rights of Man”
Turkpsies: Destroy the ottoman empire before 1750
Any creative achievements would be graciously accepted if you have any suggestions.
Conclusions
This is the part of the guide where I am supposed to make closing remarks. However, there are not many to make. The whole world is basically now at your fingertips. Your Soviet Hordes will overwhelm most nations you come across now and you have free reign to march into India through Persia or to destroy the rest of the Ottomans and secure Africa. Hell, you might want to perform a reverse Operation Barbarossa and destroy the remaining Germans. Or destroy the last remnants of Sweden. Maybe even bring communism to the Americas!
I hope you have enjoyed reading through this guide, and good luck comrade!
Edit: As of 14/9/20 This guide has gotten around 5.5K views, 4 stars and is on the front page of the Empire: Total War guide page. I originally wrote this guide as a meme but it has somehow evolved into something grander than some insane joke. I am so incredibly thankful for those 54 of you who have favourited this guide and to the 68 of you which have gotten this to 4 stars. Cheers and any suggestions to additions I will add.
Updates
8/8/20
– Finally got around to finishing that formatting problem
14/9/20
– Fixed spelling mistakes
– Added the Human Wave Offensive
– Removed Trotskyites
– Added Achievements
19/10/20
– Added the Red Alert Achievement
– Removed Trotskyites
22/11/20
– Added the “No Mujahideen This Time Around” Achievement
– Added the “Prague Spring” Achievement
– Added the “Ruszkik haza!” Achievement
– Removed Trotskyites
– Arrested Gorbachev
20/03/21
– Added New Achievements
– Sent guns to Vietnam
– Fought a war in Afghanistan