What is your experience of Empires in Beta 3A?

IMO, Empires are harder to play in Beta 3A.  Offense is typically stronger, but none of the technologies that would seem to yield armor actually do so.  Kinda sucks when your 27 attack sovereign gets killed because he's got 0 defense.  Farming and housing also seem lacking compared to Kingdoms.  Funnily enough, I seem to be able to play longer before crashing as Empire than as Kingdom.

Give it a try if you haven't yet.

The housing is the largest problem imo. Can't get a city to 4 even if I start near 2 fertile lands.

really, in my last attempt with empire I had managed to get FOUR towns to 4, but without armour I have to use influence to crush the opponents that set up near me by strangling their towns & trade, but it would be nice for the AI to actually use caravans.

and my play times(number of turns) is roughly similar on large map 4 player.

but between empire & kingdom, I find that the kingdom is a LOT easier to play because it has had a lot more testing time from beta 1 and later as beta 3a is the first outing for empires I can only hope they improve.

harpo

Seems like a challenge. One thing I notice is that I can't recruit groups of troops even though I have researched Team and Army in the Conquest tree.

I don't know about the armor situation for me, I just started and picked up Tools of War so I can get some weapons and have been focusing on trying to get the tech for the resources I ended up near (a forest is near my second city and there's a mineral or something I might make a third city to claim).

So to sum up

resource gathering, leveling up citiies is very hard

no armor

way too powerful weapons - 5 champions with large scimitars pawn all.

spellbooks very limited

Agreed, I have a hard time leveling up my cities with empires. 

Also, I am fairly new to this, is there some screen with a description of the differences in the factions? On the selection screen, it looks like it is just their history. 

 Also I saw a poll on this forum about your favorite, and most people voted for the one they make themselves, is that disabled in this beta? 

When you start a new game where you can choose the leader, you have a customize leader choice. Then when you chose a faction, you can also create your own.

Yes. It hopes to return in 3B.

They moved it to workshop already. And workshop isn't yet available...

You know there's a Russian joke...

Russian dog and European dog are talking.

European asks: So, how are you doing there?

Russian answers: We had reforms... They made the leash 1 meter longer and put food 2 meters further.

P.S. Sorry for poor translation...

I don't get what you are saying. When I create a new game, at the bottom is a button for "Create Sovereign" and from there, I can do what I want to make my own leader.

Is it typical for Empires to have a harder time gaining champions? Or did I just end up with none around me?

I believe he was talking about making your own faction (if I read his post right).

If so, then no, you can't create your own factions in 3A and won't be back for 3B (not until 4)

Right now, we can only create our own sovereign and assign him/her to an existing stock faction.

My bad, apparently you cannot make your own faction. Sad really.

I had no problems recruiting. At times I wondered why I built units!

Yes, thank you all was talking about creating my own faction. 

It is interesting - Blaze of Glory - that you don't have any problems recruiting. 

I was starting to wonder why you would want a charisma rating any higher than 5 because other champions are so rare you don't have to worry about ever recruiting any....

One thing I found interesting is there was this one stack that in one play would NOT join me. The dialog cursor didn't show up, just the attack cursor. Their leader even said "Ah, Morrigan (my sovereign's name), Layea (the city) looks ripe for the taking!" Or something to that effect (never did attack though).

I reloaded and then the next time around, they WOULD talk with me. Wanted 375 gold. Okay, fine, I had 700+ and for a stack of equipped fighters, sure (their leader had 7 (!) defense - all my units have 0 defense)

Then - somehow, I was in the red for 220 gildars. WTF. How can I be in the red by paying 375 when I had over 700? Was that 375 PER UNIT? I guess so (should either be some indication of that, or the price quoted should have been 375*number in stack). Also, another question, why was I even able to recruit them? I can understand if they were a "package deal" but then shouldn't I have been told "you don't have enough gildar!" (and then maybe they attack me because they thought I was screwing around with them).

Might want to seperately report that as a "bug"