Guys let's be honest...It's the same broken game as before. Very little has been improved. Honest review:
The campaign and battle AI for Empire weren't just bad. They were crippling. They were atrociously broken on release and a year later very very little has been improved. The diplomacy doesn't work (if you attack a friendly nation's enemy, the friendly nation declares war on you!?). The sieges don't work (enemies run around your fortress getting shot at for half the battle before they decide to scale the walls) and the battle AI will allow itself to be pelted by cannon for 10 minutes straight before advancing, and by then they've lost half their armies. Simply put, you had to be a drooling idiot to find any challenge in the game.
What was CA's solution? They hastily put together an expansion and instead of FIXING the issues with Empire's AI, they simply bypassed them. Instead of fixing the clusterfu*k that was diplomacy, they removed most of the factions from the game and gave us a small handful of factions in a dumbed-down campaign with France as the overwhelming superpower. Since the broken diplomacy parameters in Empire made it so that powerful nations were almost automatically attacked by everyone, Napoleon Total War has effectively taken diplomacy out of the game. France is the enemy, everyone else can be friends.
Aside from that, the battle AI is only marginally better. It's still terrible, just 10% less terrible. You can still beat full stack armies with half stacks.
The verdict then? This is a pretty bad cash grab from CA/SEGA. They lost my faith with Empire. They made sure it would never be restored with Napoleon. You're not really fixing the problems with the original game when all you're doing is creating a simplified campaign where most of the problems don't surface.
N:TW was supposed to give us what E:TW should have been. It would still be despicable if CA/SEGA were SELLING us the fixes to a broken E:TW. Unfortunately, they don't even do that. They're selling us the same broken piece of garbage where the glaring faults are just a lot less apparent.
This game is STILL terrible and that's now $100 I've wasted in the last 12 months with SEGA/CA. I think it's fair to say now that I won't let it happen again.