Not only do the insane amount of performance bugs make it nearly impossible to play, but the game is terrible in itself.
There's naval battles now, but what good does that do when the AI is dysfunctional and the game won't run at much more than 10 Frames per second? I personally never played out the battles personally in Total War, because I just liked the campaign map side of the games, so whatever battle system improvements they made were pointless.
Empire Total War made me lose whatever faith I still had in the Total War series, and I shall no longer purchase their new games. And don't forget to not purchase Napoleon Total War; a redo of the mistakes that occurred here.