
Creative Assembly Lead Designer Jamie Ferguson has commented that the company may have over-reached themselves when it came to designing Empire: Total War.
In an interview with Strategy Informer regarding Shogun 2, we asked him whether depth beats scope:

It’s Total War Week at the Humble Store. Games in the popular strategy franchise are up to 75 percent off.
PC Invasion: Classic Total War games such as Medieval II, Empire, and Napoleon now have their Definitive Editions which includes all the DLC. Players who already own the respective base games get the DLC as a free update.

If you didn't know, Time Commanders was a TV show that ran for 3 series back into the early noughties.
Yea, they definitely abandoned ETW, but Napoleon was very much improved. They just need to stop rushing things and take the time to work out the major glitches and fix the AI for Day 1 releases.
When is going a step further a bad thing?
i havent played empire or napoleon yet,
still on M2TW and Rome, now those were amazing.
I did like Empire, after a lot of things had been fixed. But I do miss and still want to play Rome and M2. Maybe its the sword and bow thing compared to gunpowder, who knows, but Rome and M2 just had that lasting appeal that never seems to die.