Deleted

I have it but haven't really played it. Heard it's bugged to hell though :/

history fanatic + american revolution = ageod birth of america 2

no. wait for a sale and get it for 5 bucks

I've got 830 hours logged for Empire. Mostly for the different vanilla campaigns, but I also recommend installing mods as well. The American Civil War mod is awesome. I also recently tried darthmod and it does improve some of the gameplay and bugs, not to mention prettier units. It does require a good computer and graphics card to avoid performance issues (lag, crashes sometimes) at good settings.

Empire is a decent game, but in my experience it does have a few gamebreaking bugs, i've played about 6-10 campaigns since it's release and i've never been able to fully complete the campaign due to savegames corrupting during endgame (both in the cracked and steam version)
As for it's price you can see it's sales price history over here.
It'll be on sale during the summer sale for sure if you can wait that long, alternatively you should be able to find a cheap copy on steamtrades considering it's way cheaper and region free in Russia.

Oh and when it comes to history, go with the mods for sure, the base game isn't really historically accurate but there's quite a few mods specializing in that (for most TW titles at least, not sure about empire considering it's the most unstable TW game to date)

Empire Total War: Wait for it on sale and get mods to make it playable.

Empire Total War is an amazing game if you use it with the DarthMod. There's nothing like the sound of the crackling/smoking muskets. I don't care for the naval combat though, it seems overly difficult.

I only played historical and custom battles and had great fun. The main campaign seems really difficult and different from the older titles. I didn't have the patience to learn it. I played 1000+ hours of Medieval 2 and Rome before.

I bought Empire Total War + Warpath + All DLC's, Napoleon Total War + All DLC's, Medieval 2 Total War, Medieval 2 Total War Kingdoms, Rome Total War + DLC, Alexander Total War for $16 at tf2outpost :)

I took the liberty to look up it's regional sales prices and listings on trading sites,
ATM you won't be able to find a copy on most trading sites, with the exception of a few old threads which have most likely not been updated (so you can assume those are gone already as well)
As for it's price, It's $16 for the Empire TW Collection (containing all dlc) which means it's going for $4 during sales, so with a bit of luck you should be able to grab it for a max of $5 during the next sale from a russian trader.
Alternatively, the base game is only $7 in Russia, so during a sale you should be able to grab that one for about $2.50.

-edit- some traders require TF2 keys as mentioned previously (although the bulk of russian traders have paypal nowadays), you can either grab them from the market, or buy them for paypal (+-$1.80 a key) from a key seller on steamtrades.