Dusteuh February 2018
I tried all things, and nothing works, but I followed EXACTLY these steps, and it works !
"First, do not uninstall using Steam. Browse to your Empire Folder and go inside the folder, make it empty folder deleting everything inside the Empire folder.
Second, go to C:\Users\(your user name)\AppData\Roaming\The Creative Assembly\Empire and again, leave the Empire folder, but go inside and delete everything inside.
Third, on Steam, go to top left corner, click Steam in the menu bar, select exit.
4) Go to your Steam shortcut, right click, select run as administrator
5) Go to your games list, right click Empire, select properties. On the window that opens, go to the local files tab, click verify and allow it to verify and download again.
6) Once complete, on that same Empire Properties window under local files tab, click browse. It will open the window to the empire files, right click your empire.exe, select properties, go to the compatibility tab, set to run under XP, click ok.
7) Run Empire from your games list. Once it runs, go to options and set your settings. Exit the game. Exit Steam completely, start steam normally (telling Steam to restart will restart in admin mode which is bad to run all the time). Now you should be able to play."