DW9E is an excuse to do 30 something DW9 skirmish fights all in a row AND make a bunch of CAWs so you can play pretend and marry them. Literally every other part of this game is garbage but these two core parts are pretty decent. DW9's combat is some of the best the franchise has ever put out and these maps let you actually rush from base to base exercising it whereas vanilla DW9 simply asked you to go combo one officer to clear each map. Here you can easily lose a lot of time doing 4x jump cancel combos on hordes of enemies and generally just enjoy yourself. Maps get random "secret plan" objectives that give you something to do with a time limit to put your plan into motion and thwart the enemy's but beyond that every map is essentially connecting base camps until you unlock the castle and can beat the boss.
The strategy interface is bare bones. Raise troops, raise money, raise rations, attack. Each action raises certain stats determining your character's personality: Clever vs Bold. Good vs Evil, etc. Leveling these up gives you titles, which you want to unlock for nerdy autism collection purposes and also because having a better title improves the drop rate of loot you get. So for various reasons you might be taking suboptimal ruler actions because they raise stats building toward better titles. Wanna be evil? Throw a paradise party and ruin your kingdom! Completely useless action but it gives you big evil points! Loot is either weapon upgrades or gems with various ARPG loot grind style random effects ranging from useless trash like Bow Skill+ to borderline necessary stuff like Atk Speed+. You have no power to guarantee these outside of cheating, which removes one of the core fun parts of previous musou games. Loot carries over permanently and weapon upgrades are one pull for all weapons so you'll have maxed weapons in this game almost as quick as you did in DW9, but since gems are random and the balancing is still wacky, you still aren't going to be playing this at a high skill or demanded to do so.
For all that, I have to give it a thumbs up because it is functional and does what every single Empires game has done, with the added bonus of giving DW9 some much needed combat focused maps. Unfortunately, it has many of the problems of other Empires games and a few of its own too. First, ANY mode of play that isn't focused on map painting is useless. Wandering officers cannot do anything or have any fun. Befriending officers is only good if you want to marry someone and that is only to provide you with a higher tier gift table and roleplay fun. CAWs are locked to this new Nioh-esque art style so now you can make everyone an ugly wrinkly hag but you can't make a 7 foot tall 4 foot wide barrel chested monster of a man any more because we're out of the PS2 era so everyone has to look realistic. Feels like half the characters are clones with the same moveset too. Like every single Empires game, China is just way too damn big. The game snowballs and you'll have it won in 5 hours but you have to do another 5 hours to paint every single square of the map one by one. You always end up dreading the last ten fights and just wanting it to end. Every single vagrant force that tries to rebel, every single defensive battle you have to fight is just more wasted time. The runs in this game are too long and boring and they always have been in the Empires franchise. Like every other Empires game, the balancing is a joke and it kinda has to be since they are including mainline game weapon upgrades in a minigame that does not benefit from their inclusion.
There is a certain person this franchise has always aimed at and unfortunately for them there is zero competition. Nobody has a war action game where you can fill it with your own CAWs and do your nerdy play pretend. I know I like that sort of thing until I actually start playing. It's a bit like modding Oblivion or Skyrim, really. The other sort of person this game might appeal to is the sort who wanted more of DW9's combat better packaged. Both sorts would enjoy this if their expectations were tempered to accept runs that will outlast the stories your imagination can tell or your patience for running the same fights 30+ times. So I have to give it a begrudging thumbs up because, if nothing else, it delivers on something that no other game maker is doing. I really wish someone would try to compete with Koei in this though just to get them to stop sleepwalking through this franchise.
