I've only played a little bit of Empires (sub one hour) but have played over 100 hours of Kingdoms. I would say it's worth it. I particularly enjoyed importing battles to play in Medieval. Some people say that this ruins the balance, which I guess is somewhat true, but to me that was most of the fun was building armies and then getting to fight with them. The strategic aspect of Kingdoms is okay, and the building "mini game" is actually pretty fun and there's a ton of different buildings to choose.

>>2134346
I tried it for a bit but didn't stick with it
It's on gog so you can easily pirate and give it a try

>>2134446
I don't do custom battle imports, but from what I've heard it's much improved in Kingdoms over how it was in Empires, at least as far as how accurately your army lists convert over to the battles

>>2135811
It is, but it also tweaks the numbers in annoying ways. You'll almost always end up with fewer units in a Medieval battle than you actually had in Kingdoms; they're just buffed in quality. Also, sometimes the game will calculate it in really stupid ways like being slightly outnumbered in Kingdoms but giving you three superior rated cavalry in Medieval while the enemy gets like 8 average ones, causing you to get overwhelmed and flanked. Overall though, it's an enjoyable system imo.

>>2136162
You can edit the save file to fix that. But it should allows you to allocate how your units are upgraded in game