Empire : Total War

[sk3pt 0]

Downloading now !

[EDIT]

Argh, 50 KB/s

[Spetz 0]

ha ha i am getting 86kb/s

lol i started at exact 4pm est. i hope by like 10pm the downloads done,

reminds me of the good ol' days of dial up, No one better use the Phone!!

[stevevcb 3]

Mine keeps jumping up to 1mb/s, then dropping back down to about 30-50kb/s. The servers must be getting hammered.

[Spetz 0]

mine bounced to like 450kb/s i doubt i will ever get higher then this, i can't wait for this game, I plan on being the British Empire and Stop the US from Rebeling lol

[froggyluv 2136]

Thanks for the heads up!

Been waiting to check out this one for a while

[Spetz 0]

The demo is Buggy and has alot of lagg, it is almost unplayable for me and i have like an average system too, ( I can run ArmA, fallout 3 on max settings)

Pentuim D @ 3.00

3GB ram

Nvidea 9800GT 512 MB

windows XP

anyone else got problems with the game?

[Colossus 2]

Didn't have any sort of problemes with the performance (Core 2 Duo E8600 @3GHz, 4GB RAM & Nvidia 8800GT). Only thing I can say I wanted differently

is speed of moving the view and change the UI to a bit more readable look.

Full game, patches and perhaps a mod (a.k.a. Stainless Steel) should do the trick for me.

[stevevcb 3]

Worked fine for me, save long load times. The controls feel a tad clumsy at times, but being able to zoom right in and watch one of your blokes boot someone in the face and then bayonet him more than makes up for that, as far as I'm concerned.

I really hope the next one is 20th Century. I understand machine guns and tanks a lot better than I understand muskets and horses.

[POPKA 0]

I only really enjoyed the campaign game of the Total War series, i take it that is not included in the demo?

[berghoff 11]

Right on time, I was playing Medieval 2 with SS6.2 when I saw this. Still downloading... and I've seen that The Netherlands is in this game, thats just great.  

Will give an update once I've played it.  

[uPDATE]

Camera-controls are fine to me, UI could use a little tweaking though but nothing serious just minor things like small fonts on high resolution.

But basicly its as nice as the other Total War games only the sea battles are a nice addition. Damn just not enough free time to play all these games!  

[-Snafu- 79]

I have never played any of the Total War games before and I gave the Colonial forces a damn good thrashing in the Brandywine scenario. It was awfully easy and I was expecting it to be more realistic but I still enjoyed it. The After Action Report:

UK

Deployed: 875

Lost: 425

Enemy KIA: 764

US

Deployed: 1032

Lost: 808

Enemy KIA: 372

General Washington was killed in the battle.

I split my forces (call this Force A), containing 6 line infantry units backed up by cavalry. These guys moved to the far left flank in order to avoid Colonial cannon. The remaining forces (Force B) stayed in position for the moment. I sent my two horse artillery to a small rise some distance in front of the enemy artillery and had them fire on the enemy guns.

As Force B crossed the river on the far left they met a US force of roughly 4 line infantry units. This force was crushed easily enough. However, the US were assembling a large force of about 8 units on my right flank in the woods. I diverted my Force B to counter them. It was a tough battle but thanks to a flanking manoeuvre by one of my infantry formations and the cavalry cutting down the infantry in the forest, my guys won and the US retreated. One of my formations retreated from the field of battle.

I reorganised my force to march up the original path (the one that led to the houses at the top of the battlefield). I had them march forward with the cavalry behind. They met another small US force I believe, which was easily routed. Force B continued their march to meet an enemy force that was forming at the settlement at the top of the battlefield. Thankfully, the US removed two cannon from the defence positions at the river.

As a result, I had Force A organise to march across the river. I sent a cavalry unit across and they took care of the one remaining cannon unit and George Washington, at least I think that's where he was killed. The cavalry unit remained at the newly held ground while my Force A moved forward to meet them.

Meanwhile, Force B was taking fire from a US artillery unit so I had the cavalry force charge that position to disrupt the fire. As that was happening, my Force B moved forward, took a small hill where one US line infantry force was holding and routed them. They then continued their march, I had my cavalry retreat and then had Force B charged the cannon. They took a minor beating but the artillery was silenced. One unit took the high ground just before the settlement, one unit occupied the Town Hall and the other two moved around the buildings and engaged the enemy. I had Force Bs cavalry return to attack the one unprepared artillery that the US had, they were stuck moving between the buildings. I then had Force As cavalry come in and finish off the last US cavalry unit.

As a consequence the US forces were defeated and routed giving me a Close Victory.

Due to my shitty computer I had to set graphics to low. It didn't really matter as the gameplay made up for it. Loading time can be a bit ridiculous.

It's a good game, I do hope that a realism mod is released. I still have the naval scenario to try out.

Oh and there is Highland units for the British complete with kilt so I am very chuffed.

[froggyluv 2136]

Nice read -snafu-  

I love tactical play-by-play.

I've played/owned 2 of the other Total Wars, both the original and Medieval 2 and both were pretty solid. This one is pretty amazing. The close-up infantry battles are quite entertaining and the sea battles...amazing! The ability to zoom far out presents a nice viewpoint for strategy but zooming in on those beautiful ships and ocean is just stunning! Watch your men actually running around the deck with various tasks and actually jumping overboard had me in chuckles.

Of course, demo's only show what's possible with the combat engine with the real meat of the package being the campaign, with conquest on the line!

Consider it bought  

No tech problems here but I've read many people were having some problems.

Intel 8500 @3.9

Ati 4870

4 gigs Mem.

Vista 64

[Blackhawk 0]

I got 750kb/s at 6:00am GMT this morning.

Unfortunately, whenever I play the navel battles the game freezes about 2 seconds into the game. But otherwise, i'll definitely be getting this.

[Wolfrug 0]

I could play the tutorial missions fine, but when I tried the regular one it started chugging like crazy a couple of minutes in - even with settings on Low Then again I also had the bug where I couldn't start the game without doing some magic with the file-integrity checking program in Steam (or whatever?), and the loading times were ginormous.

Still, the naval battles were excellent - I still think the wind should have a bigger impact, but maybe I just didn't pay that much attention to it. I loved the ability to micromanage shot types, when to shoot full broadsides, the exact turning of the ship etc. And then the boarding of course. All in all, VERY entertaining.

If they clear up the weird performance issues I had, this game is definitely a winner - I loved STW, MTW and M2TW, and this one just seems to continue the line of excellence.

Regards,

Wolfrug

[Dwarden 1125]

great demo ... if all bugs are ironed then it's worth the investment

[Pathy 0]

Not to keen on Steam unfortunately, but i've been waiting for this since, well, it was announced!

[Prydain 1]

Demos ruin the experience but you can tell me how you find it Chris.

[mikebart 1]

Ship battles are cool, but I wish they had have gone strait to WW1 and skipped this era of infantry combat, I just dont think it translates very well into a video game, but I guess they would have gotten alot of negative response if they hadn't done it.

[Prydain 1]

Well technicaly sitting in a trench and occasionaly walking into machine gun fire is not exactly a good video game experience. Besides, playing Haig's warfare is a bit like musical chairs but with trenches as the seats and artillery and machine gun fire as the instrumentals.

I suppose Ferdinand: Total War would have to be shipped with a rat, diarrhoea and an instruction manual on the legality of diging up the garden.

[Pathy 0]

I don't see why they have to progress through the timeline as such. Personally i'm hoping they'll redo Shogun, but that could just be me being hopefull. There are plenty of interesting history periods that could be covered, without going into modern territory

[MehMan 0]

mneh, modern Total War would probably look like Combat Mission: Shock Force with a campaign screen.

Would anybody be interested in Prehistoric: Total War? Three cavemen battling it out with mammoths!

[mikebart 1]

Yeah, actually come to think of it Total War probably wouldnt lend itself to modern combat very well either, I shouldnt judge too harshly on the demo though, but I found the ai were doing some pretty dumb things like walking just past my ranks while my men wouldnt even turn to face them (maybe i had them in the wrong place?).

[BLSmith2112 0]

I played the first ship battle, I sucked horribly

- I tried controlling all of the ships manually and just failed, failed miserably.

The controls (in the options panel when you hit pause) for land combat talks about group formations. Using the controls Alt+1, Alt+2...and so on, I read the first few and decided to play with a few of these groups. As I started pressing these group configurations and went down the line.. Alt+1, Alt+2, Alt+3, ALT+4...DOH!

Lost my game 20+ minutes in. I'm just gunna wait for the game, its too damn addicting.

The group controls didn't even work for me Musta been for something else.

[Prydain 1]

but I found the ai were doing some pretty dumb things like walking just past my ranks while my men wouldnt even turn to face them (maybe i had them in the wrong place?).

This is a demo, you won't get half of the features you will get in the game. I suspect the files are stripped to the minimum of what is needed.

[Bernadotte 0]

but I found the ai were doing some pretty dumb things like walking just past my ranks while my men wouldnt even turn to face them (maybe i had them in the wrong place?).

This is a demo, you won't get half of the features you will get in the game. I suspect the files are stripped to the minimum of what is needed.

Seems to me ETW battles require more micromanagement than previous TW releases.  I suspect that musketmen won't shoot at a flanking unit until reoriented to avoid killing the guy they are standing next to.

I've been spending most of my time off the coast of Lagos, although the AI  gets quite predictable after a short while.  I'm hoping that weather conditions will vary enough to allow battles on rough seas, which should reduce some of the predictability.