Empire: Total War review - experience thread

[Vympel]

Link

A thread about the "stuttering" problem I'm all of a sudden experiencing. I don't have an nVidia though. I have an ATI card.

[weemadando]

Yeah, since the steam update I've experience a bit more lag any time the campaign map resets for my turn.

More annoyingly - my units are idiots. If I hold some cavalry in reserve to protect my cannon, then it would be really nice if they had *just enough* initiative to realise that I probably would want them to engage the enemy cav that brushes right past them (and I mean literally close enough for them to behead with sabres as they go by), rather then diligently awaiting my next orders.

It drives me nuts that this happens time and time again. Additionally, it would seem that units in cover behind walls or in buildings require express orders to fire for me, even if set to fire at will.

[PeZook]

I wonder what the hell got into CA's head to not allow playing all factions from the start. It's hilarious that from Day 1, people look for a hack to do it, and yet the devs still insisit of locking them out

And damn the list of annoying bugs is getting longer...scary, even. And to think I wanted to pay for computer upgrades to play this game...

[GuppyShark]

As you know, you've always had to unlock most of the playable factions by conquering them. I'm still not sure how the United States is supposed to fit in (they have a starting date on the faction selection screen which I assume is how that works for them once they are unlocked).

EDIT: Fun little anecdote, one player got a general called Vader so he renamed his units "1st Elite Stormtrooper Regiment", "2nd Elite Stormtrooper Regiment", etc.

[Setzer]

The more I hear about this, the more I think that playing any vanilla CA game is a mistake. I might stop buying their games altogether, since they can't seem to be bothered to finish them.

[Stark]

People like me already did that. Nothing about Empire's problems is surprising, and is just CA business as usual.

[Quetzalcoatl]

Anybody know what the deal is with deployable fortifications? I used them in RtI to great effect, but I can't seem to access them in Skirmish or the Grand Campaign.

[Nieztchean Uber-Amoeba]

Your units can use deployable fortifications once they've been sitting in one spot for more than 1 turn.

Anyways, I've managed to avoid most bugs (except for an annoying CTD whenever I select a certain one of my Gentlemen), discovered that fire by rank is awesome, found a way to manually fire by rank (since this idea that until 1710 all infantry behind the first row just stood there until enough people died to free up a front-row space is hilarious), and, er, yeah.

[ray245]

The more I hear about this, the more I think that playing any vanilla CA game is a mistake. I might stop buying their games altogether, since they can't seem to be bothered to finish them.

Well, you could always wait a few more years before buying the game, when the price of the game has dropped and you can start to install mods immediately, without playing Vanilla ETW.

Quite a number of Total war fans, Rome total war fans especially did this.

[Nieztchean Uber-Amoeba]

People over at TWCenter have already cracked the game's code to make all factions playable AND make all the Special Forces Edition-specific troops playable (all it takes is deleting one unpacked file) in the vanilla game (so much for all the whining about CA doing that). Cheers for modders in what is so far the least moddable TW game yet.

[PeZook]

People like me already did that. Nothing about Empire's problems is surprising, and is just CA business as usual.

At least in Rome and MTW2, when you trained an elite unit, you could actually expect it to rape militia

I mean...come ON! That platoon firing thing should've come up in, like, five minutes of beta testing...

[defanatic]

Yeah, since the steam update I've experience a bit more lag any time the campaign map resets for my turn.

More annoyingly - my units are idiots. If I hold some cavalry in reserve to protect my cannon, then it would be really nice if they had *just enough* initiative to realise that I probably would want them to engage the enemy cav that brushes right past them (and I mean literally close enough for them to behead with sabres as they go by), rather then diligently awaiting my next orders.

It drives me nuts that this happens time and time again. Additionally, it would seem that units in cover behind walls or in buildings require express orders to fire for me, even if set to fire at will.

What? Like some sort of "guard area command". Do you want the game to play itself? Hur hur. /competitivertsmoron

That skirmisher thing is rather annoying. I think light infantry should be able to fire in any direction, rather than having to align their loose arrangement to face the enemy. I think that was half-implemented, as evidenced by the fact that your light infantry do not form up when they reach their destination, although the half in which they can shoot in any direction wasn't. *sigh*

Hiding in buildings seems to drastically reduce the killy power of your units. Probably working as intended. The fences thing is really annoying (especially since they don't seem to want to fire by rank).

Light infantry and Puckle guns seem to keep shooting at their targets even if their targets retreat out of range (not chasing them or retargetting or anything).

Infantry seem to be able to walk through the short lived fires created by incendiary mortars and howitzers.

Bizarre things happen if your unit of deployed Puckle guns gets charged, especially if the horses run away, but your dudes stay. Where is your God now?

Platoon firing doesn't really work when your guys are hiding behind a wall. The next row should stand up shoot, duck down and reload etc.

Platoon firing doesn't work with more than 3 ranks, AFAIK.

The AI seems to be able to mysteriously get food from nowhere, and also afford massive armies even when they have no money.

It should be made a little more clear when your infantry (and, indeed, most other units) have reloaded their weapons. They should have something like what they have for ship battles. Maybe an XXX/YYY/ZZZ where XXX is the number of infantry that have their weapons loaded and ready to fire, YYY is the current number of infantry, and ZZZ is the number of infantry in the unit at the start of the battle.

[weemadando]

The AI seems to cheat like a motherfucker. I don't know how else they can continually raise units when they are a micro-state being blockaded on all sides by me and under siege. How is it that they can raise army after army within a blockaded city to through at my besieging forces?

[Steel]

The AI seems to cheat like a motherfucker. I don't know how else they can continually raise units when they are a micro-state being blockaded on all sides by me and under siege. How is it that they can raise army after army within a blockaded city to through at my besieging forces?

The AI has always had massive bonuses. In Medieval 1 they got something like 10,000 florins/turn. Not too much of an impact for massive states, but for 1 province factions increasing their income by a factor of 20 allows them to recruit quite ridiculous armies for their size.

[Thanas]

Proof of how little Betatesting CA did -

They forgot the "delete savegame" option.

Yeah, that's right, they freaking forgot it. Which leads to you being unable to save the game anymore after you have filled up all slots.

However, there already is a fix - just delete them manually under:

Windows XP:

C:\Documents and Settings\username\Application Data\The Creative Assembly\Empire\save_games

Windows Vista:
C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\The Creative Assembly\Empire\save_games

[Samuel]

As you know, you've always had to unlock most of the playable factions by conquering them. I'm still not sure how the United States is supposed to fit in (they have a starting date on the faction selection screen which I assume is how that works for them once they are unlocked).

EDIT: Fun little anecdote, one player got a general called Vader so he renamed his units "1st Elite Stormtrooper Regiment", "2nd Elite Stormtrooper Regiment", etc.

Actualy, beating the game unlocks them all. Conquering them just unlocks those until you beat the game (at least in Rome). I have no idea why it works that way.

[GuppyShark]

Units will hunker up behind battlefield terrain pieces but you have to click-drag to assign the front rank of the unit to be aligned with the terrain piece, you can't just click on the wall/fence/whatever. You can tell when this is successful due to the animation of the front rank.

Oh I know, and there's the special icon for it and all, but half the time when I tell them to do that, they decide to instead go and do something completely different like stand half each side of a different section of the wall.

Did some further research. I think I've found what you're experiencing and I have a fix.

1. Approach the wall from the side you want to be on.
2. Right click when the "use terrain" icon comes up. Hold the right mouse button.
3. You will now see the green circles indicating where your mans will stand. Moving the mouse adjusts this.
4. Release when you're happy with it.

Your infantry will march up to the wall, make any final adjustments to their order, then they will adopt crouching positions.

I think the problem you were having is that if a unit is not already on the right side of the wall, they will move into 'order' half over the wall and half not. I imagine if you're doing this under fire, it means they never get their ranks sorted properly and never move into battle position.

I had one instance of this in my last battle while not under fire and I think it was because another unit moved too close and it got in the way. I reordered the "use terrain" and they got ready normally.

It'd be great if this sort of manual hand-holding wasn't necessary, but considering how godawful their terrain handling used to be, I'm prepared to cut them slack in this area. It's an amazing improvement over the previous titles. I used to never increase unit sizes because city fighting sucked hard even with the normal unit sizes.

EDIT: If an infantry unit is outnumbered and risks being surrounded, is adopting Square formation a good idea, even when there is no cavalry threat?

[loomer]

Damn it, I need to clear out a lot of crap or buy a new hard drive. Fifteen fucking gigabytes, plus 11 gigs for an iso back up? Sweet jesus! The game is a big enough expense that I don't need to spend more!

EDIT: Fortunately, it turns out one of my buddies played a joke at a LAN and copied my GMod folder about five times. Each one is about... 15 gigs or so, and there are still two left. Space, cleared!

[RogueIce]

People like me already did that. Nothing about Empire's problems is surprising, and is just CA business as usual.

At least in Rome and MTW2, when you trained an elite unit, you could actually expect it to rape militia

I mean...come ON! That platoon firing thing should've come up in, like, five minutes of beta testing...

Well, you'd think they'd have noticed archers shooting their own front rank in the back for Rome, but that apparently took a patch to fix. Go figure.

Anyway, I usually wait around until the Gold Edition with the expansion pack and all their patches. Mainly because that's around the time I have a good enough computer to run it halfway decently (I can do Rome on about middle settings...no way am I doing ETW with this machine!) but it also helps for them to have done their patches and other fixes.

I actually still enjoy vanilla RTW and BI. Mods are nice, but they usually add things that are just too annoying for me personally (fuck not being able to recruit Legions at any City I damn well please!) so I stick with vanilla.

[weemadando]

Units will hunker up behind battlefield terrain pieces but you have to click-drag to assign the front rank of the unit to be aligned with the terrain piece, you can't just click on the wall/fence/whatever. You can tell when this is successful due to the animation of the front rank.

Oh I know, and there's the special icon for it and all, but half the time when I tell them to do that, they decide to instead go and do something completely different like stand half each side of a different section of the wall.

Did some further research. I think I've found what you're experiencing and I have a fix.

1. Approach the wall from the side you want to be on.
2. Right click when the "use terrain" icon comes up. Hold the right mouse button.
3. You will now see the green circles indicating where your mans will stand. Moving the mouse adjusts this.
4. Release when you're happy with it.

Your infantry will march up to the wall, make any final adjustments to their order, then they will adopt crouching positions.

I think the problem you were having is that if a unit is not already on the right side of the wall, they will move into 'order' half over the wall and half not. I imagine if you're doing this under fire, it means they never get their ranks sorted properly and never move into battle position.

I had one instance of this in my last battle while not under fire and I think it was because another unit moved too close and it got in the way. I reordered the "use terrain" and they got ready normally.

It'd be great if this sort of manual hand-holding wasn't necessary, but considering how godawful their terrain handling used to be, I'm prepared to cut them slack in this area. It's an amazing improvement over the previous titles. I used to never increase unit sizes because city fighting sucked hard even with the normal unit sizes.

EDIT: If an infantry unit is outnumbered and risks being surrounded, is adopting Square formation a good idea, even when there is no cavalry threat?

I'm not a retard, that's what I have been doing. It's just that at least 1 time out of every 4 it flatly doesn't work that way.

[CmdrWilkens]

So anyway to take a turn away from the doom and gloom I've actually been having a lot of fun with this or late, boarding ships almost always puts them in my prize queue, I haven't researched Platoon Fire yet so I havent' had to deal with that headache and aside from the Cherokee somehow repeatedly being able to outfight one of my armies (with 8 units of veteran line infantry, a couple 12lb howitzers, and 12 lb field guns plus dragoons and hevay cavalry) I've been having a blast. My ships will actually act like a squadron and take turns in order rather than all turning at once, improved grapeshot and 2nd rates in 1715=dead galleons for me to take a prize.

The thing which has been moodiest for me is the diplomacy. While most of my major power negotiations have made sense (France was desperate to get Florida after I seized it from the Cherokee to secure their position in Louisiana) some have just made no sense (The Mughals usually send me a request every year to start a trade agreement..only my ports are nearly full AND they want me to pay for it AND they don't have money for me to make that I can't better earn by chartering some more Indiamen (I currently control every single port in the Straights of Madagascar).

So yeah things are looking up (especially since I managed to get the 13 Colonies to formally join me which was a nice boost to everything).

[GuppyShark]

I'm not a retard, that's what I have been doing. It's just that at least 1 time out of every 4 it flatly doesn't work that way.

I give up then, it's been absolutely fine for me (it's actually pretty fun).

[Thanas]

EDIT: If an infantry unit is outnumbered and risks being surrounded, is adopting Square formation a good idea, even when there is no cavalry threat?

No, as square formation eliminates rank firing and groups your units together so that they can be dropped quite easily. If you have no support to call on, tough it out, you'll lose anyway. If you have support, better take the chance and have them run towards it. Volleys in the back are deadly, but it is better than losing the entire unit. I have often saved at least half of a unit that way.

Square formation on the other hand also removes mobility, which means you can't even run anymore.

[CaptHawkeye]

I haven't researched Platoon Fire yet so I havent' had to deal with that headache and aside from the Cherokee somehow repeatedly being able to outfight one of my armies (with 8 units of veteran line infantry, a couple 12lb howitzers, and 12 lb field guns plus dragoons and hevay cavalry)

That's currently my biggest gripe with the game. CA apparently learned nothing from M2:TW. It just doesn't make any sense to see unarmoured Native Americans charge my line and literally absorb musket fire. You can see them taking one hit after another and just staggering for a bit. What the hell?

[Samuel]

I haven't researched Platoon Fire yet so I havent' had to deal with that headache and aside from the Cherokee somehow repeatedly being able to outfight one of my armies (with 8 units of veteran line infantry, a couple 12lb howitzers, and 12 lb field guns plus dragoons and hevay cavalry)

That's currently my biggest gripe with the game. CA apparently learned nothing from M2:TW. It just doesn't make any sense to see unarmoured Native Americans charge my line and literally absorb musket fire. You can see them taking one hit after another and just staggering for a bit. What the hell?

... Ghost Dancing worked?