Empire: Total War review - experience thread

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Re: Empire: Total War review - experience thread

Post by Stark »

ray245 wrote:The things is looking at how people like Stark can dislike the game to some extend because of its steep learning curve, from a business perspective, CA has to cater to people like them.
Jesus christ.

The learning curve is 'steep' because the game presents information poorly, not because the concepts are over-complex. The strategy level is where most of this comes in, but even units have a bunch of statistics that affect performance that you'd never find in the ingame stats (at least they did in Rome). This is simply a communication or UI issue, not an issue with 'lol boats are like units of spearmen'. I think the idea they should have done naval warfare in this era and not even attempt to include the features that shaped tactical battles (wind, formation, etc) is absurd. Hint: naval battles didn't have to be reskinned land battles.
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Re: Empire: Total War review - experience thread

Post by Lazarus »

Bullshit. I jumped right into the naval demo, no tutorials, no nothing, a total deer-in-the-headlights fumbling noob stumbling around the interface like an idiot (the quality thereof notwithstanding) and got a Close Victory with damn near my eyes closed. Don't blame any illusion of overcomplexity and micromanagement on your own complete ignorance of the concepts at work.
Oh right, well as long as you're ok then. Clearly I'm in the minority in my lack of practical 18th century sailing knowledge.
Don't ever go into business. CA need to make a product that is accessible and fun, although realism is a concern it comes a long way behind 'Is this fun?' and more importantly 'Will people pay to play this?' Beta testing gave them an indication that gamers wanted less complexity, and I can see why. Individually ordering every one of your ships to tack back and forth just to move across the map would be boring as fuck, not to mention irritating, for the majority of the game's audience. I couldn't give a fuck whether the game is 100% accurate; this ISN'T a sailing simulator, it's an RTS. You may have noticed CA made the latter, not the former, for the same reason that sales of Flight Simulator lag somewhat behind Halo3, namely only a niche audience exists for such specialist games.
If you seriously think wanting to make the naval system MORE complex is going to be the majority opinion of gamers playing this, you might want to take a look at the audience. They really don't give a fuck about tacking so long as the game's realistic so far as they can tell and fun to play. Go make your 'Realistic Sailing' mod, I'm sure literally dozens of people will download it.
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Re: Empire: Total War review - experience thread

Post by Stark »

They need to learn how to make tutorials that explain concepts and not 'click here to shoot'. They've always been very poor at explaining just how 'things are done' in their games.
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Re: Empire: Total War review - experience thread

Post by Vympel »

The land battle tutorial was exceptionally poor - at no point did it explain how to have units fortify buildings or take cover behind an object - of course, doing this is easy and I figured it out myself by simply mousing over the relevant cover and clicking, but it's ridiculous that they didn't actually demonstrate this in the tutorial.

Of course, I'm a TW vet so it doesn't matter.
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Re: Empire: Total War review - experience thread

Post by Vympel »

Also, a specific historical niggle - when you start the game the Swedes are in possession of "St Petersburg, Ingria".

Erm ... what?

It's 1700. St Petersburg wasn't founded until 1703, being based off of capturing a Swedish fortress. Guess that was their only way of accounting for St. Petersburg given the start date.
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Re: Empire: Total War review - experience thread

Post by Vympel »

Fuck! I just realised I had selected the short campaign (victory conditions set at 1750) rather than the long campaign (1799) option. Shit. All that progress last night wasted, I'll have to restart (I took the Crimea and St Petersburg easily).
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Re: Empire: Total War review - experience thread

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Turns out my brother who was just visiting me has already bought ETW and was kind enough to lend me his laptop while he gets drunk on my wine. Here is what I saw by only three hours of gameplay: Massive Bugs. ETW is *yet another* unfinished product - the sea battle is completely bugged:
- No matter what ammunition you choose, the enemy ship loses masts. Even if you pelt it with grapeshot, it still looses masts.
- Ship boarding is useless since ships that surrender to you are not actually prizes of war...and lower ranking ships will almost always surrender immediately when boarded by a ship twice as large, so there goes your impulse for boarding larger ships.
- The turn rates are insane - 1st rates turn almost as fast as the smallest sloops.

Land game is not much better:
- If you recruit a specific type of iroquese soldiers, the game may or may not slow down to a crawl.
- The enemy still wastes cavalry on head-charges. Whats even worse, it decides light cavalry is perfectly good for charging line infantry - I had this happen to me three times in a row.
- platoon firing for elite units leads to one soldier slowly shooting after the other, which means your guard and elite units get spanked by freaking militia which fires volleys. Best part: You cannot build elite units without platoon fire research and all elite units are automatically stuck with it. So I just had three units of prussian guards getting destroyed by freaking french militia.
- if the enemy fortifies a building and you pound it with artillery, the enemy sits there until the building collapses and destroys the whole unit. It never occurs to it to simply move the unit out of that building and use the rubble for cover.
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Re: Empire: Total War review - experience thread

Post by Vympel »

I haven't played any naval combat except the tutorial - unsurprisingly, Russia is a great land power :)

(though I will be building a navy and wiping out Britain, of course, in the finest "yeah right, that never happened, and thats why its awesome" Total War traditions)
Ship boarding is useless since ships that surrender to you are not actually prizes of war...and lower ranking ships will almost always surrender immediately when boarded by a ship twice as large, so there goes your impulse for boarding larger ships.
Wait, what? The naval tutorial specifically says that if you successfully board an enemy ship you get it as a prize. Are you saying that if the ship surrenders, you don't get the ship? :banghead:
platoon firing for elite units leads to one soldier slowly shooting after the other, which means your guard and elite units get spanked by freaking militia which fires volleys. Best part: You cannot build elite units without platoon fire research and all elite units are automatically stuck with it. So I just had three units of prussian guards getting destroyed by freaking french militia.
Sorry don't get what you mean - what's the difference between platoon firing and volley fire? I have no idea. I've only played two major battles (to take the Crimea and St. Petersburg) and I won them through use of cavalry and use of superior infantry numbers + cover, respectively.
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Re: Empire: Total War review - experience thread

Post by Fire Fly »

So is this game worth shelling out $50 USD for or should I invest that money in really good food instead? The reviews seem to suggest that there have been some great leaps for the TW series but at the same time, some of the fundamental problems that people have been pointing out previously have not yet been fixed. The demo hasn't struck the same kind of magic that RTW did with me; ETW just doesn't seem to elicit that same addictive crave that RTW was able to.
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Re: Empire: Total War review - experience thread

Post by Samuel »

Fire Fly wrote:So is this game worth shelling out $50 USD for or should I invest that money in really good food instead? The reviews seem to suggest that there have been some great leaps for the TW series but at the same time, some of the fundamental problems that people have been pointing out previously have not yet been fixed. The demo hasn't struck the same kind of magic that RTW did with me; ETW just doesn't seem to elicit that same addictive crave that RTW was able to.
It will be fixed by the modders...
again.

You should probably just wait until they patch it or (even better) mod it. I've only played the unmodded versions of the games and they get boring really fast.
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Re: Empire: Total War review - experience thread

Post by Stark »

There's a sad fact though; there are basically no good RTS games on the horizon. If you want to play with armies, this is pretty much the end of the road for many months.

CA's terrible quality will sell like hotcakes. :D
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Re: Empire: Total War review - experience thread

Post by Minischoles »

Have they at least fixed the diplomacy AI? i'm playing MTW2 again and i'm getting very annoyed how someone will come ask for a ceasefire from me, I add one thing to it (like trade rights) and suddenly they no longer want one.
Or where you'll be the absolute supreme power in the world, and yet you'll still have people suddenly declare war on you, or break an alliance when you've got like full stack armies marching around with masses of experience.
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Re: Empire: Total War review - experience thread

Post by JointStrikeFighter »

Stark wrote:There's a sad fact though; there are basically no good RTS games on the horizon. If you want to play with armies, this is pretty much the end of the road for many months.

CA's terrible quality will sell like hotcakes. :D
Not true, soviet assault is out tuesday ;)
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Re: Empire: Total War review - experience thread

Post by Acidburns »

Vympel wrote:
Ship boarding is useless since ships that surrender to you are not actually prizes of war...and lower ranking ships will almost always surrender immediately when boarded by a ship twice as large, so there goes your impulse for boarding larger ships.
Wait, what? The naval tutorial specifically says that if you successfully board an enemy ship you get it as a prize. Are you saying that if the ship surrenders, you don't get the ship? :banghead:
If you capture an enemy ship in a naval battle you get prize money. I received 600 cash for taking a french brig (I think it was a brig of some sort, whatever it was it was smaller than a 5th rate).
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Re: Empire: Total War review - experience thread

Post by Vympel »

Fair enough, it's worth capturing them for cash if you can methinks.
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Re: Empire: Total War review - experience thread

Post by Fingolfin_Noldor »

Why capture it for cash? In real life, it takes years to finish construction of a heavy ship like a third rate. Capturing it means that after a few month of repair, you get a ship to send back to fight with. Don't tell me they didn't allow for that? Why is it that a ship that surrenders isn't a prize?
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Re: Empire: Total War review - experience thread

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Vympel wrote:
Ship boarding is useless since ships that surrender to you are not actually prizes of war...and lower ranking ships will almost always surrender immediately when boarded by a ship twice as large, so there goes your impulse for boarding larger ships.
Wait, what? The naval tutorial specifically says that if you successfully board an enemy ship you get it as a prize. Are you saying that if the ship surrenders, you don't get the ship? :banghead:
It is bugged. Sometimes, you get the option of taking them as a prize or sell them for prize money, at some times you do not even get that option. I have played five naval battles so far and only once did I get the option of adding a ship to my fleet and that was the suckiest prize of them all.
platoon firing for elite units leads to one soldier slowly shooting after the other, which means your guard and elite units get spanked by freaking militia which fires volleys. Best part: You cannot build elite units without platoon fire research and all elite units are automatically stuck with it. So I just had three units of prussian guards getting destroyed by freaking french militia.
Sorry don't get what you mean - what's the difference between platoon firing and volley fire? I have no idea. I've only played two major battles (to take the Crimea and St. Petersburg) and I won them through use of cavalry and use of superior infantry numbers + cover, respectively.
It is a balancing frackup. Here is the problem described by someone who can explain it better:
Simple, elite infantry mess around, firing a few shots at a time. Since firing by rank seems to be mutually exclusive with platoon firing, only the front rank and possibly one or two from the second will fire. So that's 4 or 5 shots every second.

Then take regular line infantry. They can't use platoon firing, so you get a crashing volley of 50+ shots immediately. Perhaps two seconds later, the second rank unleashes another such volley. Another two seconds, a final volley.

By this point my Guards haven't even finished their volley, and have taken heavy casualties from the sheer volume of fire thrown their way.

Now sure, their whole regiment has to reload while mine continues firing, but my regiment now has a numbers disadvantage (not to mention the disadvantage of not all my men being able to fire) so can't inflict as much damage. This spirals into a slaughter, with the basic line infantry retaining most of its numbers.
Which leads to such fine things like the crappiest line infantry tearing up a most-upgraded guard infantry. In every engagement, no matter what I do.


Another thing: The Egyptian syndrome has hit again, especially considering the uniforms of my favorite faction, the Spanish.

Looking throught the unit rosters, CA got really lazy. High end unit: guard infantry. Best cavalry unit: Guard cavalry. All across the field. The only ones who get any kind of difference are the british and the prussians. Every other european army is comprised of the same stuff.
It is like they just cloned 90% of the roster for every army. So when I meet the netherlands, my army will have the same units they do. Even the guard units have the same stats etc.

I mean, wtf? Even medieval had way more variety. Would it have been so hard to get some books and look at the various elite units, CA? Frack you.
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Re: Empire: Total War review - experience thread

Post by ray245 »

Thanas wrote: Another thing: The Egyptian syndrome has hit again, especially considering the uniforms of my favorite faction, the Spanish.

Looking throught the unit rosters, CA got really lazy. High end unit: guard infantry. Best cavalry unit: Guard cavalry. All across the field. The only ones who get any kind of difference are the british and the prussians. Every other european army is comprised of the same stuff.
It is like they just cloned 90% of the roster for every army. So when I meet the netherlands, my army will have the same units they do. Even the guard units have the same stats etc.

I mean, wtf? Even medieval had way more variety. Would it have been so hard to get some books and look at the various elite units, CA? Frack you.
Well, it seems that the only differences lies in the stats. Although I don't really care about CA not focusing on the units if they bothered to spend more time on the freaking AI!

Certain stuff is easy to mod it in, but things like modding an AI is hard, if not, impossible at times.
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Re: Empire: Total War review - experience thread

Post by Minischoles »

I've played the campaign a bit now, and the enemy AI seems as dumb as usual. Attacked Silesia and once i was inside the fort the enemy literally stood there while i pounded them, from very very close range until dead. Not once did they move or try to attack, they just sat and died.
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Re: Empire: Total War review - experience thread

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Played through the Trafalgar sim, a close defeat. I screwed up a few times and, despite actually causing more casualties, lost in the end. It seems like it'll be a bit before I get a handle on naval combat, but at the same time, everything seemed to be working properly. I only fired round shot, and didn't noticeably dismast any of my opponents.
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Re: Empire: Total War review - experience thread

Post by ray245 »

For those that is interested, steam will be releasing a patch next week.

http://shoguntotalwar.yuku.com/topic/45171
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Re: Empire: Total War review - experience thread

Post by Slacker »

Okay, major improvement on the diplomatic model-starting a game as Poland-Lithuania, the Prussian AI proposed to me a deal on Turn 1 that would swap East and West Prussia, and, further, offered me incentives in the way of tech and florins. Maybe I just got lucky or something, but that would've never happened in any of the earlier TW games.
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Re: Empire: Total War review - experience thread

Post by wautd »

Just bought it and tried it out for a few minutes. The Dutch actually speak dutch so that's already a nice detail.
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Re: Empire: Total War review - experience thread

Post by Samuel »

Why was Platoon Firing historically used? It sounds rather useless to be trained it. What was it supposed to be used for in the game?
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