Medieval II Total War Demo

Captain Cyran · Post by **Captain Cyran** » 2006-10-09 11:30pm

Need, to upgrade, video card! I need Pixel shader 1.1, which my current (old ass) video card doesn't have. Grrr, need money!

Post by **Darth Wong** » 2006-10-09 11:45pm

Captain Cyran wrote:Need, to upgrade, video card! I need Pixel shader 1.1, which my current (old ass) video card doesn't have. Grrr, need money!

You need to become a consultant, so you can write it off

Post by **Vympel** » 2006-10-10 12:03am

You need to become a consultant, so you can write it off

Heh.

Kramer: It's a write off for them.

Jerry: How is it a write off?

Kramer: They just write it off.

Jerry: Write it off what?

Kramer: Jerry, all these big companies, they write off everything.

Jerry: You don't even know what a write off is, do you?

Kramer: Do you?

Jerry: No. I Don't.

Kramer: But they do. And they're the ones writing it off.

Given my inability to enjoy this demo until my new PC is built, I am given to randomly quoting amusing Seinfeld exchanges.

So yeah, what's a write off?

Post by **Darth Wong** » 2006-10-10 12:09am

Vympel wrote:So yeah, what's a write off?

Assuming that this is a serious question and that "write off" is just an American slang term which never made it to your neck of the woods, a "write off" is just a tax deduction. When you write something off, it means you're claiming it as a legitimate business expense, hence it is a deduction against your taxable business income.

Post by **Vympel** » 2006-10-10 12:43am

Darth Wong wrote: Assuming that this is a serious question and that "write off" is just an American slang term which never made it to your neck of the woods, a "write off" is just a tax deduction. When you write something off, it means you're claiming it as a legitimate business expense, hence it is a deduction against your taxable business income.

Ah- usually, when someone says "write off" here, or at least in the context I've always heard it, it'll be:

"I crashed my car. The thing's a total write off."

So I took it to be something other than that

InnocentBystander · Post by **InnocentBystander** » 2006-10-10 02:12am

Did they change the camera? I'm finding it impossible to zoom in close enough to really see whats going on. Anyone else finding this to be true? I know its been a while since I played Rome, but I'm almost positive RTW could zoom in further.

Netko · Post by **Netko** » 2006-10-10 02:17am

It means that if your taxes are more then the item you are buying you essentialy get the item for free since you don't need to pay the value of the item in taxes. There is also a similar mechanism in VAT areas that allows you to deduct the VAT part of an item price that the company bought from the taxes since VAT is a tax on final consumers and companies are, by definition, expected to not be such.

There are a lot of neat little loopholes that you can make your life cheaper with if you have a company, the only problem being if everything is tied to the company if the company goes down all your assets go down with it.

GuppyShark · Post by **GuppyShark** » 2006-10-10 06:18am

Looks like I need me a new computer.

Arrow · Post by **Arrow** » 2006-10-10 08:52am

Voodoo Extreme has non-torrent download links up. Now I wish I hadn't wasted two and half hours with the torrent last night, I would had gotten it from Fileplanet in five minutes.

Brother-Captain Gaius · Post by **Brother-Captain Gaius** » 2006-10-11 01:10am

InnocentBystander wrote:Did they change the camera? I'm finding it impossible to zoom in close enough to really see whats going on. Anyone else finding this to be true? I know its been a while since I played Rome, but I'm almost positive RTW could zoom in further.

There seems to be some issues with it (hey, it's a pre-release demo) but it looks to be theoretically the same as Rome's. I haven't had too much trouble getting in close.

That said, I tend to need to be in close because I find it hard to tell what's going on. I may just need to tweak the graphics some more (disabling bloom lighting certainly helped) but zoomed out it looks a blob of colors and movement to me and hard to decipher, unlike Rome.

I like the voice-overs though. Something about the English accents makes me grin, and the "battle announcer" is thankfully back to his Medieval (1) self and not that soul-jarringly annoying adolescent warbling from Rome. I'm disappointed though in that the English general only seems to have one rally voice-over ("Reform ye spineless wimmen!") and I suspect I shall miss that nice Roman "Come back, cowards!"

Post by **Vympel** » 2006-10-11 02:21am

like the voice-overs though. Something about the English accents makes me grin, and the "battle announcer" is thankfully back to his Medieval (1) self and not that soul-jarringly annoying adolescent warbling from Rome.

Do we know if they got Sean Pertwee back?

Medieval (1) had the best announcer of the series. Who can announcements like this:

"Like the soft panderer he is, the enemy general flees the field and returns to his women!"

Stark · Post by **Stark** » 2006-10-11 02:24am

That was Sean Pertwee? That announcer was excellent!

I also think the game looks a bit muddled at long range. The palette is very dark, and I've jimmied my settings around but I can't get it looking sharp and clear. Is this just because I'm doing the night battle?

PS they reversed the 1/3, 4/6 functions. 1/3 used to strafe the camera, now it turns it - all my R:TW muscle-memory is useless. Shits me no end.

Brother-Captain Gaius · Post by **Brother-Captain Gaius** » 2006-10-11 02:40am

Stark wrote:PS they reversed the 1/3, 4/6 functions. 1/3 used to strafe the camera, now it turns it - all my R:TW muscle-memory is useless. Shits me no end.

Yeah. I assumed this was just a demo issue (I hope it is). I remedied it somewhat by going into game options during a battle and selecting "RTS Camera" even though it's greyed out. Doing this seems to change the keyboard controls so that the arrow keys move the camera instead of turning it.

LeftWingExtremist · Post by **LeftWingExtremist** » 2006-10-11 02:52am

How do you use the special ability button, I want to get my bowmen to use fire arrows but I don't know how (be usefull against those painfull crossbowmen).

Arrow · Post by **Arrow** » 2006-10-11 08:12am

LeftWingExtremist wrote:How do you use the special ability button, I want to get my bowmen to use fire arrows but I don't know how (be usefull against those painfull crossbowmen).

You see the command wheel at the lower right hand corner? It should be one of the buttons on the upper left part of that wheel.

Post by **Darth Wong** » 2006-10-11 09:49am

The fucked-up controls are seriously annoying; the function of the arrow keys actually seems to change in mid-battle. At the beginning of a battle, the right and left arrow keys rotate the camera. Later in the same battle, for some reason they slide the camera left and right. No changes to any options, but suddenly they act differently.

Anyway, I discovered that I can't run M2TW on a 3GHz P4 with 1GB of RAM and a Radeon 9600 video card at "Medium" graphics quality without experiencing a slide show. Runs fine on "Low" quality, though. Matthew's machine (an Athlon64 3200+ with 1.5GB of RAM and a Radeon X800 GTO video card) can run at "Medium" more smoothly than mine runs on "Low".

PS. Is it just me, or is Pavia much more difficult than Agincourt?

Nieztchean Uber-Amoeba · Post by **Nieztchean Uber-Amoeba** » 2006-10-11 09:54am

Darth Wong wrote: PS. Is it just me, or is Pavia much more difficult than Agincourt?

No. They modelled French incompetence well at Agincourt, even if the infantry waves are still a bitch to deal with. But the French at Pavia are pretty fearsome.

Post by **Vympel** » 2006-10-11 10:16am

Darth Wong wrote:The fucked-up controls are seriously annoying; the function of the arrow keys actually seems to change in mid-battle. At the beginning of a battle, the right and left arrow keys rotate the camera. Later in the same battle, for some reason they slide the camera left and right. No changes to any options, but suddenly they act differently.

Anyway, I discovered that I can't run M2TW on a 3GHz P4 with 1GB of RAM and a Radeon 9600 video card at "Medium" graphics quality without experiencing a slide show. Runs fine on "Low" quality, though. Matthew's machine (an Athlon64 3200+ with 1.5GB of RAM and a Radeon X800 GTO video card) can run at "Medium" more smoothly than mine runs on "Low".

PS. Is it just me, or is Pavia much more difficult than Agincourt?

So are you going to upgrade? Or use your son's machine?

The controls must be a bug- anyone else encountered that problem?

New PC in a few hours. *jumping up and down with anticipation*

Fingolfin_Noldor · Post by **Fingolfin_Noldor** » 2006-10-11 04:39pm

I just ran the game on my PC which is an AMD Athlon 3200+ with a x1900XTX 512 mb card. Planning to do an upgrade some time next year to a Quad Core or Dual Core.

My beef is that there seems to be text corruption which seems persistant for ATI cards. It also appeared in the Warhammer 40K Dawn of War game.

Aside from that, I experienced slow downs, and even a crash when I was running at max.

Yeah, the battle of Patvia is absurdly hard. Seriously, one needs more cavalry to deal with those damn cannons. I'm of the opinion is that it's near impossible to accomplish, unless someone has ideas how to.

Darth Quorthon · Post by **Darth Quorthon** » 2006-10-11 08:07pm

I don't remember how I managed to get past Pavia. I do remember that I had my Arquebusiers (sp?) target the French crossbowmen so that they couldn't rain hell on my troops, but not right off the bat. The announcer informed me at a pretty early time in the battle that my spanish allies had taken a severe blow, so maybe keeping the Spanish protected would help, since you can't control them. Those culverins are just murder. I do remember that I had just a few dozen troops left after it was over.

I thought the camera controls were a bit "twitchy", meaning that the camera seemed to jump a great distance very rapidly with little movement on my part.

Post by **Darth Wong** » 2006-10-11 09:38pm

I beat Pavia the first time I tried it but I've lost twice since then. Thinking back to the first time, I didn't charge the cannons right away. I kept my cavalry with the main force, reinforcing the infantry by occasionally charging enemies when they clashed with my men while my missile troops exchanged fire with the French crossbowmen. After a few minutes of using my general's bodyguard unit to reduce the impact of French attacks on my infantry, I broke off and charged the cannons. My army was able to hold together despite heavy casualties while I was doing this.

AniThyng · Post by **AniThyng** » 2006-10-12 12:52am

Ran it on my core 2 T5500 with x1400, choppily playable at medium-low with shadows on, but much smoother without shadows. Ah well. Looks unnatural but i'll live.

I once left the computer while Agincourt was starting, to make a cup of coffee, and when I came back the french, including the flanking force were all routing. Without any intervention from me whatsoever.

Post by **Vympel** » 2006-10-12 08:39am

Runs with detail cranked to the max on this new PC. I'm on 1280x1024. I got spanked at Pavia, won Agincourt with no effort.

I've never liked Historical Battles.

Alferd Packer · Post by **Alferd Packer** » 2006-10-12 08:56am

I quake with impotent jealous fury that I can't get the demo to work. Is the release date still 11/14?

Post by **Vympel** » 2006-10-13 05:52am

Well, I won Pavia- I actually find it easier to beat than Agincourt now. The reason being too many Longbowmen at Agincourt, not enough Knights. That historical battle isn't modelled too well.