Empire total war demo thread

[Samuel]

What's the point of naval battles in the AGE OF SAIL if they're not at all influenced by wind?

Seriously. Somebody answer that, please.

Wind does affect the game.

I'm guessing that they reduced the amount that wind affected things as part of their continued campaign to screw over history fans. You know, a lower learning curve to make it easier to get into and less punishing if you screw up.

[ray245]

What's the point of naval battles in the AGE OF SAIL if they're not at all influenced by wind?

Seriously. Somebody answer that, please.

Wind does affect the game.

I'm guessing that they reduced the amount that wind affected things as part of their continued campaign to screw over history fans. You know, a lower learning curve to make it easier to get into and less punishing if you screw up.

Game reviewers and people who have tried the demo are already saying the naval battle is hard as it is.

[CaptHawkeye]

Game reviewers and people who have tried the demo are already saying the naval battle is hard as it is.

Too bad I don't give a shit about them.

It's not hard at all, gamers just can't operate a naval RTS because they've never played one and have absolutely no concept of it. IGN gave Battlestations Midway a low score entirely because they couldn't figure out where the spawn unit button was on the controller. (As if you really need to do a lot of searching to find any function on a controller. )

This just reeks of another bitch-fest by conservative reviewers and fanhards.

This isn't to say the naval aspect was particularly good. I played it and was thoroughly bored by the sheer lack of detail. Maybe it's just training level syndrome, but I can only hope the bigger battles and ships are much more interesting than what I got.

[ray245]

I just hope that we can have a naval battle realism mod though. It should be possible, given that many data isn't hard-coded in this game.

[Laughing Mechanicus]

So far I have only tried the naval battle in the demo but unfortunately that has confirmed some of the fears I had for the naval aspect - the interface and mechanics seem to take a little too much inspiration from the land battle mode. It feels like there should be some sort of "planning" mode for them to allow you to keep your ships in a semblance of ordered formation or some other "helper" tools - I mean broadsides are completely manually controlled and require so much attention to get the positioning/timing right that it's difficult to even consider the rest of the battle.

In the end your ships just end up in a big loitering melee with the enemy, which sounds much more dramatic and interesting than it is. I'm going to try it again tonight to see if I can beat some semblance of order out of the naval battles, there is a formation function that I wasn't able to get working properly before.

I'm guessing that they reduced the amount that wind affected things as part of their continued campaign to screw over history fans. You know, a lower learning curve to make it easier to get into and less punishing if you screw up.

Frankly the naval battles (at least the one in the demo) are already a massive and confusing mess of micromanagement even with the ships limited to moving in a simplified manner - adding harsh wind-based movement constraints to them would have just made the whole thing unplayable.

There would also have been the problem of what to do about the battle map boundaries (if they exist, I am presuming they do) - if ships are going to tend to want to go with the direction of the wind then that is going to lead the whole battle getting squeezed against the boundaries of the map pretty quickly - what happens then? Do you move the map "zone"? What if the battle became spread out so you can't?

[CaptHawkeye]

Yeah, the naval system shamelessly copies the land battle system and that's a great way to make it not work. I suppose they were doing that so that conservative nerds wouldn't have to learn something new-god forbid-. Naval battles are just so basically different from land battles though. That's why it annoys me when people just shoe-horn ships into floating tanks.

Jutland has a very simple command system that organizes formation-wide units well, and target selection/firing are simple, honestly TOO simple. Since to minimize the player's workload the developer's unwisely chose to leave all Non-Primary weapons to AI control alone. So you end up with things like 8.8cm deck guns uselessly wasting ammo on Dreadnoughts.

[Fingolfin_Noldor]

Ray, have you ever played Sid Meier's Pirates? You obviously haven't, if you think the naval game play for Empire: Total War to be great.

I have never seen a bunch of sailing ships be so responsive though.

[Brother-Captain Gaius]

What game are you guys playing? The naval battle was a piece of cake - it practically plays itself. I just jumped right in, found my 1st rate and just zoomed around with that - I let the rest of my line of battle handle itself until the very end when it was down to just a few ships.

I just left "fire at will" toggled on, with me throwing out manual broadsides when warranted, and maneuvered my 1st rate for a few stern rakes and to cover my own line's ass. One French 4th rate started fleeing at the end, so I experimented with dismantling shot (chain? bar? whatever it was) with little success and just returned to plugging away with round shot until I won.

For all the naval battle's potential issues, over-complexity and excessive micro-management are not among them.

[Commander 598]

In the campagin it'll probably be a non-issue anyway as I'll be impressed if the AI ever manages more than a couple of ships at a time. Just like in Medieval 2: Build big stack of ships. ??? Profit, even if you do more than just autoresolve this time.

At least that's what I'm assuming anyway.

[Laughing Mechanicus]

What game are you guys playing? The naval battle was a piece of cake - it practically plays itself. I just jumped right in, found my 1st rate and just zoomed around with that - I let the rest of my line of battle handle itself until the very end when it was down to just a few ships.

I just left "fire at will" toggled on, with me throwing out manual broadsides when warranted, and maneuvered my 1st rate for a few stern rakes and to cover my own line's ass. One French 4th rate started fleeing at the end, so I experimented with dismantling shot (chain? bar? whatever it was) with little success and just returned to plugging away with round shot until I won.

For all the naval battle's potential issues, over-complexity and excessive micro-management are not among them.

I didn't mean to imply that it was hard, the first time I played it all my ships survived with only one of them "fleeing" but it's more that there's a mass pointless options (shot types, broadsides, manual positioning, sails etc...) which must be manually managed across all your ships simultaneously (so, simply impossible then) and yet they seem to do very little (apart from the obvious things like chain shot). So you just end up with a big rabble of ships firing at whatever is nearby with little effective control.

I mean, I really have no experience with the kind of tactics used in this sort of engagement - perhaps if I knew more about them I could control the battles better, I was hoping the tutorial might give some basics but its was just a pathetically useless "here's how to move, oh and you can shoot stuff".

I get the feeling they actually cut out more tutorials from the main game that may have explained things in more detail; if so they reap what they sow, introducing a complex new gameplay type to an entrenched and comfortable fanbase with little explanation is hardly a strategy for success.

[Stark]

In the campagin it'll probably be a non-issue anyway as I'll be impressed if the AI ever manages more than a couple of ships at a time. Just like in Medieval 2: Build big stack of ships. ??? Profit, even if you do more than just autoresolve this time.

At least that's what I'm assuming anyway.

I'm going to go out on a limb and imagine that making sail combat a large part of the game might have required the AI to be changed. Frankly, if Empire has the same terrible strategic AI as all the other CA games ever, it'll be hilarious that one of the biggest selling points in the game is useless.

[open_sketchbook]

Personally, I think that the naval mechanic is fine, seeing as making it truly dependent on the wind to the same degree as real life would basically come down to the wind automatically determining the winner of the battle. Historically accurate? Sure. Fun? Not really. Fun in campaign or ranked online? Definitely not.

[Stark]

Personally, I think that the naval mechanic is fine, seeing as making it truly dependent on the wind to the same degree as real life would basically come down to the wind automatically determining the winner of the battle. Historically accurate? Sure. Fun? Not really. Fun in campaign or ranked online? Definitely not.

'Ranked online' in a TW game? Dear lord.

[CaptHawkeye]

End of times are at hand indeed.

I'm staunchly worried as well that the AI will still just uselessly launch 3-4 6th rate ships at a time against my numerous full stack fleets. Of course the land-AI did things like that as well. TW's units just need to be individually more important. The AI needs to show a sense of self-preservation. I'm tired of watching the game literally throw away men and equipment because CA was too god damn stupid to program strategically thinking AI.

[Brother-Captain Gaius]

I doubt it'll stoop so low as 6th rates. From the demo, the game seems unfortunately very centered around ships of the line... with that in mind, it'll probably just spam pathetic stacks of 4th rates.

Of course, that leaves it open for me to dominate the seas with my fleets of pirate frigates.

[Lazarus]

Clearly I'm doing something wrong, I've played Lagos about 5 times and have won twice, both times by the skin of my teeth.
Is there a way to make the line follow the lead ship? Having to manually control each ship is awkward and my line gets split up.
Do I NEED to manually control broadsides or is that just to give extra control?
The Namur seems to be continually raped. The way the RN line and the closest FN line are positioned means the Namur contacts first and it's quite a while before the RN van closes to range.
Any other tips?
Also, on land, when I select a group of infantry units why can't I determine formation at a new location by click-dragging? It gives me nothing or a retarded jumble.

[Dominus Atheos]

Wow, you must be worried about 'losing' emails too, since you apparently have no data security at all. It's terrifying to me that you never thought to store keys electronically - which is all a steam account does. The only keys I've ever lost are those I never bothered writing in a keyfile due to pure laziness. What's your excuse?

After the first time I got screwed by this, I haven't ever bought a boxed copy of a game. Steam works really well since all you have to remember is your login details and you can get the games you payed for back, even if you hard drive goes out. If that happened to you or anyone else who relies on storing the data on their computer, you'd be SOL. I'd just re-pirate the games and be good to go.

And no, I'll crack games actually. It's less annoying; just starting steam takes more than a minute. I can't be assed cracking smaller games like Audiosurf, but I only play HL1 for mods and thus it needs to be more portable than 'install steam lol'.

That you think cracking a game is equivalent to piracy really shows that you're a fucking retard. I paid for it... so... it's NOT LIKE PIRACY AT ALL, wherein the salient point is that THE OWNER DOESN'T GET PAID. It's possible to support steam use without being completely retarded like this.

So? Either way you're committing a crime, which is what I said.

[Fingolfin_Noldor]

Clearly I'm doing something wrong, I've played Lagos about 5 times and have won twice, both times by the skin of my teeth.
Is there a way to make the line follow the lead ship? Having to manually control each ship is awkward and my line gets split up.
Do I NEED to manually control broadsides or is that just to give extra control?
The Namur seems to be continually raped. The way the RN line and the closest FN line are positioned means the Namur contacts first and it's quite a while before the RN van closes to range.
Any other tips?

Naval combat of that era is very close ranged. If you click any vessel, they will show the firing arcs. What you need to do is at the start of the battle, to optimise the formation of your ships such that you can have maximise the damage inflicted on the enemy while minimizing your damage. Don't let your ships lose formation, at least initially. Eventually it will degenerate into to a brawl then you have to coordinate ships to attack single enemy ships etc.

[Stark]

After the first time I got screwed by this, I haven't ever bought a boxed copy of a game. Steam works really well since all you have to remember is your login details and you can get the games you payed for back, even if you hard drive goes out. If that happened to you or anyone else who relies on storing the data on their computer, you'd be SOL. I'd just re-pirate the games and be good to go.

LOL. This is the most hilarious thing I've ever read. Anyone who 'relies on storing data on [a] computer' is SOL? Just like... say... Valve? LOLGASM. You win - you being too dumb to look after your personal data == Steam is good. And you've never bought a boxed game again, which must seriously limit your game choices - A FAIR PRICE TO PAY FOR COMPLETE SECURITY AM I RITE? What's this about other digital distribution vectors? You're a parody.

So? Either way you're committing a crime, which is what I said.

You said I might as well just steal the game, which is complete horseshit. I love it when people so obsessed with some piece of tribalism go to such outrageous lengths to support their position - claiming electronic storage is worthless because you were a moron once and that cracking is as bad as piracy. Ironically I don't have a huge problem with Steam myself, simply limiting my use of it because I hate it and Valve for their hilarious business practices, so you're even trolling the wrong person.

But I guess hating a platform for no reason is only cool when it's Apple. You learn something new from nerds every day!

[Dominus Atheos]

After the first time I got screwed by this, I haven't ever bought a boxed copy of a game. Steam works really well since all you have to remember is your login details and you can get the games you payed for back, even if you hard drive goes out. If that happened to you or anyone else who relies on storing the data on their computer, you'd be SOL. I'd just re-pirate the games and be good to go.

LOL. This is the most hilarious thing I've ever read. Anyone who 'relies on storing data on [a] computer' is SOL? Just like... say... Valve? LOLGASM. You win - you being too dumb to look after your personal data == Steam is good. And you've never bought a boxed game again, which must seriously limit your game choices - A FAIR PRICE TO PAY FOR COMPLETE SECURITY AM I RITE? What's this about other digital distribution vectors? You're a parody.

Yes, ask any computer expert and they'll tell you storing all of your important data at one location on one drive is an idiot. You're just one hdd crash or fire/flood/theft away from losing everything. And no, it really doesn't limit my game choices any. Everything is available through digital download, it's just some of them you you don't have to pay for.

So? Either way you're committing a crime, which is what I said.

You said I might as well just steal the game, which is complete horseshit. I love it when people so obsessed with some piece of tribalism go to such outrageous lengths to support their position - claiming electronic storage is worthless because you were a moron once and that cracking is as bad as piracy. Ironically I don't have a huge problem with Steam myself, simply limiting my use of it because I hate it and Valve for their hilarious business practices, so you're even trolling the wrong person.

But I guess hating a platform for no reason is only cool when it's Apple. You learn something new from nerds every day!

What part of this don't you get? Cracking a game and pirating a game are both crimes. If you do one, there's no legal reason not to do the other.

[Stark]

Yes, ask any computer expert and they'll tell you storing all of your important data at one location on one drive is an idiot. You're just one hdd crash or fire/flood/theft away from losing everything. And no, it really doesn't limit my game choices any. Everything is available through digital download, it's just some of them you you don't have to pay for.

This just keeps getting better. You've gone from 'I'm an idiot and lost a key once then massively over-reacted and never bought a boxed game again, hounded by feelings of failure and loss' to 'well in general terms data can possibly be lost'. Damn. And there you go equating people who don't like steam (like me) with pirates. The absolute best part is that you're psychic and think nobody backs anything up because YOU didn't ONCE. Grow the fuck up.

What part of this don't you get? Cracking a game and pirating a game are both crimes. If you do one, there's no legal reason not to do the other.

Hilarious! You're the best lawyer ever. Libel and murder are both crimes - if you do one, there's no legal reason not to do the other. Dear jesus.

[Laughing Mechanicus]

Fascinating and irrelevant Steam discussion aside, I have some more things to say about the naval battles.

I have played the naval battle quite a few times over while experimenting with different formations and tactics, and the most reliably effective I have found so far is thus: split your fleet into two groups of relatively equally firepower, set each group to "line" formation and control them separately. This makes each formation much less unwieldy than one big snaking line, with much less chance of ships getting in each others way.

What I then usually do with the two groups, if the enemy is in line formation themselves (and they usually are), is to try and make quick "slashing" attacks against the first few ships in their line by passing diagonally ahead of them - this prevents most of their ships from returning fire and concentrates much of your fire against an unfortunate few of them. After each attack, or if the enemy starts to get a better firing position on your short line, break off and try to get ahead so you can come at them again in the same way. Having two separate groups is really helpful here, because you can then manoeuvre your groups so that any enemy attempt to get a better firing position on one group will allow the other an even better shot at them.

Also as mentioned it is usually not a good idea to let things degenerate into a melee, at least for as long as it can be avoided. Once all the ships are mixed up together it is very difficult to extricate them and if the enemy starts to get an advantage it will just become more and more overwhelming with little you can do to stop it.

A few other things I've noticed which might be useful:
- I can't remember if the tutorial covered it, but a single click move order makes ships move at medium speed, whereas a double click makes them move at full speed. This is important for groups of ships because it is the only way to control their speed - you cannot manually change the sail setting for multiple ships at one.
- When you give a group of ships a move order the game draws a line to show you the course they will take to get there. Firstly, use this line to plan how your formation will approach and intercept the enemy, and "tune" the approach by issuing updated move orders as the enemy formation moves. Secondly, especially if you have a long formation, make sure that you give move orders which cover enough distance (accounting for enemy movement!) so that your entire formation will end up where you want them to be - it's useless ordering your ships to sail past the enemy to get out of their line of fire if they will stop while the tail end of the formation is still vulnerable.
- I have found no particular reason to manually control broadsides. There may be some exceptional situations where it is called for - perhaps high speed manoeuvring where you are presented with very limited firing "windows" - but otherwise I just leave it alone. Ships do actually seem to fire broadsides automatically for themselves on occasion.
- On formations, they only work if your ships are in a group. When you have a whole group selected you can set formations for them, and they are actually pretty good at getting into them. Be prepared to wait a few minutes for them to get into order though, particularly for more complex formations; definitely not something you want to try under the cover of enemy guns. Also if a ship in your formation becomes indiposed for some reason (collision, routing etc...) it is better to reform the formation without it to maintain cohesion, that ship is probably doomed anyway.

[Stark]

Fascinating and irrelevant Steam discussion aside, I have some more things to say about the naval battles.

Ooops.

[CaptHawkeye]

Going around the net i'm finding a surprising number of people complaining how un-playable the demo is. The load times seem to obscene for everyone and frame drops are common with generally low average rates. Did they ask the guys at Crytek to code this game for them?

[ray245]

Going around the net i'm finding a surprising number of people complaining how un-playable the demo is. The load times seem to obscene for everyone and frame drops are common with generally low average rates. Did they ask the guys at Crytek to code this game for them?

Could be, given that many modders has resolved the problem of loading time simply by unpacking the files.