Empire: Total War review - experience thread

[GuppyShark]

I am particularly fond of the engagements I am fighting wherein four units stationed in the French province just east of France, intercept the advance of Wutternburger troops marching in their territory.

My troops start the fight garrisoning a fortress.

They keep marching troops like this and I keep 'intercepting them', wiping them out with zero casualties thanks to the fortifications that funnel the enemy into a canister shot killzone.

[Lazarus]

Nope. I would be quite satisfied if they would even get one uniform right per troop type. I would be very satisfied if they had simply used the white uniform.

As for your "point" about this creating a huge extra effort, that is retarded to argue. CA is already spending time skinning them in the wrong way. So why not do it right from the start?

Broken record much?
The reason they aren't in white is because the French are in white. This is a perfectly valid gameplay reason, but apparently you're anally retentive need for absolute accuracy ranks above gameplay, so CA must have done a 'half assed job' because they haven't catered to you. You don't seem to be capable of understanding that gameplay > historical accuracy.
As someone else has pointed out, you're point is flawed anyway since CA are covering a 100 year period and any particular skin could not possibly be correct for the entirety of the period.
And it doesn't need to be a huge extra effort, in this case skinning the Spanish as white is counter-productive to gameplay. You are the only person who thinks otherwise. Accept the fact that your demands are unreasonable, it should be pretty clear by this point.

It is one case of many.

Name me some others, I bet they're equally beyond the care of the standard ETW gamer.

Yes, they do. Because no matter how you try to spin it, the heart of the matter is that CA wilfully decided to falsify history.

Oh get fucked, like bollocks they did. OH NOEZ SPANISH NOT IN WHITE, REWRITING HISTORIES!!!

Do not try to make this about the game mechanics, but if you want to we can talk about hose as well. Native american supermen, anyway? Are you trying to tell me that never came up during beta tests? Or the bug lists? Did they never built first rates and then click on the fleets during beta tests?

How the fuck did you get that from my post? Or are you just trying to shift your argument onto 'actually I WAS talking about mechanics after all! yeah!'?
There are quite a few flaws in the mechanics, I myself have already outlined several, but that's not your point.

Hey - they have those huge flags over their heads. Don't you think that would be quite the reminder?

If the Spanish and French were both clad in white there would be uproar from the players about it being retarded, which it would be. You're seriously arguing otherwise?

Ah, the old false dilemma. Don't fucking tell me gameplay suffers because the game is historical accurate. Are you familiar with RTR? No?

In this case, yes it does, other posts in this thread alone demonstrate that. As for RTR, the 'corrections' include this:
'The developers of Rome stated that a chariot-dominated Egypt that matched their consumers' expectations was considered more fun, and a sounder business strategy, than yet another phalanx-based Hellenistic race to match the four already present in the game'
Which is a perfectly sound gameplay decision. This is, after all a game and not a historical simulator. You seem to want the latter.
Sooner or later someone will mod the game to suit your expectations, so feel free to jerk off to accurately-skinned individual Spanish regiments when that happens. The devs are catering to the majority by placing gameplay above accuracy when the two conflict as in the case of Spanish uniforms, a majority which you most certainly are not in.

You are an idiot. You keep harping on this one tiny detail of my post but ignore the bigger picture, which is that CA has not even done things that are on the high school level.

Right, yeah, in High School we studied the various military uniforms of European powers circa-C18th all the time. Had to practically memorise them for the day when we could all criticise a strategy game for getting the colour wrong.
And this 'tiny detail' is one of only a few concrete criticisms you have provided, and it demonstrates perfectly your unreasonable standards. Don't try to backpedal now and make your demands seem more reasonable, the supposed inconsistency was enough for you to rant about on SDN.

[loomer]

To be fair, I'm not a history buff (well, not of the particular time period. Medieval European warfare is more my scene) but I'm kind of pissed at the uniform stuff as well. I honestly do not care about the gameplay aspect, I want a rough approximation of the old uniform colours, the ones most predominantly used by the nation.

[Thanas]

Broken record much?

Hey asshole, point out to me where exactly I have demanded that CA uses five different uniforms?

The reason they aren't in white is because the French are in white. This is a perfectly valid gameplay reason, but apparently you're anally retentive need for absolute accuracy ranks above gameplay, so CA must have done a 'half assed job' because they haven't catered to you. You don't seem to be capable of understanding that gameplay > historical accuracy.

Fuck you. I am quite willing to accede to various demands for gameplay reasons (such as take all cities = instant defeat for enemy). And it is not just the spanish who have been mutilated like that.

As someone else has pointed out, you're point is flawed anyway since CA are covering a 100 year period and any particular skin could not possibly be correct for the entirety of the period.

It doesn't have to. The skins in Rome (and every mod as well) are all incorrect and yet I am perfectly able to suggest those mods. But it is not a good job if there is not the slightest bit of resemblence. Like in the flags. For example, I can get behind the current spanish flag since it at least closely resembles the spanish naval ensign after Charles III.

No, the problem is that they didn't even care enough to get the other details right. Like powderboxes being on the wrong side etc.

You are asking me to accept something as "close-enough" description when nothing even resembles anything. Do you honestly think anyone would identify those units as Spanish?

And it doesn't need to be a huge extra effort, in this case skinning the Spanish as white is counter-productive to gameplay. You are the only person who thinks otherwise.

Actually, I am not the only person who thinks so.

It is one case of many.

Name me some others, I bet they're equally beyond the care of the standard ETW gamer.

Fuck you trying to shift the goalposts. I bet whether pikemen used the hellabarde or the long pike in MTW was beyond the care of the standard ETW gamer as well, but CA still tried to get it right back then. They simply did not care about that in this one.

Let us look at the russian line infantry:


It is quite clear that it is the absolutely same model as the spanish one, as for the swedes etc. All CA did was to clone it and paint it with different colours. Same with almost every other unit, and damm historical accuracy.

Yes, they do. Because no matter how you try to spin it, the heart of the matter is that CA wilfully decided to falsify history.

Oh get fucked, like bollocks they did. OH NOEZ SPANISH NOT IN WHITE, REWRITING HISTORIES!!!

Because it is little ignorant idiots like you who get to make that judgement, right? Because using wrong symbols, wrong units and wrong depictions is something to be congratulated, right?

Oh noes, gameplay. Well, child, why don't you first prove the assertion that having the spanish also in white would confuse people?

How the fuck did you get that from my post? Or are you just trying to shift your argument onto 'actually I WAS talking about mechanics after all! yeah!'?
There are quite a few flaws in the mechanics, I myself have already outlined several, but that's not your point.

It is one of my points, actually, if you reread the thread.

Hey - they have those huge flags over their heads. Don't you think that would be quite the reminder?

If the Spanish and French were both clad in white there would be uproar from the players about it being retarded, which it would be. You're seriously arguing otherwise?

Yes.

In this case, yes it does, other posts in this thread alone demonstrate that. As for RTR, the 'corrections' include this:
'The developers of Rome stated that a chariot-dominated Egypt that matched their consumers' expectations was considered more fun, and a sounder business strategy, than yet another phalanx-based Hellenistic race to match the four already present in the game'
Which is a perfectly sound gameplay decision. This is, after all a game and not a historical simulator. You seem to want the latter.

Blow me. RTR is not a historical simulator at all.

Sooner or later someone will mod the game to suit your expectations, so feel free to jerk off to accurately-skinned individual Spanish regiments when that happens. The devs are catering to the majority by placing gameplay above accuracy when the two conflict as in the case of Spanish uniforms, a majority which you most certainly are not in.

So answer the inaccurately skinned russian units. Go on. Or the fact that line infantry looks exactly the same for every nation.

You are an idiot. You keep harping on this one tiny detail of my post but ignore the bigger picture, which is that CA has not even done things that are on the high school level.

Right, yeah, in High School we studied the various military uniforms of European powers circa-C18th all the time. Had to practically memorise them for the day when we could all criticise a strategy game for getting the colour wrong.

Idiot. If you give a high school class a book of pictures and tell them to turn them into computer models, do you think they would come up with completely different models and different colours?

[MKSheppard]

Wow, that doesn't look very good. I mean, it looks slightly better than Rome in polys, but not by much.

From the Napoleonic Total War II mod for Rome:

[Thanas]

To be fair though, I run the game at medium settings. It probably looks better on high or very high settings.

[CaptHawkeye]

From what i've heard the game barely runs on anyone's machine. Medium is pretty much where the best are stuck at since the issues with High/Very High are so atrocious they make the game unplayable.

To me this is all just hilarious. Graphical appearances have never been a major selling point of TW. But CA decided to make it a selling point and *gasp* now they can't stomach the load of super polys and gameplay design at the same time! We've certainly never seen this problem before.

[Psychic_Sandwich]

It runs fine on the highest setting for me. Only thing I guess that might be due to it being set too high is a delay when trying to scroll the campaign map with the mouse, but it works fine on the keyboard and doesn't go away on lower settings, so I think its either a bug or WAD, and it doesn't make the game unplayable at all.

[Minischoles]

Well had my first crashes, 1704 playing as Russia, anytime it gets to Sweden on the AI turn it crashes. Tried it 8 times now, and its very very annoying to lose a game that early.

[CmdrWilkens]

I got one of those annoying "click on a fleet and CTD" deals but simply reloading, not moving the fleet that turn and moving them the next turn avoided the crash...no idea why. Anyway it wasn't a big deal mostly because I had already conquered the entirety of India (save Afghanistan) and America (save the Plains Nations and the Iroquois who are my staunchest ally) which meant all I had left to conquer was Malta and Egypt (I already got Gibraltar in a deal with Spain to stop fighting them after I finished ransacking all of their American possessions).

So yeah I'm just now waiting out the turns until 1799 for the win and planning to see who I can eliminate to ease my burden of enemies. The Dutch are already dead, Sweden got in a fight they can't win against Russia and then Denmark blockaded them from behind, Prussia never made headway against Poland and the minor nations around it which leaves just the French and Spanish left needing to be crushed (the Ottoman Navy is gone and I've got a chokepoint with Egpyt).

[Minischoles]

Oh FFS now my Road to Independence has a problem, after episode 2 finishes and I start loading 3, it crashes on the loading screen. Just flat fucking crashes every damn time, so now i'm redoing episode 2 and hoping i can avoid the crash.
To add to that, the Road to Independence has become intensely annoying, because you can't turn the damn advice off. No matter what setting its on, you get spammed with advice everytime you click anything.

Edit: Nope, absolutely no way of starting Episode 3. Anyone know of a way to unlock the other episodes yet? I was quite enjoying it, to just be cockblocked because CA couldn't be bothered to beta test is fucking irritating.

[Brother-Captain Gaius]

You have to edit the registry values for the game. There's only a couple, you just change the RTI one from whatever chapter you're currently at to 5, which unlocks everything. It's what I did, because the RTI episodes are painfully boring.

[Artemas]

by editing some of the values in the preferences file, you can "unlock" the higher graphics settings. I turned off grass and shadows, and put textures and unit detail to ultra and it runs and looks much better.

The AI seems incapable of staging naval invasions, or operations of any sort other than privateering. The Indian and European theaters are actually linked by land, which is pretty cool.

Carronade frigates are dangerous, and the firepower stat of ships is completely borked.

Has anyone experimented with "mine" defence mechanism? Its only deployable by light infantry, but i haven't gotten it to work.

[Gaidin]

Anyway, I'm glad I waited. In the past I never really had any trouble with bugs as someone people have (no CTDs, units seem to work fine, etc.) so I was quick to say that anybody who did have a gripe (historical or bug-wise) was just being pissy. Since Medieval 2 it's kind been hard to ignore the evidence of sloppiness on CA's part. A third patch and it's hardly been ten days? I'd hate to see them if they finally start getting some competition - hopefully most of this bullshit will stop.

The patch complaint doesn't follow. Now that they're going through Steam with ETW, they're running under a totally different business model for the patching, and are essentially releasing a rapid(relative to the old model of what...once every 6 months?) series of small patches for bugs as they're found and fixed. Think of it along the lines of how Guild Wars runs their patching.

[defanatic]

Has anyone experimented with "mine" defence mechanism? Its only deployable by light infantry, but i haven't gotten it to work.

It's moderately entertaining, but it is a bit buggy. Sometimes it is deployed regardless of whether you ask it to be or not, and explodes without anyone there to detonate. But it's usually very good if it explodes at the right time. It's essentially a very big, wide-spread canister shot. Unfortunately, you can't deploy it in light infantry mode.

[Brother-Captain Gaius]

Carronade frigates are dangerous, and the firepower stat of ships is completely borked.

It isn't broken, it's just obfuscated. It's a rough average of the overall mean firepower of a ship's guns. So, for example, while one ship might have 200 firepower and only 30 guns, whereas another might have only 150 firepower but 42 guns, the 42-gunner is probably much better armed. The ship details are unfortunately not very detailed at all, as it often doesn't specify the exact types of guns used. The 30-gun example might have 16 pdrs on the broadsides and 32 pdr chasers (outliers which will skew the firepower average, but chasers are insignificant toward measuring combat capability), while the 42-gun might have 12 pdrs and no chasers to disproportionately skew the numbers. Thus the 42-gun ship will generally have a significant advantage over the 30 in most engagements, despite what the "firepower" might say.

[Thanas]

But why do galleys who only carry small cannons (and only 4-6 of them) have a firepower of 255, which is the equivalent to a ship of the line?

[Brother-Captain Gaius]

Do they? I always figured they just stuck a couple 32 pdrs on there or something to make them somewhat useful. I don't know.

[Artemas]

Yeah, I figured that the 4 cannons or so on a galley were something huge, seeing as they are aligned along the beam instead of broadside, but the carronade frigate (with 64 lbers) has a firepower rating of like 58, whereas a sloop of equal, but FAR weaker guns has a higher rating. Some of the ratings for larger ships could be accurate, but its hard to tell what the weight of the guns are because they're not decribed as you say. My comment was mostly relating to carronades, and to lesser degree, galleys.

[Resinence]

Got this game earlier today, and I have to say this thread is hilarious. It runs perfectly fine at high/ultra for me and -nothing- in the graphics menu is greyed out but hey! I guess my PC just doesn't suck

It still looks like crap on high settings though, I mean its next gen and all like they promised but it's just horribly ugly... sounds familiar, and AA refuses to apply to half of the game because they billboard so many damn things (tried transparency AA and it still doesn't work). The road to independence campaign is even more incredibly boring than MTW's campaigns and thats saying something. Not to mention those bowmen, yeah, I get that they are supposed to be better then muskets but the constant skirmishing by the AI is fucking infuriating when you have nothing to counter them early on. I did notice that the AI is much more aggressive this time around but it's still dumb as a rock, utilizing the same strategy pretty much every time.

Colour me shocked, it's the same game again on a new engine with boats on land naval battles, didn't see that one coming!

At least I haven't encountered any of the CTD's or performance issues others are struggling with, but this game - like the other TW's - seriously needs some good mods. Correction: Fun mods, since hardly anyone cares whether that guy on the left's buckle is the right way around or whether spain are in white uniforms.

[wautd]

Wow, that doesn't look very good. I mean, it looks slightly better than Rome in polys, but not by much.

There's also no variation when compared to MTW2. Sure, I can understand that they all have the same uniform, but some variation in the faces would have been nice

[Stark]

Colour me shocked, it's the same game again on a new engine with boats on land naval battles, didn't see that one coming!

Why do you hate CA's freedom to produce broken, unfinished games? I lol'd when I found out instead of a new engine it's just Rome 1.5 with new Boat Action, even with that AA thing still there.

BCG, that firepower stat shit fucking shits me. Heaps of games do it, and it means you get a totally misleading number that may represent some ideal time-averaged dps but doesn't tell you shit about how many of it's guns are good against xyz or allow you to make a decision beyond 'somehow this is better than this other one'. I know, CA obfuscating unit stats is unheard of.

[Thanas]

Do they? I always figured they just stuck a couple 32 pdrs on there or something to make them somewhat useful. I don't know.

No, the forecastle of most galley cannot handle that. Most galleys only had 9-18 pdrs. Of course, those are historical facts...

[RazorOutlaw]

The patch complaint doesn't follow. Now that they're going through Steam with ETW, they're running under a totally different business model for the patching, and are essentially releasing a rapid(relative to the old model of what...once every 6 months?) series of small patches for bugs as they're found and fixed. Think of it along the lines of how Guild Wars runs their patching.

Then that's my fault for not being more specific. CA still released a buggy game regardless of how quickly they can apply patches and that was the essence of my complaint. Steam merely smooths the process, let's CA get the smaller issues, and keeps the customers playing the game. Guild Wars is a competitive game that requires constant tweaking so of course they're going to apply a bunch of patches for balance.

[Minischoles]

The patch complaint doesn't follow. Now that they're going through Steam with ETW, they're running under a totally different business model for the patching, and are essentially releasing a rapid(relative to the old model of what...once every 6 months?) series of small patches for bugs as they're found and fixed. Think of it along the lines of how Guild Wars runs their patching.

Then that's my fault for not being more specific. CA still released a buggy game regardless of how quickly they can apply patches and that was the essence of my complaint. Steam merely smooths the process, let's CA get the smaller issues, and keeps the customers playing the game. Guild Wars is a competitive game that requires constant tweaking so of course they're going to apply a bunch of patches for balance.

It might be why they didn't beta test. Why bother when you can just release the game and get however many people brought it to pay for the privilege of beta testing it for you, patching the problems as they go.

I've actually now managed to get most of the way into a campaign without crashes, and overall its not too bad, but its not exactly amazing either. Its pretty much RTW with the bells and whistles of single settlements to manage, which your enemy without fail, will raid with a unit of horsemen with 5 men left in it. Does nothing except cause damage and annoy you, and force you to send out units chasing it. Every single damn turn as well.