Gaming Empire: Total War

I'm struggling to complete the land battle on the demo. It seems if I do anything other than run away from the enemy cannons they quickly rout my entire army?

 

Thanks for the review, though I am a bit suprised. This is the lowest score the game has gotten with the next lowest being 90/100.

Just doesn't seem like the downsides mentioned warrant the score given. Total War games were never mass market appeal type games, with this one it seems like they've tried more so then before to break that conception with less micromanaging and the Road to Independence campaign. From what I've read that was supposed to act as a kind of tutorial for the Grand Campaign, and yet its only criticized for being too slow.

I'll have to form my own opinion after its launched on Steam. The thing I'm most looking forward to other then a new Grand Campaign is the multiplayer options. Steam matchmaking for custom battles and the online Grand Campaign option is to be added in a later patch.

One question, how come it was decided to leave out the most interesting of the graphics options from the review? Stuff like Volumetric fog effects, self shadowing, anti-aliasing and texture filtering are what I really want to know about and what I looked forwar to reading about in a BT review. Not the same old Texture and Water low medium high ultra effects, its pretty much a given what those do and the article itself even suggests that these settings are mostly the same anyways.

I'm gonna guess time constraints cut short the quality of this review which is understandable (blog also mentioned this one slippin by), maybe a update in the future to complete it with all the graphics options and multiplayer aspects.

 

Greetings!

That "mass market appeal" path started with Rome TW. Better graphics with less gaming depth.

 

8/10 should by no means be a bad score though, especially when you remember that BT uses the whole 1-10 range and not just the 70 - 100 that most other sites do.

As for the graphics stuff - every setting there takes time to do, and it's time that I'm still not convinced is going to be hugely beneficial to the reader without turning the graphics section into a performance section where we test multiple GPUS. That's possible, but it'd take yet more time and still not be totally relevant to most games and readers.

I've been thinking about the graphics stuff in game reviews recently and how it may be possible to tweak it somehow to be more useful, or quicker to turn around. I may write a blog post on it at some point soon to try and gauge the thoughts of you guys. Until then, thanks for the feedback.

 

I'm wondering if those folks complaining about ship micromanagement found the group and formation commands in the game. You can set up a bunch of ships to sail together in a line, and in other formations too. Individually managing ships weapons can be a chore but I can't see anybody wanting to use chain and grapeshot unless they are in a one sided fight anyway because if you're in a fight you might lose you want to be knocking down the enemy gun count. You might want to use chain shot if you're trying to escape, but again that'd be when you don't have many ships. So say you're in a big fight, maybe with a dozen ships, you can group them into three squads of four, set each group formation to line, and suddenly things look a lot less complicated.

 

I went far around them, routed the rest of the Army and then finished the Artillery last

 

Try moving up some troops into the trees just ahead as a secondary force distraction, sending a major force through the left to flank. In the mean time protect ur cavalary untill its needed and keep ur cannons occupied, though I found they weren't that effective all together. You could only really hope to take out maybe 1 or 2 enemy cannons or the same amount of good hits on troop formations.

 

I just find it interesting that DoW 2 was slapped with a 9, particularly when taking into consideration its extremely repetitive and limited nature, but Empire gets slapped with an 8 for being too hardcore (what?) and having a problematic naval aspect (even though you can skip it.)

Oh, well....

 

I just spent the last hour staring at the screen wondering what the hell I'm gonna do XD

Much more complicated than the old total wars, nothing like Hearts of Iron complicatedness, actually, I think it's almost that complicated.

Graphics look a bit **** on my PC, it really is time for an upgrade.

Road to indipendance is quite cool, but only because it's like a tutorial for the grand campaign.

 

Greetings!

Considering the hour you posted, you should had gone for lunch.

Still waiting the game, ordered retail to avoid the St€am rape.

 

Steam worked fine for me other then the no preload fiasco, I left it downloading during the night and started playing when I got up.

Game is great so far and the grahphics are much sharper then the demo, using full Ultra settings. Anti-aliasing works fine now so you can see alot more troop detail, at the expense of a big hit to the frame rate of course.

I started playing the Road to Independence Campaign and am enjoying it so far, if I was getting a friend to try the game this is easily where they could start. Reminds me alot of the Rome Campaign in R:TW.

A.I. troop battle is the best it's ever been, exploiting your weaknesses and going after your general when possible. I love the new campaign map too. Contrary to some thoughts of it looking too complicated, I found it felt bright and alive. The way cities, buildings and troop orders work is a big improvment as well.

 

Surely thats not fair basing it on the sea battles, as surely you still ahve the option to auto resolve sea battles, which puts that part automatically better than medieval 2's as you can either do it the old way, or play them yourself.

 

The main problem I had was I started with Britain, which had several colonies dotted around the globe, and with no proper explanation of the campaign map unless you've played independence, it was a little daunting. Also there was the fact that diplomacy and trade take massive roles now, my experience with games with a big importance with diplomacy is you really don't want to **** relationships up in the beginning by going gung-ho with taking over regions like you could in Medieval. I think there's a lot left unexplained really, both the manual and helper don't really explain all the details well enough. Probably the only way to get a good grasp is with the road to independence, which I haven't played through fully yet.

 

Greetings!

Thats why on these games I always start with a small faction.

 

I started up a Grand Campaign using Poland-Lithuania to see what it looked like in the thick of Europe, and then I understood why some people were saying it looked cluttered. There had to be maybe 4-5 other nations all around my borders all with a different shade of red just like my own, making it very hard to differentiate any borders or building ownership. If the colours were differentiated more there it would've helped alot.

Playing the Road in to Independence campaign had no such problems for me, its alot more black and white who your enemies are, who you can ally with. Starting there will ween you into the game mechanics alot better I think then starting elsewhere.

 

After having spent the time since this game launched doing little else but playing it I've very nearly nailed my first Grand Campaign win as France and I'm in awe of the game as a finished product. I mean sure it needs patching, what game with any ambition doesn't in this day and age, but I think it's great to see an unapologetically mature and deep game appear on the PC from a major developer when so many others seem happy with generic McGames ported from consoles.

 

Game is amazing, however the performance is odd to say the least. Have a Radeon 4870/512 using CCC 9.1, and with almost all maxxed out, AF at 4x, and AA at OFF, the game would run the Ground Battle tutorial at a measly 40FPS (using FRAPS), yet when I set AA to 2x, the FPS took off to well over 70 frames. I tried this several times off and on, and there is no mistake. That is plain WEIRD.

 

Ok, turns out that AA enabled turns off SSAO. That said, SSAO is a major resource pig, as it cuts performance by 50%!! With AA off and AF 4x, and not everything at Ultra, I'd get 40 FPS, but with SSAO off, and everything at Ultra, with 4xAA and 16xAF, the same scenes would reach 65FPS. That's ridiculous.

 

Greetings!

The new patch (1.2) really makes the game challenging in VH/VH.

An interesting mod:
http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showthread.php?t=239299

 

Greetings!

New units from CA to come to ETW:
http://shoguntotalwar.yuku.com/sreply/744381/t/The-Daily-Update.html