Total War:Empire

Anyone been playing? if so, how's it stack up against Rome and Med2?

I'm snowed under and so haven't pre-ordered (also more wary about pre-ordering after Spore)

Looks like there's no TW fans here <sniff>

Never played any of those strategy games.

Hehe. That is all.

I liked Rome better, might just be that my puter isn't really fast enough to turn the graphics up. It feels like Rome but a bit more longwinded.

I'm looking forward to the next one, they finally got proper naval combat in there with tall ships and cannon etc.

Just got a 24" monitor, for which I was partly influenced by the occasion (Samsung T240). Totally excited. Local stores seem really slow at getting their hands on it. (If the pirates are so horrible, why are they so much more efficient at getting things distributed worldwide? Hmm?).

Just hope they don't jump the shark and do a "World War 2: Total War".

Rome was actually fairly broken when it came out. They had a ridiculous time limit on battles (which I suspect came from Sega looking to make the battles more 'fast moving'), your troops would run away at the drop of the hat and it was easy to game the AI. In many ways, it was the fan made mods and TC's that really made it shine - but the campaign strategy was never really that deep.

Med2 was better, but for some reason it didn't feel very 'gritty' or as historically true as Rome. Not sure why - maybe the units were all too clean and shiny. But again some of the AI was pretty broken and the best play (for me) came from the Stainless Steel mod - another fan made mod.

Suspect much the same might happen with this latest offering. So to that end, I've ordered X3 Terran Conflict (because I hear the interface is better than X3 Reunion) and then it'll be a rerun of Gothic3 cause there's a new (big) community patch on the way

I loved the Medieval 1 and Medieval 2, I didn't like the Rome version at all, it was like they are testing the engine before Medieval 2. Can't wait to get Empire now.

The first couple of evolutions were interesting - shogun total war & mongol Invasion. Rome frustrated me when I'd been playing it a while and it persistenly crashed in northern Europe.

Hope they've tested their latest offering a bit better.

Heh - I expect it'll do well but there'll be the usual complaints on the forums about the AI behaving irrationally. Then the modders will get to work, then an expansion'll be released that includes new content and critical bug fixes, then the modders will get to work...

I hear that the old 'enemy army stands still and won't respond' bug has made a comeback as well.

heh I wanted to like gothic 3 but couldn't get past the animal combat. Just got fed up with the way certain things killed you without batting an eyelid.

If there's a good community mod I'd like to try G3 again :)

You might be in luck then - from what I've read, the G3 modders have modified/rebalanced the combat considerably.

There is actually a great game in there, it's just taken about 4 years for it to arrive ;-)

The game is seriously in need of optimizing. Granted, I have a pretty weak graphics card. It forces me to a maximum of Medium settings for everything because my card lacks the memory for more. I went into the configuration files and "fixed" that. Curiously, (although this actually happens quite often), a mixture of the previously locked High and Medium settings gave me better performance - and a much nicer looking game - than just Medium which it had forced me to use before.

So please don't ever think you can decipher the capabilities of graphics hardware with cheap algorithms. That's why the options are there in the first place.

I'd wanted to try it out but as I don't have an internet connection (at home that is) I can't play it since it needs to be activated online to play even single player. Would have loved to have given it a try and from what I can see it requires an internet connection even for single player usage.
Still it looks like a great game.

I see there's the usual screaming on the Steam forums. Think I might wait till the dust's settled. Also need to upgrade...

It runs reasonably, most of the time, for me. The graphics can get a little choppy in places.

My biggest problem is the occasional crash in naval battles (which can be somewhat frustrating when you've just managed to sink 7 of 8 French ships with your two.

Enjoying it enough though.

seen the specs on the back of the game today, 2.4GHz minimum CPU. Who are they kidding, usual bandwagon of if your PC < 2-3 years old spend more dosh.

Ah Well.

Just bought medieval total war 2 at bargain basement prices - runs well, still looks good, although I only play the custom battles, and no internet connection needed to install/play..yay.