By Alec Meer on February 20th, 2009 at 4:57 pm.
February is, it seems, the official month of killing tiny soldiers, and today in particular is St. Man-Squisher’s Day. This fine Friday has already seen the launch of Dawn of War II – which I’m alt-tabbed from right now, excitingly – and now we also get to behold the majesty of the new Total War game. The 2 gigabyte (lawks, lummee, won’t somebody please think of the children etc) Empire demo’s just gone live on Steam, ahead of the launch of the whole epic shebang on March 4th. We shall, of course, be sharing some sort of opinion on ETW cometh the hour, but let’s be honest, the odds of it being anything less than spectacular are tinier than a vole’s pinkie finger.
Beneath the magical clicky words, details on exactly what’s in this here demo.
A tutorial on the basic land and naval battle systems, then two historical skirmishes that go a little something like this:
Battle of Brandywine Creek
After landing from his transport ships on the American coast, Major-General Sir William Howe led the British troops eastwards, with the intention of capturing Philadelphia.
In preparation, American General George Washington readied most of his units to defend from this frontal assault around the narrow crossing of Chad’s Ford on the Brandywine. The Creek flows through the countryside of Pennsylvania, enveloped by sheer cliffs and heavily wooded hills on both sides. Knowing that much of the fast-flowing creek could not be crossed, Washington was confident of holding his position.
However, more detailed surveillance of the terrain would suggest that alternative routes could turn the battle in the favor of the British.Battle of Lagos
As so often in 18th Century warfare, French plans to invade England during the Seven Years War were reliant on ships from the naval base at Toulon joining ships from Brest. The British had both ports blockaded, and the French had to wait for one of the blockading fleets to withdraw for re-supply before attempting any rendezvous.
The opportunity came when the British fleet under Admiral Boscawen at Toulon withdrew to Gibraltar. The French under Jean-François de la Clue-Sabran left Toulon, and began to make their way towards Brest. Passing the Straits of Gibraltar, the French were spotted by Boscawen’s lookout ships.
Giving chase, Boscawen’s fleet was only slightly larger than the French force, and caught up with them off the coast of Portugal where battle was joined.
Take control of the British and defeat the French to end the invasion threat to Britain.
But I hate the British!
Oh, and have some system specs too. We know that stuff’s the only thing you really read RPS for.
Processor: 2.4 GHz Intel® Pentium® or greater or AMD® Athlon® equivalent CPU
Memory: 1GB RAM (XP,) 2GB RAM (Vista™)
Graphics: 100% DirectX 9.0c compatible hardware accelerated video card with shader version 2.0 support, 256 MB video memory
Display: Minimum screen resolution of 1024 x 768 pixels
Hard Drive: 15 GB free hard disk space
20/02/2009 at 17:05 Heliocentric says:
Downloading like torrent fiend.
20/02/2009 at 17:07 Xercies says:
Ah damn you TW I really want to buy you yet I have no money…or time…
20/02/2009 at 17:09 jalf says:
If only all you schmucks would get off Steam and stop hogging their download servers! Getting a miserable 53kb/s from them atm.
At this rate it’s going to be ages before I get to play… *sigh*
20/02/2009 at 17:19 Binho says:
Oh yeah! sucks to be you jalf, I’m getting more than 800kb/s! Thank god for our office’s industrial internet connection! :D CAN’T WAIT!!!
20/02/2009 at 17:24 jalf says:
Binho: I was able to grab the DoW2 beta at some 2.5MB/s, so I can’t complain about my connection either. I guess Steam just insists on assigning me to their busiest, slowest server…
20/02/2009 at 17:27 Binho says:
Man, that sucks! Hopefully it’ll speed up. How far along is it?
20/02/2009 at 17:29 Darkelp says:
I almost missed this until I casually alt-tabbed out of L4D and saw it on the steam updates.
Now it’s downloading at 200kb’s, but I have been having the same speed’s as Jalf.
Lame.
20/02/2009 at 17:36 Pantsman says:
The only Brandywine I know is in Middle-Earth.
20/02/2009 at 17:38 LordAnubis says:
Was downloading at an epic 1.1kb/s. Ah, the days of dial-up – how I miss thee! It was downloading so slowly that it just stopped altogether. Can see why though – a few million people hitting the same Steam server ^^
20/02/2009 at 17:47 rob says:
The battle for Brandywine Bridge: lead the hobbits to defend their quaint rural village from an attack by the dastardly British! Sabotage the enemy’s tea supply to ruin their morale but be wary! If the evil Brits deploy their special Sharpe unit, nary an officer will be left unpunched nor a french bird unshagged. Coming to PS3, XBox 360 and Nintendo DS this summer.
20/02/2009 at 17:50 Binho says:
grr, the download finished, but it keeps crashing. This is why I hate steam. What happened to good old fashioned download from the website?
20/02/2009 at 17:57 jalf says:
Binho: Verify the installation in Steam. Steam doesn’t handle errors very well, so running out of disk space or other errors just makes it jump up to 100%. Verifying should detect that and download any missing bits.
And I’m 52% through now, and still chugging along at 53kb/s…
20/02/2009 at 18:10 rupert says:
zoom downloading at 700KB/s got 60% so far :D
20/02/2009 at 18:10 Binho says:
just did it, 0% fragmentation. It won’t even load up the menu. Probably those annoying backgrounds with videos playing.
And because it’s bloody steam, I can’t take the install file home and have to redownload it all over again. Bah. Does anyone know if there are torrents up for the demo yet? :P
20/02/2009 at 18:11 jigglybean says:
Its a bad idea giving an exclusive of a demo to someone. It annoys me and means that people have to wait even longer to download and play it.
Cheers Sega – great idea. NOT
Moving on to the game, I cant wait to get my hands on it.
20/02/2009 at 18:16 crying-minotaur says:
This item is currently unavailable in your region
GGRRRRR!!!!
(I’m in Korea right now).
20/02/2009 at 18:25 Binho says:
Got it to work!!! Just take more than 5 minutes to load.
First impressions:
– Pretty
– Pretty standard total war fare
– The british accent in the tutorial is hilarious! lol, I hope they are taking the piss :)
Havn’t tried naval battles yet
20/02/2009 at 18:32 Nimic says:
30kb/s on a connection which can do 10MB/s…
I feel violated.
20/02/2009 at 18:36 Dreamhacker says:
I hope the demo appears OUTSIDE Steam for us luddites…
Steam eats children!
20/02/2009 at 18:49 manintheshack says:
I’m so happy I could cry. No, really.
20/02/2009 at 19:06 PaulMorel says:
Wow. I wish I could afford this game right now.
Also, 15Gb free space? blech.
It’s not that 15Gb is too big, in these days of ridiculous hard drives. It’s just that I have a hard time believing that they really NEEDED 15Gb. It seems to show a remarkable lack of care for the customer’s PCs…. but I guess that if you develop a great game, you can afford to give a big middle finger to the small portion of your customers that will notice the 15Gb install size.
20/02/2009 at 19:08 cliffski says:
wow I can pre-order now for £39.99!!!!!!!!! OMG!!!
or..
Dispatch estimate for these items: 3 Mar 2009
1 “Empire: Total War (PC DVD)”
CD-ROM; £23.96
Sold by: Amazon EU S.a.r.L.
Steam loses…
20/02/2009 at 19:17 jalf says:
cliffski: Too true. I found game.co.uk to be a better deal than Amazon, but both are better than Steam.
Oh, and for some reason my download restarted. I got to 52%, then it jumped to 0%. I’m back up to 24% now. :/
PaulMorel: The download is only 2GB. I don’t know where they get the 15Gb figure from, and I strongly suspect it’ll work with less.
20/02/2009 at 19:25 MooseDrool says:
jalf mine did the same thing. Was at 80% and it started to resume… back to go without my $200.
20/02/2009 at 19:28 Lord Forkington says:
Wasn’t the Medieval 2 Space 12GB? Not sure, that’s just a figure that rings bells.
20/02/2009 at 19:40 manintheshack says:
Honestly, if you sit and watch the download rate and will it to be stable it works a treat.
20/02/2009 at 19:44 jigglybean says:
4 hour download so far and im only 58% there. Ive a good mind to cancel my pre-order. Great work Sega!
20/02/2009 at 19:50 Archonsod says:
Takes around ten minutes to start up once you get it downloaded too. Quicker on subsequent runs though.
Ick, the naval combat is clumsy.
20/02/2009 at 19:55 manintheshack says:
‘Wasn’t the Medieval 2 Space’
Christ, I thought I’d completely missed an amazing re-invention of the series then. Medieval set in space sounds awesome.
Also, ‘Brest’. Heh.
20/02/2009 at 19:56 Heliocentric says:
If they bollocks up mod support. And the naval combat is crap i’m sticking to rome.
20/02/2009 at 19:59 Hentzau says:
Jim mentioned the naval combat in his PCG review, but what he seems to have omitted is any mention of the atrocious load times. Two minutes spent looking at the damn loading screen for the land battle. Translate that into campaign terms and probably two hours of it will be spent there. I hope they have some *really* good quotes for this one because we’re going to be reading them a lot.
20/02/2009 at 20:00 clive dunn says:
oh god, what to do. I really want to play it but feel i should wait for it drop through my letterbox and play the ‘real thing’. I guess i could look at the demo as being like foreplay i s’pose.
20/02/2009 at 20:03 Heliocentric says:
So, try not to enjoy the demo too much?
20/02/2009 at 20:23 reiver says:
The game has steamworks so even if you don’t buy the steam version (and why would you?) you’ll still need steam to run it.
Also for anyone with crappy download speeds i can reccomend going into settings and changing your download region to east coast USA. My speed went from 100KB/s to 750.
M2 did say it was going to be 11 or 12 GBs in the run up to its release but ended up at around 9.
20/02/2009 at 20:37 Rich_P says:
The load times are atrocious. I mean really bad. So bad that I tried to Alt-F4 out of the demo, thinking it froze on me.
Other than that, it’s standard Total War fun. I was surprised when cannonballs started plowing through my infantry columns from halfway across the map. Very few RTS games have large maps and truly long-range weapons.
20/02/2009 at 20:40 Turin Turambar says:
“The game has steamworks so even if you don’t buy the steam version (and why would you?) you’ll still need steam to run it.”
Because the Steam version is twice as expensive as the retail version?
20/02/2009 at 20:41 Real Horrorshow says:
It gave me a BSOD…thats always a good sign. That and, as said, the load times are absurd. In-game performance was a lot better than I expected though.
20/02/2009 at 20:50 Binho says:
It’s not bad, nothing revolutionary. The load times are terrible, i thought the game was crashing before because it took so long to load.
The music is very repetitive, and a bit disappointing considering how good the music in the rest of the series was.
I thought the naval combat was different and interesting. The demo map for the naval combat is pretty good. The only issue I have is that fact that the sea has boundaries! It really breaks immersion and your tactics, when your line of battle hits an invisible wall and all the ships lose formation. Especially as it takes ages to get them underway again.
The demo land battle is quite boring though, it’s quite a crap map. I get the feeling that big, open plain battles are going to be great. Especially since generals seem to no longer be suicidal!
Hopefully it being on steam won’t make it hard to mod though…
20/02/2009 at 20:55 FunkyLlama says:
Awful load times. If the full game doesn’t load any faster, I won’t be buying it. They’re THAT bad. U_U
20/02/2009 at 20:57 Real Horrorshow says:
I agree with FunkyLlama. I can’t imagine trying to play a campaign with those load times. I’d end up just auto resolving everything.
20/02/2009 at 21:01 reiver says:
“Because the Steam version is twice as expensive as the retail version?”
My bad, poor syntax or whatever. What I was meaning was why would you buy the steam version when it’s twice as expensive as the retail and the retail comes with the usual steam benefits of CD free play and auto updates.
20/02/2009 at 21:22 Poindexter says:
I believe I read on their website that Empire will be the most moddable Total War game yet. And they plan to support the community with it too.
20/02/2009 at 21:23 Johnson says:
Truth about changing your download region to east coast usa and getting MUCH better speeds, i went from 50k to 700k after a steam restart.
20/02/2009 at 21:33 hjh123 says:
Thanks johnson, im getting a 500 kb download now which is good considering it was 10kb
20/02/2009 at 21:46 Po0py says:
I’m kinda having second thoughts on getting this now. It performs well but load times are a killer. It even takes at least 30 seconds just to get back to the main menu after a battle. Also, is anyone having problems Alt + Tabbing?
20/02/2009 at 21:49 A-Scale says:
It’s taking me nearly 3 hours to download. 100kbps.
20/02/2009 at 21:52 A-Scale says:
Yeah ok wow. I just changed from US North central to East coast and saw my speeds go from 30kbps to 770. And I’m in Michigan (aka not the east coast). How strange. Thanks for the advice!
20/02/2009 at 21:55 Erlam says:
“If the evil Brits deploy their special Sharpe unit, nary an officer will be left unpunched nor a french bird unshagged.”
One thing I love about RPS is there are so many people from the Empire who love the same shows I do.
Also; I’d better be able to play as the Canadians or the Whitehouse is going down for the 3rd time.
20/02/2009 at 22:14 A-Scale says:
Andddd the game won’t advance past the first black credit screen. No sound. Hit every button to no avail. I’m on Vista 64.
20/02/2009 at 22:18 Rich_P says:
Are you giving it enough time? The loading times are long enough to be confused with a complete system hang…
20/02/2009 at 22:21 Noc says:
I will be tremendously disappointed if George Washington is not three stories tall and made of radiation.
20/02/2009 at 22:22 Evil Vitamin C says:
I finished downloading, but now it’s ‘updating’. Gah!
20/02/2009 at 22:31 Nimosav says:
Is anyone else getting a weird flickery graphical glitch whenever there’s anything moving on screen? (In total war games, this means all the time apart from the loading screen when the bar isn’t moving…) Or is it just me?
20/02/2009 at 22:35 jigglybean says:
Changing the location works. I went from average 9kbs to over 600kbs. I managed to play the battle tutorial and I cant wait for this game!
20/02/2009 at 22:36 Jahkaivah says:
@Nimosav
Maybe try updating Graphics Driver? (Assuming you haven’t tried already, we all forget these things)
20/02/2009 at 22:44 A-Scale says:
Rich you were right. I just took about a minute for it to advance past that black screen, something I’m not used to on this very fast system.
In other news, I now know why the Brits lost. Their moronic artillery don’t know the difference between “move here” and “look over there”, and their infantry just stand 50 feet from the enemy looking at each other stupidly, without firing.
20/02/2009 at 23:05 jigglybean says:
If they are out of range, they wont fire. Or until you give the command. Thats the way they battled back then.
Another reason why the Brits lost is because they wore stupid bright red uniforms when clearly some more suitable to their surroundings was needed
20/02/2009 at 23:06 Solace says:
Terrible! Terrible! Load times, and graphical glitches whenever I move the cursor or anything else for that matter. Using latest nvidia drivers released on the 18th
20/02/2009 at 23:15 A-Scale says:
Well at least give them a closing mechanic where if they are only 5 feet too far away they will close that gap and fire. That or let them fire from too far, but alert me that they will be less effective doing so.
I find the game beautiful, realistic, and just what I wanted. I’m fine with the long loads, as it appears to make the game butter smooth. I’ll probably be buying this.
20/02/2009 at 23:15 Trousers says:
So everyone is making this sound truly mediocre.
DOW2 is fun, but I was really hoping one of the two games would be assmazing, like the way goldeneye felt 10 or whatever years ago
What is our best hope for something assmazing? HL ep 3?
20/02/2009 at 23:23 Nimosav says:
@Jahkaivah: You got it in one :D
Odd, Steam usually bugs me whenever new drivers are out.
20/02/2009 at 23:37 Doc MacRae says:
I have a couple problems with the demo – the first being that I really really really want to play more ETW but I don’t want to replay the same scenarios over and over again! :P
Other than that, the loading times are problem #1. The AI is a little moribund at times – allowed me to shell them to pieces without counterattack once – but maybe a little less likely to break up formations to be truly retarded like Rome and M2.
The naval battle is a funny bird – ships are hyper-responsive while turning but move like molasses. It’s a little weird, or at least the turning is, because these are all big ships of the line. I haven’t lost, but my margin of victory, while usually close, seems arbitrary. Sometimes I really smash them, sometimes I barely get by.
The campaign itself is said to be masterfully re-done, but naturally we’ll have to wait for reviews and AARs to confirm that. Which basically seems like a good course of action for Total War games – wait for veteran players to really work out the kinks and see how CA responds patch-wise.
20/02/2009 at 23:53 Andrew says:
Took so long to load i thought it had crashed. I remember hearing that medieval 2 was buggy on release. So im definitely buying this……..in June or something. Seems a safe bet to wait a while for patches with many new games lately
21/02/2009 at 01:06 Anon says:
I can atest to the long load times.
The game also doesn’t seem to like my dual core all that much, preferring to go with the usual “core 0 ONLY” mandate for most games.
I also dislike the load times after a battle where you sit staring waiting for the menu to pop up. Hopefully this is not an accurate depiction of the final product.
21/02/2009 at 01:06 Klumhru says:
I don’t know what kind of coal driven calculators you guys are running on, but I’m running on a mid range dual core, and the load times are 15-25 seconds, comparable to M2TW today.
It’s so… beautiful!
21/02/2009 at 01:19 Andrew says:
Huge load times but that’s possibly because I have everything on ultra (it runs as smooth as anything in-game). It’s stunningly beautiful and genuinely tactical. The land battle was incredible. Naval battle was chaotic but still good – I love the detail.
Definite purchase.
21/02/2009 at 01:58 Real Horrorshow says:
About the Steam speeds….
I got 1.8 Mb/sec. Yes, that’s right.
21/02/2009 at 02:53 Ginger Yellow says:
Someone on TotalWar.org suggested disabling Steam to reduce the load times. I did that before my first play and the load times didn’t seem much longer than previous TW games. Certainly not to the extent of thinking it had crashed.
21/02/2009 at 02:54 Real Horrorshow says:
I’m a tool. Even with these load times, I can’t help it. I love Total War games too much. I’ve bought every TW game they’ve ever release, I can’t stop now. George Washington! Chances are it’d be patched out, and at least the in-game performance is excellent to kinda make up for it.
21/02/2009 at 02:59 Real Horrorshow says:
“Disable steam”?
It requires Steam.
You mean disable the in game Steam interface?
21/02/2009 at 05:16 Rich_P says:
Heh, if you force gamers to use Steam, at least make sure it doesn’t screw up game performance.
@Trousers: it’s not mediocre. Loading times aside, it’s what you’d expect from a next-gen Total War game. And in-game performance is magnificent, even on high settings. The loading times would be bothersome during a proper campaign because I’d be tempted to auto-resolve…
21/02/2009 at 06:25 Scandalon says:
And because it’s bloody steam, I can’t take the install file home and have to redownload it all over again.
Unless you use the “Backup” command…
21/02/2009 at 07:14 Stromko says:
I was looking forward to some nice powder and muskets killifying, but found this rather dull. It’s not quite there, to the extent I suspect this is an incomplete or gutted demo of some kind. It doesn’t match up to my expectations of an imperial-age TBS/tactical RTS — too rough, controls and camera are dodgy as hell, combat played out very sloppily.
My baseline expectation comes from ‘Imperial Glory’, a Total War-style game released in 2005 by Eidos Interactive. It too featured both land and naval combat, though it only covered the ‘Old World’ no Americas campaign from what I recall. The ‘empire’ side of things in Imperial Glory was far simpler than Rome: Total War, and the flow was different. It modeled colonial expansion as currying favor with various ‘non-Empire’ nations and adding them as fully functional vassal states, though you could also conquer them militarily.
I don’t understand this ‘free-form’ formation system in Empire: TW, why can’t I just click a button and say I want a square or a line formation? It seems like the first two soldiers are the only ones that can ever shoot, so what’s the point of requiring me to right-click and drag to determine what precisely the kind of rectangle I want my troops to form?
So if I want to pick out 5 regiments (or squads or platoons, whatever they are), and line them up so there’s 2 rows of guys and a cohesive battle line … Well, I can’t unless A) I find a sweet spot after right-clicking and dragging, and B) each regiment has the exact same number of troops. It seems to me like this is a combat that is in a general’s arsenal, the detailed and frankly random formations that groups of regiments will take on in Empire: TW are simply implausible.
21/02/2009 at 07:15 Stromko says:
I meant, ‘It seems to me like this is a command that is in a general’s arsenal’ not ‘combat that is in a general’s arsenal’. I really should consider signing up for a forum account so I can edit my own posts again.
21/02/2009 at 07:21 Jeremy says:
“This item is currently unavailable in your region
GGRRRRR!!!!
(I’m in Korea right now).”
Japan here. I want to cry.
21/02/2009 at 08:13 MeestaNob says:
Question: Is everyone the Internet as impatient as those upthread? This is a serious question, because if they are I’m thinking of irreparably cutting the modem cable and reading a book.
Click download, make lunch, go to work, LIVE YOUR BLOODY LIVES, come back, play game. Come on guys, get a grip.
21/02/2009 at 10:27 bansama says:
Wow. Valve just hit a new low. Regionally restricting demos? WTF? That’s just down right pathetic.
21/02/2009 at 10:32 cliffski says:
indeed. i let it run last night while I watched QI. no big deal. done now.
21/02/2009 at 10:52 Heliocentric says:
Why do people fall out with valve for doing what the publishers ask?
21/02/2009 at 10:52 cliffski says:
wow. pretty unstable. i think i clicked outside the window once. had to restart the game.
Im not sure the demo is really finished.
21/02/2009 at 11:32 jigglybean says:
I’ve had no problems since I downloaded it. Graphics are great, load times are a little slow but there is alot to load. Bring it on!
21/02/2009 at 11:33 jigglybean says:
I forgot to add – the sounds are amazing. All those muskets firing away, awesome stuff
21/02/2009 at 12:07 reiver says:
The demo difficulty is set to normal. To increase it you have to go to: C:/Users/*yourname*/AppData/Roaming/The Creative Assembly/Empiredemo2/Scripts/preferences.empire_script and set the battle difficulty to -1 (hard) or -2 (very hard).
21/02/2009 at 12:18 Viskernus says:
I’m getting disappointing performance, and severe input lag in the land battles. I had anticipated as much, but it’s still a cold shower.
Could some of the people who say they’re getting great performance post their computer specs? It might be helpful.
In my case, it would be a 5600mhz dual core, 2 gigs of ram, and a radeon x1950 with 512mb vram
21/02/2009 at 12:23 bansama says:
Why do people fall out with valve for doing what the publishers ask?
Show me a publisher that has ever gone record as wanting to regionally restrict access to a PC demo. Doing so pretty much kills off potential sales from importers and the like. But then, why do people always want to believe that Valve are the angels in all this? Especially when there is plenty of evidence out their to the contrary.
21/02/2009 at 12:52 Heliocentric says:
Evidence, such as? Now you are starting to sound a little tin foil hat.
Regardless, 5600mhz dual core? You mean 2* 2800mhz or some crazy future pc?
21/02/2009 at 12:55 Binho says:
Unless you use the “Backup” command…
What does that do? Why can’t they just plop down an install file, and make things easy. I thought that was the steam motto against piracy? :P
After playing the demo for the 20th time, i’m starting to get annoyed at the decision to make it so ships can sail IN TO the wind.
Because of that, the AI is always sailing into the wind, and trying to break through to the other side of my battle line to get the wind gauge on me…but there is no space!! So my ships and their ships just kind of collide, and my fourth-rates and third-rates get pummeled by their bigger ships because they’re all stuck together. By the time my first and second rate manage to turn around and sail back I’ve lost half my squadron!
I can understand why they made the design decision of letting you sail into the wind, but they have to lower the speed of sailing into the wind some more. It shouldn’t be something you would want to do out of choice. And the one time I tried sailing into the wind, my whole line gets messed up (Which dosn’t happen to the AI).
Stromko: I’d say wait for the full game to judge the ground combat. This map is a bit crap, there isn’t enough space to put down proper battle lines. I do agree on the free form formations though. We should be able to set a fixed amount of ranks…but on the other hand, considering how much broken terrain there is in most of these maps, the free form formation is the only way to keep any sort of line.
Smoke and sounds are great, although we need more smoke! The battlefield should quickly get hazy with all the musket and cannon smoke. Same goes for the sea! We need smoke that blows in the direction of the wind. Can’t wait for this to be modded in!
Music is a bit crap.
21/02/2009 at 13:16 Legionary says:
I haven’t experienced any massive loading periods. The initial load is a bit bumpy because the intro isn’t polished yet, but in-game it was about the same as a Medieval II load. My PC is a dual core @3ghz, 2gb RAM, GeForce GT 8800GT.
21/02/2009 at 13:38 Viskernus says:
“Regardless, 5600mhz dual core? You mean 2* 2800mhz or some crazy future pc?”
Yes, i meant 2* 2800, sorry.
21/02/2009 at 13:41 bansama says:
Evidence, such as?
Take the recent speeches put out by Valve about how they hate regional restrictions. Then take how they actually act. The best example of this right now is Saint’s Row 2. Even the retail CD keys are now regionally restricted so that people importing cannot activate them — such as happened when people in Australia tried to import the game so they could play it at the same time of the US release.
Then take the fact that it was never released in Japan on the 30th of January — the date of release set by Volition/THQ for the Japan. Valve witheld it. And that was confirmed when Volition were contacted about it.
That’s just the most recent example. I’d go into more, but we’re drifiting way off topic here. Besides, if demos were supposed to be regionally restricted, don’t you think all the other download sites, such as Fileplanet would have been enforcing such restrictions by now? (Especially given that they have the technology to do that via their D2D service).
And to add insult to all of that, Valve still advertise some regionally restricted games as for sale in the very regions they are restricted. Such as Dawn of War 2, any SEGA game and even this one. All of which are listed as for sale in regions where they aren’t sold (the only difference being that the purchase button is intentially removed from the store page).
Are you telling me that the publishers specifically tell Valve to leave such games as visible just to taunt us?
21/02/2009 at 14:27 Willem says:
“I will be tremendously disappointed if George Washington is not three stories tall and made of radiation.”
Alas. I did shoot him, however. That’ll show those yank bastards. RULE BRI-no wait, I’m not British. :(
Demo is excellent, though. The loading times aren’t that bad, if you just turn the specs down one level below the auto-settings. Unless, of course, your PC is shit and you can’t turn it below the auto-settings.
21/02/2009 at 14:46 Heliocentric says:
No, i think people seeing what they can’t buy is a result of laziness on the steam store programmers part. What reason do they have to taunt people? Bar maybe having irritated customers ask the publisher for world wide steam access on the title. Which surely, is a good thing?
Valve get a cut of all sales, of course they want to sell to everyone.
21/02/2009 at 15:01 Heliocentric says:
There should be a mod for total war games that brings a little craziness to history the the massive george washington. Who’s only weakness is an allegy to cats which means if can’t shoot lasers from his eyes while down wind from cats. But his arm cannon is undefeated.
21/02/2009 at 15:03 bansama says:
No, i think people seeing what they can’t buy is a result of laziness on the steam store programmers part.
But that wouldn’t explain why other games are filtered correctly =/ Besides that, they have been informed countless times by me and others of these non-filtered games. So far the only one they fixed was Shellshock 2 for Australia (due to it being banned there). All others are still visible. So I wouldn’t say it’s laziness. It’s just appears that they either don’t care or can’t be bothered.
21/02/2009 at 15:05 Heliocentric says:
Laziness=not bothered enough
Yep
21/02/2009 at 16:34 Don says:
Well this worked sort of ok for me, I duly kicked Johnny Reb’s insurgent ass back to Hicksville. But the load times and menu transitions are pretty slow and after the battle the menu seemed frozen as my exit was via task manager and a process kill.
I was disappointed that some of the sillier battlefield glitches hadn’t been fixed. IRL try moving cavalry through the middle of a crowd of infantry who are also on the move and all you’ll get is a big fat mess and an enemy general unable to believe his luck, but in E:TW you can still get away with it. And when I ordered a battered artillery unit to retreat they decided the best exit route was straight through the enemy’s position. A panicked, routing unit might (very occasionally) do that but one in good order shouldn’t.
Hope this is improved in the gold code when it arrives via online retail (£24) and not Steam (£40). Look’s like Gabe’s message about correct pricing has yet to impact 3rd parties selling on Steam.
21/02/2009 at 16:37 jalf says:
It wouldn’t be the first time Valve has pulled stunts to annoy its users without being asked by publishers. Take the Euro pricing fiasco. We’ve gotten confirmation from several publishers that they didn’t ask for it, they were simply notified by Valve that “we’re going to jack up prices in Europe by 50%. Email us if you want to set a different price on your games”.
Unfortunately, “blame the publishers” is still a popular pastime among a lot of Steam users, allowing Valve to get away with anything.
21/02/2009 at 16:46 Real Horrorshow says:
Has anyone else noticed that units don’t swap ranks after firing a volley like I think they’re supposed to? The front rank just keeps reloading over and over.
21/02/2009 at 17:12 Bossman says:
In the demo units only use the basic firing drill. In the full game you can research platoon firing which allows multiple ranks to fire.
21/02/2009 at 18:03 bansama says:
Laziness=not bothered enough
Not really. Laziness is also apparent in people who do care to do something. They just take an inordinate amount of time to do it. Such as a couple of months or so. But when it’s been over 2 years, it’s certainly not laziness at the root of the problem.
21/02/2009 at 19:56 jigglybean says:
Personally, I’ve just stopped playing the demo because its given me a taster. I just cant wait now for the full game. I’m looking forward to the new online play as many of my friends are getting this.
Great job Creative UK! This game will be worth every single penny.
21/02/2009 at 20:16 Erlam says:
I was totally underwhelmed by the game, I have to admit. My first time through (playing Brandywine) I lost when my troops, for some reason in single file were ‘running’ about about 1/4 their usual movement speed, and many were stuck on the edge of forests. Then my artillery was hit by the enemies first shot, and they fled. The second shot, which managed to fly partly through a hill, killed my commander. Not bad for an opening two minutes eh?
The next game I won rather easily, and I’m not really sure where the ‘strategy’ comes in here. I lined my troops up against there’s, had one firing their first volley, the second charged the enemy. Then I’d charge all remaining enemies (regardless of what unit I had vs. there’s) and won rather handily. I took heavily losses, but I think I killed (literally) 90% of their forces.
Am I missing something? Is the game normally that easy to win? I just wanted to see the Brits kill as many Americans as possible, yet lose. Somehow I won, haha.
21/02/2009 at 20:44 jalf says:
@Erlam: Apparently the demo is running at normal difficulty, which can be changed by fiddling with some config file somewhere. The full game presumably lets you choose difficulty freely. ;)
Also a big part of the fun of the “real” game is that how you play in the campaign map affects the difficulty of the battles as well. The one in the demo was pretty even, if it didn’t straight out favor Britain, but in the campaign, you’re guaranteed to end up in some battles where you’re outnumbered 3-1 simply because you’ve stationed the bulk of your troops somewhere else to deal with one of the 3 other wars you’re involved in. ;)
So no, definitely not easy to win. Individual battles, perhaps, but not the entire game. :)
About the initial bugs, I’d assume a good deal of it was simply down to not knowing the controls. Getting the hang of formations might take a while :)
And the cannon ball probably bounced off the hill, rather than through it? Might look similar, but from what I’ve seen, it follows the terrain pretty well, and never flies *through* hills.
21/02/2009 at 22:05 Erlam says:
It was a hill, and I saw a cannon-ball fly through it, haha, so yeah. I’ve seen stuff bounce off too, so I know that does happen.
My surprise was not so much in the difficulty of the fight, moreso how I just head-on charged in instances where one should never do that, and still won rather easily.
Also, Horsemen need to move AROUND pikes. Because after a battle was done I told a bunch of horsemen to form up, and then wandered through pikes near them, and then fled.
it was funny, but not indicative of a good AI.
21/02/2009 at 22:47 jalf says:
Well, if you have enough men, head-on charges will always work. ;)
In the demo map, it seemed like the British troops had heaps more infantry,and cavalry, so while head-on charges may not be the best tactic, it’ll most likely still win you the day, as you found out. That’s especially true because of the cramped terrain, making it impossible to line up for proper firefights, and the huge amounts of American artillery pounding down on anyone standing still in the open. That map really encouraged you to get up close as soon as possible.
So I’d still be inclined to chalk it up to a silly demo map more than anything.
But apart from that, the AI in TW games has always been a bit on the iffy side, unfortunately.
22/02/2009 at 03:17 Jim says:
““This item is currently unavailable in your region
GGRRRRR!!!!
(I’m in Korea right now).”
Japan here. I want to cry.”
China here, no dice either. Hope the demo’s out on other sites soon.
22/02/2009 at 08:42 Beefeater1980 says:
Hong Kong here. Can’t d/l the demo.
The game itself appears on the store page with an unlock countdown and an invitation to pre-order, but as reported the purchase button has been intentionally removed.
Is this game not being released in Asia at all, then? Very bad show if this is the case.
22/02/2009 at 09:09 BoltingTurtle says:
I’m currently writing up a few remarks on this demo for my own website, but I really just do that for fun, so here’s my basic thoughts.
Initially I was underwhelmed. It seemed a bit too much like imperial glory. But that was just the first glance, and I blame the tutorials, neither of which were terribly consistent and didn’t cover the full interface, which is the part I may be most excited about.
After a few playthroughs of Brandywine, you begin to realize that the AI isn’t that bad. It may seem like it doesn’t do that much at first, but these are historical battles, and ever so slightly scripted as far as I could tell. I did the same thing with minor alterations each time I played through, and as I learned about the handy drill commands portion of the interface (you can click to right or left wheel) I became more capable of really managing the finer points of tactics.
What was impressive about this was that the AI seemed to match what I gave it. In one battle I had stationed the units making a feint at a frontal assault a bit too far back, and my horse artillery that I had placed on the bluff at the right side of the battlefield (and I thought inaccessible) were comparitively open. The AI used the troops it still had at the crossing brilliantly, and crossed the river under support of their guns, used a pinning force to hold my infantry at bay, and stormed the ridge. The M2 AI never would have been able to handle this, and would have played it safe on their side of the river.
The interface forces you to think like an 18th century general. The AI, though never flawless, was easy enough to give those playing the demo a good time (let them win) without making it easy. Naval combat takes more getting used to, but damn it’s pretty.
22/02/2009 at 09:10 BoltingTurtle says:
“Here’s my basic thoughts”. Damn my pointless and wasted education.
22/02/2009 at 10:17 Rabbitsoup says:
Surely the main problem in the demo is that they are not your troops. In the campaign you have a reason to win without massive and that’s what makes these games so good, in the demo i don’t really care about my units they may as well be merch which are cheaper when they are dead
22/02/2009 at 11:52 michaelfeb16 says:
I’ll just add to the “wtf load times!?” of this thread.
I am also not buying this game. They have the nerve to release a 2+GB demo and then have me wait five minutes to load…THE MAIN MENU FROM THE OPTIONS SCREEN!?
Maybe, maybe, I could understand terrible load times on maps and such. I’ve waited twenty minutes on past computers for a map to load in some games (we’ll ignore that my current computer is quad core, 8GB, 4870×2), but to expect me to wait so long I am certain the system is frozen on the change from settings to the main menu?! I never even tried to load up the game!
Also, alt-tab is terrible, waiting a full minute for an intro movie is terrible, and getting me excited over the continuation of one of my favorite franchises only to let an idiot do the coding is terrible
22/02/2009 at 12:36 reiver says:
It seems there’s no limit to unit size anymore. Fear the 1400 Grenadier battalion: http://img407.imageshack.us/img407/2337/holyshitlotsofpeopleu.jpg
22/02/2009 at 17:06 jalf says:
@michaelfeb16: Apparently the initial load time improves a lot the second time you run the game. It also took me a minute or so to load, tops. It was more the before/after battles load time that annoyed me.
05/03/2009 at 12:47 Jacques says:
On a GForce 7800 GTX (ancient- perhaps, effective at playing most things including crysis at medium detail levels) I find the demo to be… frustrating. The initial load time for the game/menu was a good 4 minutes, I left, got something to eat from the kitchen, played tetris, suicided in tetris after screwing a critical block, and took a piss before the credit anims popped in. The battle loading time was about 3 minutes, MII: TW averaged about 20-30 seconds for me on my low end laptop. Details were set to medium and low, and I have to say, my framrate took a hit when I came in range of the grass, and by a hit, I mean less than 7 frames per second as a result, less. I find the artillery to follow Murphy’s law to a tee, the enemy has double the range and double the accuracy. The sword wielding horsemen were of great use in comparison to their dragoon counterparts that fell like trees in a paper mill. I wiped out a good quarter of Georgy’s army with them before bayonets routed them.
I tried loading the naval battle, it failed to load after five minutes, I quit and uninstalled the demo for fear of another freeze crash like my first and second exits.
On a plus note: the screenshots are very pretty and I lived in the area the first battle took place in (Chad’s Ford, and along the Brandywine river). Muskets are thankfully more effective than they were in medieval times as well. I successfully reenacted a “whitest kids you know” skit, without attempting to do so, where my British soldiers readied their guns and must have been chatting with the enemy about rules as all but one man was killed off by the Americans.
“Who took a shot at the CO? Who TOOK A SHOT AT THE CO!? Reprimand that man, REPRIMAND THAT MAN!” *gets shot and dies*