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
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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.
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.
@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.
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.
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.
““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.
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.
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.
“Here’s my basic thoughts”. Damn my pointless and wasted education.
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
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
It seems there’s no limit to unit size anymore. Fear the 1400 Grenadier battalion: http://img407.imageshack.us/img407/2337/holyshitlotsofpeopleu.jpg
@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.
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*