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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I will be tremendously disappointed if George Washington is not three stories tall and made of radiation.
I finished downloading, but now it’s ‘updating’. Gah!
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?
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!
@Nimosav
Maybe try updating Graphics Driver? (Assuming you haven’t tried already, we all forget these things)
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.
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
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
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.
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?
@Jahkaivah: You got it in one :D
Odd, Steam usually bugs me whenever new drivers are out.
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.
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
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.
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!
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.
About the Steam speeds….
I got 1.8 Mb/sec. Yes, that’s right.
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.
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.
“Disable steam”?
It requires Steam.
You mean disable the in game Steam interface?
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…
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…
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.
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.
“This item is currently unavailable in your region
GGRRRRR!!!!
(I’m in Korea right now).”
Japan here. I want to cry.
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.
Wow. Valve just hit a new low. Regionally restricting demos? WTF? That’s just down right pathetic.
indeed. i let it run last night while I watched QI. no big deal. done now.
Why do people fall out with valve for doing what the publishers ask?
wow. pretty unstable. i think i clicked outside the window once. had to restart the game.
Im not sure the demo is really finished.
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!
I forgot to add – the sounds are amazing. All those muskets firing away, awesome stuff
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).
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
“Regardless, 5600mhz dual core? You mean 2* 2800mhz or some crazy future pc?”
Yes, i meant 2* 2800, sorry.
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?
“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.
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.
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.
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.
Laziness=not bothered enough
Yep
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.