Empire: Total War DEMO OUT Friday Feb 20th

[Sus-penders]

For all of us out there waiting for this game, the Demo is set to be released on Friday, Feb 20th!!!!!


http/shoguntotalwar.yuku.com/topic/42851

I am pleased to report that our official Empire: Total War demo will be available via Steam from 4pm GMT on Friday 20th February.

Let loose the dogs of war! Ahahahahahaha!

 

[Annisman]

Yea, I just saw that was announced, can't wait to download and play, I hear its about 2 GB !

 

[Sus-penders]

Not too much longer now

 

[jason73]

About time, I am just about fed up with ROME TOTAL WAR, all the conquests and playing on line for a clan started to take its toll on me, but no matter how many times i kept saying I would stop playing that game I kept going back,
MED & MED II just never seemed to have that appeal to me for some reason,
I just hope EMPIRES will live upto the expectations I have, god they kept us waiting a long time for this to be released.

 

[Annisman]

Downloading now, at 92 %!

 

[jason73]

Anyone got any idea just how long this download takes, seems to be taking ages on my pc.

 

[Annisman]

if u go by steam and have decent DL speeds, it is only an hour or so.

I LOVE THIS GAME! THE DEMO IS AMASZING!

 

[gjdixon]

its going to take a long time i am downloading at 20 to 60 kb/s but steam keep stoping it

 

[jason73]

Im doing it by steam and I normally have a great download speed, but this just seems to be coming down at between 40 & 50 KBs and sometimes it drops to about 15, Im only at 5% lol
by the time it as finished I will have grown a beard !

 

[Sus-penders]

Make sure your download region is set to whatever is nearest to you. That should solve the slow download problem. You can find it under settings> downloads>regions. It was pretty snappy for me...

It's worth the download though, the demo is quite good When you first start the demo, be patient, as it can take a while to start up (it did for me, I thought the game froze but it just took forever to initialize).

Who knew broadsides could be so fun? :lol:

 

[gjdixon]

sus-penders thx man i live in the uk was downloading at 100kb/s top change it to east coast US now its at 510kb/s

 

[Sus-penders]

Glad it worked out for you!

 

[crusoe74]

Sounds great!

Shame I can't log into Steam anymore; all the words in the icons have 'disappeared', and won't accept anything I type.

Tried re-installing, all that did was remove all my steam powered games from the hard-drive. Hmmm........thank god I bought all my games on dvd format, although god only knows when I can play my copies of the Half life 2 series or Portal <sigh>.

 

[quantumsheep]

Crusoe - tried formatting? Make a partition and put everything you want/need in there then reinstall windows. Should fix the problem.

 

[jason73]

Hmm, having now played the Demo apart from the graphics looking ok Im really not sure why it was so long in been released, its not exactly mind blowing, I cant help feeling a bit disappointed by it, maybe it will grow on me but I think they could have done better with this game, for some reason I enjoyed the navel battle more than the land battle which is strange I thought it would be the other way round.

 

[djcoolmasterx]

I mainly just do the campaign and just auto all the battles so it was quite disappointing.

I like micromanaging >_<

 

[videogameaddict68]

Dudes it took 5 hrs and i realized the default download region was on UK and i live in east coast US. i was already up to 89% until i realized and after i changed it it took 2 minutes to finish.dammmmm could've been playin hours ago

 

[jason73]

Yea the default is strange, I live in the UK and the default was set for downloading from france WTF !, so I changed it to UK and that wasn`t much better, but then I changed to East Coast USA and for some reason I was getting 5 times faster download ,the demo was then downloaded with in 1 hour 30 min.

 

[Sus-penders]

Hmm, having now played the Demo apart from the graphics looking ok Im really not sure why it was so long in been released, its not exactly mind blowing, I cant help feeling a bit disappointed by it, maybe it will grow on me but I think they could have done better with this game, for some reason I enjoyed the navel battle more than the land battle which is strange I thought it would be the other way round.

Well, don't forget that they've totally redone how the campaign map works (which wasn't in the demo), and have surely added other stuff to keep us occupied in the future. The game itself is supposed to be over 15 gigabytes (vs just 2 for the demo), so I'm sure there will be plenty of stuff in there that will make you happy

I personally enjoyed the land battle more than the naval, which was surprising as I thought it would be the other way around.

How did it run for everyone? I found it ran well (better than expected) on my ageing Athlon X2 3800 + HD4850 system, although the naval battle was struggling mightily on ultra quality settings. I think I'll be looking for a new processor soon, heh

 

[Sus-penders]

Anyone else getting their asses handed to them in the naval battle? :lol:

My first ship-to-ship battle was an embarrassment, to say the least. It turned into a big, jumbled mess, with my poor flagship getting the hell beaten out of it. You could generally track my battle performance by counting the number of holes in its hull (the poor thing looked more like a sponge than a ship before it sank!). Sending her in solo wasn't such a bright plan in retrospect....

 

[Annisman]

I thought this demo was incredible. The land battles have turned out different every single time I have played it. Sometimes America would advance on me, sometimes they would play defence etc.

I dont care for the naval battles.

THe game runs excellent, if you turn a couple of settings down from 'Ultra' to high then I get completely stable fps even during intense battles.

 

[jason73]

Whats the max on the units ? I set the units to ultra and there was around 80 inf in each unit, is the demo just set to max 80 inf or will the full version on release have bigger numbers, I hope so Im use to having 200 to 240 inf in each unit on ROME TOTAL WAR.

 

[JeanLuc]

Whats the max on the units ? I set the units to ultra and there was around 80 inf in each unit, is the demo just set to max 80 inf or will the full version on release have bigger numbers, I hope so Im use to having 200 to 240 inf in each unit on ROME TOTAL WAR.

The unit cap at 80 is misleading, the final will have larger unit sizes (lets face it, it won't have less then previous games), I suspect CA done this to artificially boost performance which misleads people who may think this is the actually performance they will get in the final game. I was getting 45 FPS (FRAPS) on average for the land battle on a C2D 2.13Ghz, 2Gb ram, 8000GT, with M2TW on the same high settings, huge units I got 15 FPS average.

Also the game isn't properly multi-threaded, quad core users have reported half their cores remain inactive and when I tested it on my dual core the task manager graphs didn't max out to anywhere near 100% which is very disappointing. Along with poor stability of the demo and misleading performance the demo has put me off buying the game.

 

[jason73]

I agree even though the graphics look good, I think they could have pushed this game a bit more when you think what hardware is now available for gaming, and as for the CPU, I keep seeing this game showing that it will work better with i7,
but whats the point in splashing out $$$ when the game only needs a decent dual core, Im not saying this game is crap by no means, you wil still enjoy it and I do recommend it.
But I know alot of die hard people who play ROME TOTAL WAR on line in clans and Im hearing the same story, That there a little disappointed because they think this will go the same way as MED I & II and die out, because even though the graphics are better, the actual fighting is no way near as good as what you get on ROME,
its missing that magic.
but I think one thing could save this game and that is the campain map, because of its sheer size.
And just for the record I will get this game.

 

[Sus-penders]

I think those people are being a bit premature. I seriously doubt this game is going to be "dying out" anytime soon, and I think this is going to shape up to be the best total war game yet. Honestly, we haven't even played a full game yet and people are already thinking it's going to "die out"????

The era, the units, the sea battles, the factions; it's going to be so much more colourful than Rome.

As for the processor thing, I think that just goes to show everyone how difficult it is to code games (and programmes) to take advantage of multiple CPU cores. The battle to add more and more cores to processors isn't really reaping all that many benefits; 4 cores is more than enough for gaming. What we need now is SPEED.

In other news, I finally won my first Naval battle! Formations are your friend, people!