Increasing number of games you see in lobby

[Lavos]

Empire has decentralised servers so a lot of server zones have small population and some may need to move around by changing 'download zone' in Steam to get to a good one. Now in one of the early patch they improved their system so you get to see and join all games from players you have added as friends. This way you can join players even if they are on different server. Now that may help a little, but its not enought. Fortunately this friend thing also works to every group that you belong to. So if you join a ton of empire goups, you see every game one of their member has hosted, and their members see your game no matter what server they have been asigned to.


This is how you do it:
Go here and just join empire groups that have a lot of registered players, if you are worried about lag only join those closer to you: http://steamcommunity.com/actions/Search?T=ClanAccount&K="empire%20total%20war"

Now to see if it works for you. Join lobby while your status is offline. This way 'join friends system' won't work and you'll see only games on your selected server.
https://i719.photobucket.com/albums/ww195/lavos_1/before.jpg

Then just set your status to online and you should immidiately see couple of games more:
https://i719.photobucket.com/albums/ww195/lavos_1/after.jpg


For me personally, its improvemen't from 5 to up to 15 games, so trying doesen't hurt. :beam:

[The Hun]

Nobody reply but this maybe does not hit same satisfied as place where we see hosted games and can join by choosing. Maybe too much worry flaming in lobby so make a new option but not maybe good as was before.

[pevergreen]

It is frustrating to not be able to just join a friends game if they are not in the same area. I had to switch from Australia to Canada to be able to play with Megas.

[Megas Methuselah]

It is frustrating to not be able to just join a friends game if they are not in the same area. I had to switch from Australia to Canada to be able to play with Megas.

I think they fixed that in a patch, where you're able to see your friends' games in the lobby now. Not sure, though, but somehow I got in a game with this dude I know in the UK. :shrug:

[Lavos]

I forgot to update this.

Be carefully when joining a lot of groups. For some reason steam strains system resources when you are online in Empire. So you have two processes that will use CPU, steam.exe and empire.exe. It seams that number of friends and more importantly number of groups that you've joined is having big effect on how high is Steam CPU usage. I don't have super fast cpu so I had to leave some groups to get Steam CPU usage down too normal level.

So, If you're having problems with lag ingame it may be that Steam is using too much. Try leaving groups too see how its with less. Then if it's not having an effect you can join them again.