Unofficial Retail Patch for Win10/Modern Systems

[scowie]

I thought I had no chance of running this on my tablet's Intel Atom (Bay Trail) CPU due to Intel HD graphics not supporting pre-DX9 games and I thought the steam update was just to get it to run ok on Windows 10 with widescreen resolutions so I never bought that version — thought I'd have to stick to playing the game on my ancient and noisy desktop pc. I have now realised that the steam update "DX9-ified" the game, allowing it to run perfectly even on low-power cpus with built-in Intel graphics chips (as long as you set the game's resolutions to the same as your desktop to avoid crashes). What's more, it is possible to "patch" the retail version to the steam version. I have a guy on the steam forums to thank for this. He made a patch to do just that. [if you try downloading that you may find that a number of spam webpages open up before the download link actually works, so close these when they open and retry]

I used that patch myself on the retail version I had copied over to my windows 10 tablet (i use it as a desktop, i.e. with kbd/mouse/monitor plugged in) and started a new campaign to put it through it's paces. As I like a challenge I went for an Expert Early HRE campaign and I'm letting the AI do all the building & training (ticked all the boxes in the settings that slide out from the mini-map). The battles are working fine too — just fought two against the Danes following their invasion of Saxony. Unfortunately my first attempt at relieving the siege failed and I lost my Heir but my Emperor got his revenge the following year and wiped out the Danish Royal Family!
Now I'd better go and invade the rebel Denmark before the faction reappears...