A Concern Regarding Preferences

Hey guys,

I have a concern regarding video/audio/game settings in Empire:TW.

I am hoping that things do not function the same way that they did in M2TW where I have to go to a preference.cfg folder in the game's directory in order to save my settings/have them apply.

Further, things like unlimited men on battlefield, micromanage all settlements, etc - these should either a) be on by default, naturally or b) be adjustable and savable in the game. No going into the directory and marking folder read only and stuff like that should be necessary. This was a major shortcoming with M2 in my opinion, and I've never played another game that has been like that.

Any indication that things are done sensibly with Empire?

I thought all the preferences the developer intended you to control are ingame. CA is nice enough to let us know about ways to change things that weren't "supposed" to be changed.

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Originally Posted by quadalpha

I thought all the preferences the developer intended you to control are ingame. CA is nice enough to let us know about ways to change things that weren't "supposed" to be changed.

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Well that's the whole thing, you see. There were preferences that SHOULD have been controlled in the game that were ONLY controllable in the preferences, when dealing with M2TW.

Example: My computer easily maxes out M2. I mean, easily. Yet, unless I went and edited the preference.cfg, I would not be able to have more than say 3500 troops on screen without getting the dreaded reinforcement delay...hence ruining the whole point of being able to use huge unit settings.

Example #2: Micromanage all settlements and some other settings would not stay saved in the game unless you edited the preference.cfg. So, let's say you started a campaign and chose unlimited campaign battle time and micromanage all settlements. Save the campaign and exit the program. Restart the program and load up the saved campaign - boom. You're back to a campaign battle time limit and not able to micromanage all your settlements. You'd have to go and edit the preference.cfg and then mark it as read only in order to save your preferences.

example #3: Video, Audio and Game Settings: Same situation. Unless they were saved to the preference.cfg with it marked as "not read only" and THEN marked as "read only" before starting the program, they would be overwritten every time you started the program.

These are the kinds of things I'm talking about. Users should not HAVE to go into the game's directory and tinker with the file settings in order to address fundamental settings that should have total control within the game. I've always just assumed these examples with M2TW were the result of shoddy programming...and they probably were. I don't think any of these things were "as intended" with M2...we just found the workarounds for them by editing the preferences.

I never had those problems with M2. I rarely had 3500+ anyway since I play on medium, but if there were 3500+troops then it meant I was way outnumbered and saved me time ;)

As for the micromanage and saving campaign and stuff, this never hapened to me. I always left it on read-only as OFF and it never overwrote the file. Same deal with the graphics, never happened to me.


But all in all I completely agree it would be nice if you could just check and uncheck those options during hte game rather than messing with the files.

Only time settings haven't be saved was when the programme crashed. If I changed the settings to lets say, windowed mode, when I re-next load it, it would only undo the changes if I made any, in the previous. (Saved files were a exception, they always loaded right)

I would love all options to be in an easily accessed/understood .CFG file and I fail to see the big deal about editing it to your liking/saving and making it read only.

Just be sure to save a copy as a back-up as patches always seem to over-write these files. :oops:

this never happen to me in M2TW everything saves fine

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Originally Posted by miniwally

this never happen to me in M2TW everything saves fine

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Yeah, same here.

:inquisitive:

Well if nobody else has had the problems I've mentioned, perhaps it has something to do with the fact that I was playing using the Gold edition of the game...which had it's own special patch for compatibility with non gold editions.

Either way, as I've said: Things like unlimited men and all of your graphics and video settings need to be fully accessible from the main menus. Let's hope that's the case because although some might not think it's a big deal, many of us want NO part of dealing with another preference.cfg.

Gah! This is why games aren't more moddable. People confuse mods with features, and blame the game designers when it doesn't work out. CA could have made the max men limit hardcoded in a binary file, and then you would never have had the chance to whine about have to change a single line in a text file in order to mod the game.

Some limits are required in order to make sure the game can be tested on a range of systems. For those who wish to take the risk of pushing the game into untested territory, the devs made modding this easy. But if it is in game it has to be tested. Just be thankful that modding this is so simple.

As for your other points not saving preferences for settlement management and graphics etc that would clearly be a bug, rather than bad design, although if it is a bug I have never heard reported before (same for everyone else in this thread) so it seems strange. I've certainly never has such trouble with MTW2.

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Originally Posted by Hollerbach

Gah! This is why games aren't more moddable. People confuse mods with features, and blame the game designers when it doesn't work out. CA could have made the max men limit hardcoded in a binary file, and then you would never have had the chance to whine about have to change a single line in a text file in order to mod the game.

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Gentlemen, this isn't the Backroom! Please, let us treat each other with some degree of respect and exchange frilly pleasentries and poor spelling.

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Originally Posted by Bopa the Magyar

Gentlemen, this isn't the Backroom! Please, let us treat each other with some degree of respect and exchange frilly pleasentries and poor spelling.

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It's not a big deal. He makes good points. The fact remains, as I've said, I was using Gold/Vista. There were definitely the issues I described, at least for me.

The fact is that this thread served it's purpose. If there are no serious modifications necessary for basic gameplay features, I'll be happy.

I love the game being moddable. What I don't want is modding to be necessary to play the game the way the average user would expect to in the first place.

Ah, Vista. It's very protective of its innards, as well as the whole Program Files folder.

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Originally Posted by quadalpha

Ah, Vista. It's very protective of its innards, as well as the whole Program Files folder.

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Exactly. There were several workarounds necessary because of said protectiveness :laugh4:

I mean, I managed. It wasn't surgery. But it was still irritating because it took significant time to figure out how to do everything.

I wasn't registered here at the time, but I saw a few other guys posting about it over the summer. It seemed they just gave up but I eventually figured it out.

Either way, I'm sure Empire is optimized for Vista this time around. M2 was a while ago now.

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Originally Posted by ArtillerySmoke

Exactly. There were several workarounds necessary because of said protectiveness :laugh4:

I mean, I managed. It wasn't surgery. But it was still irritating because it took significant time to figure out how to do everything.

I wasn't registered here at the time, but I saw a few other guys posting about it over the summer. It seemed they just gave up but I eventually figured it out.

Either way, I'm sure Empire is optimized for Vista this time around. M2 was a while ago now.

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I hope so. It took me days to get Cossacks II working on Vista 64. Turns out there was a patch on some French site.