Hate to say that I do not like the game!

Although I am a huge and longtime fan of TW games, I must say that ETW has been a huge disappointment for me so far. I was expecting the usual minor bugs in the beginning but I wasn´t expecting a game from TW that has so many flaws that playing the game in campaign mode is both boring and annoying.

True, there is a lot of blingbling now on the campaign map but that doesn´t make the game experience any better.

There are so many things I have come across so far that I can mention only the worst without turning this rant into a novel.

1. What´s the use of playing a campaign of almost 200 turns when after turn 40 you have basically won the game?
a. Revolution: Funny how the game ends very suddenly when you chose the wrong side without being able to get any info on what results your choice might have.
2. What´s the use of diplomacy when diplomacy is a ridiculous, totally usueless feature in this game.
a. Minor nations: What´s the use in ally with them if you get no benefits? Apart from some cash when you´re protector.
b. What is it when Savoy can conquer France?
c. Why would the Moguls like to trade scientific research for East Prussia?
d. Why would Prussia like to trade East Prussia for Courland? Totally senseless.
3. Gentlemen and Rakes
a. Duelling: What is the benefit of a won duel apart from having an enemy gentlemen removed from the game? Since gentlemen are spawned anyways without costs for either your or the opposite side.

And on and on it goes....

I would expect that at least the diplomacy feature gets a major overhaul. I would opt for a totally new appraoch with the minor factions. E.g. if my side becomes a protector of a minor nation - why not including the minor factions military forces and their scientific research in the benifits?
I would also expect that the load of stupid requests my side gets (totally sensless demands for regions etc.) get removed from the ai.

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Originally Posted by mmk

Although I am a huge and longtime fan of TW games, I must say that ETW has been a huge disappointment for me so far. I was expecting the usual minor bugs in the beginning but I wasn´t expecting a game from TW that has so many flaws that playing the game in campaign mode is both boring and annoying.

True, there is a lot of blingbling now on the campaign map but that doesn´t make the game experience any better.

There are so many things I have come across so far that I can mention only the worst without turning this rant into a novel.

1. What´s the use of playing a campaign of almost 200 turns when after turn 40 you have basically won the game?
a. Revolution: Funny how the game ends very suddenly when you chose the wrong side without being able to get any info on what results your choice might have.
2. What´s the use of diplomacy when diplomacy is a ridiculous, totally usueless feature in this game.
a. Minor nations: What´s the use in ally with them if you get no benefits? Apart from some cash when you´re protector.
b. What is it when Savoy can conquer France?
c. Why would the Moguls like to trade scientific research for East Prussia?
d. Why would Prussia like to trade East Prussia for Courland? Totally senseless.
3. Gentlemen and Rakes
a. Duelling: What is the benefit of a won duel apart from having an enemy gentlemen removed from the game? Since gentlemen are spawned anyways without costs for either your or the opposite side.

And on and on it goes....

I would expect that at least the diplomacy feature gets a major overhaul. I would opt for a totally new appraoch with the minor factions. E.g. if my side becomes a protector of a minor nation - why not including the minor factions military forces and their scientific research in the benifits?
I would also expect that the load of stupid requests my side gets (totally sensless demands for regions etc.) get removed from the ai.

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1. Same for M2TW and RTW. ATPG and others won M2TW in 20 odd turns, taking every province. You cant do that in ETW
a: You make the choice, if you lose, you die. Realistic.
2: Diplomacy works much much better. No more "GET OFF MY LAND". You can see why their position is. massive improvement. Military/diplomatic AI isnt separate.
a: Same again, they are minor for a reason. Crush them if you want, keep them alive if you like the pretty colours on the minimap. My opinion is they take the place of rebels from previous games
b: What is it when Milan can take over Euorpe? When Persia can conquer all of egypt. When Brittania can take western euorpe. TW provides many many outcomes, some historically correct, some hilarious.
c&d: should be tweaked in patches, thats simply priorities gone wrong for the AI
3. What about them?
a: Stops them stealing your research, if you are stealing theirs, gives you a better chance, with the upcoming mp campaign, removes vision and stops their research.

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Originally Posted by pevergreen

1. Same for M2TW and RTW. ATPG and others won M2TW in 20 odd turns, taking every province. You cant do that in ETW
a: You make the choice, if you lose, you die. Realistic.
2: Diplomacy works much much better. No more "GET OFF MY LAND". You can see why their position is. massive improvement. Military/diplomatic AI isnt separate.
a: Same again, they are minor for a reason. Crush them if you want, keep them alive if you like the pretty colours on the minimap. My opinion is they take the place of rebels from previous games
b: What is it when Milan can take over Euorpe? When Persia can conquer all of egypt. When Brittania can take western euorpe. TW provides many many outcomes, some historically correct, some hilarious.
c&d: should be tweaked in patches, thats simply priorities gone wrong for the AI
3. What about them?
a: Stops them stealing your research, if you are stealing theirs, gives you a better chance, with the upcoming mp campaign, removes vision and stops their research.

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Thank you for reminding me. ;-)

Maybe I was just expecting too much of the new TW game.

I stick to my point though, that the power of the minor nations is nor very well balanced and that better use could have made of the fact that they play part in the game.
And I do not see any improvement in the diplomacy features at all.

I guess it is wait and see what the next patch will bring.

To me M2TW was a disappointment. It was just blitz. Everyone is going to war with you at some point anyway so just have at it.

This game is different. There are a lot of things still to learn and the tactics both land and sea have some depth.

Everything is not working perfectly but I think it will be much better than the past games in the end.

Granted it has more starting issues then the others but it is also more complex.

Diplomacy is improved. Some times factions will make peace when they should…not always of course, but sometimes.

I don’t find Rakes of much use. Maybe they just don’t work as well as advertised. Gentlemen do research and that is a big deal. If you can kill the enemy it does slow him…though usually it has been my men who went down in flames.

I know it can be improved and I hope that I like what they do…in the past I went back to the older versions. Something we can’t do this time. So I hope they keep the AI balanced and don’t make it a bunch of aggressive warmongering mad men.

My main problem with diplomacy is that you cannot intercede between 2 AI nations. An ally you go to war with to defeat a common enemy should also go to peace if you broker a peace deal with the enemy nation. Other than that the diplomacy is much improved over previous TW games. Most of the other points are pretty much spot on though.

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Originally Posted by Fisherking

Diplomacy is improved.

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Twice nothing is still nothing.

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Originally Posted by mmk

1. What´s the use of playing a campaign of almost 200 turns when after turn 40 you have basically won the game?

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And after turn 50 you consistently get game-ending CTDs, no matter which faction? :tomato:

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Originally Posted by mmk

Maybe I was just expecting too much of the new TW game.

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But it's so pretty (if your box has enough graphics horsepower) ... :laugh4:

problem with empire tw is they made it to complicated....

...for the ai

despite all the flaws, they did add a lot of new features.... but if the ai cant utilize them properly wtf is the point?

Well, it does have flaws, and its not for everyone.

At least are actually addressing the major problems, though. Remember when they fixed the passive AI bug in MTW 2, and then made two handers not suck? Me neither!

For anyone wishing to just dislike the game, great. You have the purgative.

But if all you want to do is complain then there is little reason to discuss the issue.

No one wants to change your mind.

We all have aspects we would have improved but if you would rather not play then fine.

Complaining for the sake of complaining is just flat boring.

If there are suggestions for improvement or what you would change then perhaps there is value in talking about it.

From my view point this thread is going no where and may have a very short life.

I think Empire Total War is a fine improvement over M2TW and RTW wall still being a Total War game which is what it is and I assume was set out to be from the start.

Would it be as fun if it was imposable to expand in an a historical way? Probably not it is a sandbox to play with after all.

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Originally Posted by MikeV

Twice nothing is still nothing.

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Do you not think that not having to run ambassadors around the map is an improvement? Its certainly more than nothing.

Btw you can answer more than one question per post, unless you want to spam your post number up ;)

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Originally Posted by bluenu

problem with empire tw is they made it to complicated....

...for the ai

despite all the flaws, they did add a lot of new features.... but if the ai cant utilize them properly wtf is the point?

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no they just forgot to include an AI and went for the point they knew would sell : eyecandy

Empty criticism is pointless!

Of course there is AI.

And if you don’t think it is improved go back an play M2 for a while.

I dont necessarily hate the Game, but am disappointed with endlesssssssssssssss Navy CTD's , regardless of Theatre. Even without use of Fleets, all of Europe is under Prussian control, with the exception of Great Britain, Denmark(Iceland) . The disadvantage being involved in a long, drawn-out LAND Battle, slowly conquering the territories, one by one without the use of Navies is a major setback.

When CA/ SEGA/ Whoever gets the patch to fix this Naval glitch, then I'd love to play as the Game was intended.

Those are good points!

But you know, I don’t have those issues.

My Land battles all hang instead. The Naval Game works great….

Sometimes it is Prussia and sometimes not.

I don’t know if it just acts differently on some systems or what but it does not make fixes easy when the problems are not all the same.

I know I hate having to auto resolve my battles. And CTD in Naval Battles would be just infuriating.

I hope something can be done soon!:sweatdrop:

I just don't understand how people are getting so many hangs and CTD's... I've only ever had 2!

Intel Core2 6600 @ 2.4 gigglehertz
2 gigglebytes of RAM
ATI Radeon HD 4800 series (one of the most unstable cards on the market!)
Windows XP home

ETW's state out of the box is vastly superior to that of both RTW and M2TW (can't comment on STW/MTW, as I didn't play them when they first came out). There are many annoying aspects to the game, most significantly with the AI, battle pathfinding, and CTDs, but it's a definite quality improvement over the previous titles when they were at the same level of patching. I think a large part of this is due to major improvements in the engine which have removed a lot of the problems in the RTW/M2TW engine.

I admit that the lack of naval invasions has essentially made me stop playing the game, but I am hopeful for the future with patching. A expect a patch-polished ETW with released mod tools and the promised multiplayer campaign mode to be the best TW game released so far. Let's just hope that the patches and improvements needed to get it there are released before we all get tired of waiting.

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Originally Posted by TinCow

ETW's state out of the box is vastly superior to that of both RTW and M2TW (can't comment on STW/MTW, as I didn't play them when they first came out). There are many annoying aspects to the game, most significantly with the AI, battle pathfinding, and CTDs, but it's a definite quality improvement over the previous titles when they were at the same level of patching. I think a large part of this is due to major improvements in the engine which have removed a lot of the problems in the RTW/M2TW engine.

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LOL no it isn't we're had 4 patches now out of a box i couldn't even start the game.

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Originally Posted by Smellycat

LOL no it isn't we're had 4 patches now out of a box i couldn't even start the game.

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I don't think your experience out of the box is typical. My game ran fine out of the box, except for very annoying CTDs when boarding during naval battles. That CTD was fixed in the first patch, though I still get a few random ones. If you are finding that you are having technical problems that are not often reported by other people, it is probably because your computer is the problem. Sometimes it's hardware, but more often it is OS configuration or driver problems. Failure to update VPU drivers, failure to update your OS, and general incompatibility problems aren't really ETW's fault. Sometimes you just need to format and make a clean OS install. It's annoying, but it's part of life as a PC gamer.

If you're having problems, I find it important to try and get a feel for how often other people are having the same problem. If the problem is common, then it's likely a game software issue. If it's uncommon, then it's likely an issue with your own machine. Being unable to start the game out of the box is definitely an uncommon problem.

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Originally Posted by TinCow

I don't think your experience out of the box is typical. My game ran fine out of the box, except for very annoying CTDs when boarding during naval battles. That CTD was fixed in the first patch, though I still get a few random ones. If you are finding that you are having technical problems that are not often reported by other people, it is probably because your computer is the problem. Sometimes it's hardware, but more often it is OS configuration or driver problems. Failure to update VPU drivers, failure to update your OS, and general incompatibility problems aren't really ETW's fault. Sometimes you just need to format and make a clean OS install. It's annoying, but it's part of life as a PC gamer.

If you're having problems, I find it important to try and get a feel for how often other people are having the same problem. If the problem is common, then it's likely a game software issue. If it's uncommon, then it's likely an issue with your own machine. Being unable to start the game out of the box is definitely an uncommon problem.

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I can play the game after 4 patches so i doubt it is my computer and if you check the readme's to each patch they mention ctds being fixed. I have a vivid memory of playing RTW and M2TW out of the box for months (untill the patches came fixing the secondary weapon in RTW and the peasant army zerg being better than knights in M2TW) without major hiccups. I am not alone in having technical issues just go to the official forums

We know you are not alone, but TinCow is saying that it is still uncommon that you have these problems. I for one have not had any CTDs, and thus, I have no reason to post a thread about how I my game is fine.

Part of the issue is that there are so many different possible PC configurations, that it's impossible for the devs to test them all prior to release. Once a game is released, a lot of new bugs (particularly hardware bugs) pop up, simply because suddenly there's a much wider base using the software. For this reason, I personally don't consider these uncommon incompatibilities to be major faults of the dev. It would be unreasonable to expect them to test every possible hardware configuration, so some are going to slip through.

What I do blame the devs for are things like the lack of naval invasions. That exists in everyone's game, and is a clear bug that should have been noticed prior to release. There's no way that one wasn't pointed out in testing, so its presence OOB is irksome.

If you read my comment you will see i am disagreeinf with the view that ETW's state out of the box is vastly superior to that of both RTW and M2TW . If you followed the drama on the official forums as well as TWC (yes the org has shrunk a lot) you would see that lots of ppl think that CA botched this release. Adding to the annoyance is the fact that we had to pay extra to get all the units (lucky noone came up with the idea to make the unplayable factions part of dowloadable content they could charge for). I like the game but i regret buying it for the first time in the series. Its been shelved 2 weeks now waiting for an AI. consider the enthusiasm in the posts pre release here : is it really the players/posters that are to be blamed for the lack of it now?

The other two had the same issues with CTDs, memory leaks, AI issues, and so on. It took much longer to get fixes and some of them came from the mod community prior to the official fixes…which for both games took a while, but for M2 in particular it seemed to take ages. For what ever reason 3 months seems to stick in my mind. That I believe was about twice the wait for the RTW patch. (6 weeks I think)

This game has not even been out that long!

Most of the changes have fixed technical glitches but most have not been aimed at game play, I don’t think.

I know with RTW I was making saves sometimes twice a turn or more.
I had a bleeding edge system at the time and still had to go and get THE best graphics card on the market to get it to work half way!

I know with the system I have at the moment that the land battle hang-up seem to be more to do with the locations on the map than the inability of the system to handle battles. (Something I noticed about a week ago but haven’t brought up until now)

The level of hate and discontent is even much milder than I remember from past releases.

If you think I am wrong you can always go and check the archives and the back of the threads.

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Originally Posted by A Very Super Market

We know you are not alone, but TinCow is saying that it is still uncommon that you have these problems. I for one have not had any CTDs, and thus, I have no reason to post a thread about how I my game is fine.

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Yes but why do you feel you have to post in a thread about how the game is not fine? I for one wouldn't troll that thread if i had no problems- I would be too busy playing the game

How am I trolling? Have I insulted you in some way?

OK:1 you have no problems = no thread ;= makes sense
2 I have problem = no thread because of 1 ;= not same thing because having a problem is a bigger reason for starting a thread than not having one in my opinion, besides i doubt anyone would object to you starting one

No, that logic doesn't work. And anyways;

I'm not trying to stop you from making a thread, I'm trying to say that the fact that these threads exist doesn't mean that the game is completely glitched for everyone.

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Originally Posted by TinCow

I don't think your experience out of the box is typical. My game ran fine out of the box, except for very annoying CTDs when boarding during naval battles. That CTD was fixed in the first patch, though I still get a few random ones. If you are finding that you are having technical problems that are not often reported by other people, it is probably because your computer is the problem. Sometimes it's hardware, but more often it is OS configuration or driver problems. Failure to update VPU drivers, failure to update your OS, and general incompatibility problems aren't really ETW's fault. Sometimes you just need to format and make a clean OS install. It's annoying, but it's part of life as a PC gamer.

If you're having problems, I find it important to try and get a feel for how often other people are having the same problem. If the problem is common, then it's likely a game software issue. If it's uncommon, then it's likely an issue with your own machine. Being unable to start the game out of the box is definitely an uncommon problem.

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Forgive My ignorance, but how does one obtain/use this first Patch, that can correct Navy CTD's ???

That is the ONLY issue I seem to have with ETW, every other aspect of Gameplay runs just fine. I have enjoyed every other Game since STW came out years ago, and have never had any problems until I purchased ETW. I had seriously looked forward to Naval interaction personally, being a former Naval Officer and Merchant Mariner, as I would LOVE to see how the Navies play/interact on the Game, but alas, " das geht nicht" ! !!!

Any advice/suggestions would be Welcome.