IGN preview

[Martok]

Linky



The preview takes a more in-depth look at the game's naval aspect, particularly its importance to trade. It also reveals a bit more info about Empire's political and diplomatic portions as well.

[rajpoot]

All right! I'm loving this, I just hope that the flow of updates continues thick and fast this way

Btw, this thing has put me on tenterhooks again, we see a ship being blown to bits as the cannon balls hit the powder magzine. Agreed it's the end of the battle, and the outcome is almost decided, but still what are the chances that the ship has to explode?! I really hope this bit was just in favour of the preview, to show off how good it looks and not a regular occurrence.
Furthermore, the formations still seem to be looking a bit too rigid........? I mean it all looks great, just a bit too mechanical to be true.

[pevergreen]

The practical benefit of this approach is that you can now recruit armies by simply selecting your generals and ordering new troops. "You're not spending your time assembling armies and then marching them to the place you want to be," James explains. "You just say, I want them to be here." The orders are automatically assigned to nearby provinces and once the troops are trained, they'll march to wherever the general is stationed.



Yes! Finally an explanation on how thats going to work!

[PBI]

Nice stuff. A couple of the bits that caught my eye:

And in case you're worried that wily enemy players can sneak by your squadrons on their own turn, each fleet in this game projects a rather large zone of control and will have the option to intercept passing ships and engage them in battle.

Excellent, I was worried about how it would be possible to stop a one-turn naval invasion across the English Channel; so hopefully just having a fleet in one of the Channel ports should be enough to intercept an invasion.

You can even order artillery to fire on a fixed point on the map to discourage enemies from crossing a specific chokepoint or approaching a key objective.

Good, should hopefully make artillery more useful and less likely to spend the whole battle trying to turn to target a unit of cavalry.

or even slightly after our period like Waterloo

Bit odd, I thought the timeframe was 1700-1820, i.e. including Waterloo?

So if your army is fighting near a farm or a mine, the tactical map will reflect that with appropriate structures and backdrops.

Very nice.

[CBR]

And here is new E3 preview:

Hmm rocket ships...

More land battle details coming at Leipzig. Will CA be able to deliver or will they suffer a similar fate as Napoleon did 195 years ago?


CBR

[The_Doctor]

From the E3 preview:

First, in addition to the grand campaign, the game will include a Road to Independence campaign that lets players take charge of America from the founding of Jamestown to the victory at Yorktown.

I like the sounds of this.

[Martok]

And here is new E3 preview:

Hmm rocket ships...

....And steamships, which seems a tad anachronistic. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I seem to recall that steam-powered warships didn't really come into being until the late 19th century (and at the very least, they certainly weren't common until then).


This greatly cheered me, however:

They also mentioned that the campaign AI will now advise the tactical AI about how important a battle is. So if an enemy is fighting while retreating on the strategic map, they might tell the tactical AI to fight a delaying action, preserving as many of their troops as possible. If the battle takes place just adjacent to the enemy capital, the campaign AI will tell the tactical AI to go all out and fight to the very last man.

Now *that* is something I've wanted to see in strategy games for a long time now -- an AI that is able (at least to a degree) to combine its strategic/tactical priorities! It's always frustrated me when the AI goes down in flames fighting over an insignificant city/world, yet abandons its capital with almost nary a fight. This is welcome news indeed.

[rajpoot]

....And steamships, which seems a tad anachronistic. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I seem to recall that steam-powered warships didn't really come into being until the late 19th century (and at the very least, they certainly weren't common until then).

I'm not supporting but this is expected, any way you look at it. For one, they need to have content, number two, the very first date on the latest calender sets the invention of the 'steam engine' in 1698 :P as will be the case with primitive sort of machine guns I think. Another calender set the first patented 'machine gun' somewhere in 1700s.

[CBR]

....And steamships, which seems a tad anachronistic. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I seem to recall that steam-powered warships didn't really come into being until the late 19th century (and at the very least, they certainly weren't common until then).

There were steamships in use by mid 19th century. But with that reasoning we can expect breach loader rifles too I guess.

From the preview on naval combat and the fantasy(rocket) units it seems more like some fast paced naval fun than hardcore wargaming but could we have expected otherwise?


CBR

[SwordsMaster]

Heh, I guess it's always easier for modders to remove fantasy content than to add it in anew.

[pevergreen]

I hope they are the traditional one fantasy unit (Arcani/Sherwood Archers etc) and not commonplace.

[rajpoot]

Rocket ships are not total fantasy. I haven't read about any Oriental rocket ships, but there have been quite a few rocket vessels in the West.
The one that I know of, the most famous one perhaps is the one that made Francis Scott put in the line 'the rockets' read glare', HMS Erebus was a rocket ship.
Ofcourse, the rockets were highly inaccurate, so these were used as psychological weapons rather than ones that actually cause damage.

[CBR]

Shacknews has an article: Empire: Total War is a Strategy Fan's Wet Dream

Not so much new stuff but some more pics.


CBR

[hoom]

Not so much new stuff but some more pics.

Really nice, high-res pics

[Adrian II]

I haven't looked into the E:TW development threads for quite a while. I didn' t want to be disappointed the way I was by Imperial Glory.

But the gameplay images and screenshots that we are offered now, plus the commentary in interviews with developers, are very promising indeed. If the naval battles are anything like the description in Shacknews I will seriously consider giving up my job and social life and marrying this game. For better or for worse.

I got a look at a lengthy naval battle, the Americans facing down the British. The game features dozens of ships, and all sorts were on display. Small sloops, larger frigates, ships of the line--even rudimentary rocket-armed ships and early steam-powered behemoths.

It is difficult to stress how fantastic the game looks in motion. Cannon fire is a sight to see: billowy smoke thundering from each broadside, masts accurately snapping and crashing onto the rolling waves. Crew effects have been added since last we saw a build, and now an impressive number of sailors can be seen running about the decks, loading cannon and climbing the crow's nest.

During a boarding action, the little men used grappling hooks to pull an enemy ship closer. When the two had joined, they threw down planks and boarded, engaging in hand-to-hand combat and quick musket fire. Combat in Empire is now rendered on a soldier-by-soldier basis, more in the tradition of Shogun's duel-focused combat than Rome's hordes. Men were seen aggressively locking muskets and battling eachother to the death, even fighting up in the crow's nest.

For a naval buff like myself this be da shizzle, man, precisely because it is more than a tactical naval game. You're not just directing a fleet in(to) battle, you are directing fleets as part of a wider strategic situation, deciding when and where to build them, deploy them, and engage (or be engaged by) the enemy with them. Thinking of the possibilities gives me goosebumps.

As for the first steamship venturing out to sea, Wiki has a nice write-up:

The Élise was the first steam ship to cross the English Channel.

She was bought in England 1816 by Pierre Andriel as Margery, and renamed Élise. Andriel intended to accomplish a spectacular crossing of the Channel to convince public opinion that steam ships could be ocean-worthy.

The Élise departed from Newhaven on 17 March, with a heavy sea. At midnight, a tempest broke out, and Andriel had to threaten his own crew at gun point and award three bottles of rum to the first man to spot the French coast. After 17 hours of sea, the Élise reached Le Havre.

She sailed up the Seine and arrived in Paris on 28 March, becoming a popular sensation. Two small saluting guns were mounted at the bow and fired in honour of Louis XVIII.

[Mailman653]

That article says 1816 was the year for the first steamship to go out to sea but in a post further up which is a quote from the devs, they stated something about Waterloo being past the time frame of the game, that battle if I'm not mistaken was 1815.

So....we need more info, lol.

What also I would like to know is if the US is featured in its own storyline, does that mean for the grand campaign they won't be playable?

Overall, I think any news right now is good news and I hope by this fall we will have the first in game videos coming out.

[Jack Lusted]

That article says 1816 was the year for the first steamship to go out to sea but in a post further up which is a quote from the devs, they stated something about Waterloo being past the time frame of the game, that battle if I'm not mistaken was 1815.

So....we need more info, lol.

In Empire if you want you can research tech from slightly beyond the time frame covered by the game if you put the effort into it. So that's why you might see Steam ships in the campaign.

And America will be playable.

[rajpoot]

In Empire if you want you can research tech from slightly beyond the time frame covered by the game if you put the effort into it. So that's why you might see Steam ships in the campaign.

Right, that makes sense.

[Adrian II]

In Empire if you want you can research tech from slightly beyond the time frame covered by the game if you put the effort into it. So that's why you might see Steam ships in the campaign.

And America will be playable.

Right. I have the feeling you are also going to tell me that Empire will have sails and ensigns that 'follow' the wind direction, as per the screenshot I posted above in this thread. If that is the case I will gladly give up sex for this game as well - at least until Trafalgar...

[Jack Lusted]

Right. I have the feeling you are also going to tell me that Empire will have sails and ensigns that 'follow' the wind direction, as per the screenshot I posted above in this thread.

Yes sails and flags will be affected by the wind direction.

[Martok]

And America will be playable.

Is the USA going to be playable in the main campaign, or just in the American Independence campaign?

[Mailman653]

Is the USA going to be playable in the main campaign, or just in the American Independence campaign?

Both.

[pevergreen]

I disagree with Mailman. I think they wont be playable in the normal campaign, they will be an emerging faction, like the Romano-British.

[Martok]

I disagree with Mailman. I think they wont be playable in the normal campaign, they will be an emerging faction, like the Romano-British.

That's what I'm thinking as well, but I dislike making assumptions.

It wouldn't make any sense to have the US as a playable faction in the main campaign. Both for gameplay reasons (i.e., they won't appear until later in the game); and also because, quite frankly, we just weren't that important back then. (To have us as a playable faction in the main campaign would be like having one of the numerous small German principalities as a playable faction.)

[AlJabberwock]

Surely the one cautionary note in all this heady hysteria is that there may be a piper to pay...

IN fact,
we should consider it most probable the Prophet in his great and kind wisdom would tell us SEVERAL pipers will have their hands out... named NVidia, ATI, AMD and Intel. You can add mobo and ram and other hardware makers to your particular taste.

When we had gathered a rough idea of the needs of MTW2, the last round up of improvements I made for the kid's machines was to add the 7900GTX and, when it came out, the 8800GTS EE (both oc'd versions) and similar levels of speed elsewhere to prevent bottlenecking. Both no longer in the primary series, these vid cards along with now-soon-to-be-lame 3.2 gig dual cores and 4 gigs of Corsair 800 ddr2 dual-channel and very fast perp drives and so forth, required new system builds to accommodate.

Unless the new engine is extremely more efficient than the previous generation, the leviathan-level mind-numbing computing power likely to be required by the physics detail and rendering that is being suggested is perhaps beyond these current upper end systems' capacities judging by our experience with MTW2 without these added confections.

The Physics of buoyancy, wind and impact, the issues of physical cover and its vissicitudes, cross-ai interpretation and true-form translaton of satellite imagery to the proximate battle's field all have to use resources. The question has to then be, not whether, but rather how much and from whence shall they come...

May Allah and the price of hardware be merciful,

AlJabberwock

[Adrian II]

Yes sails and flags will be affected by the wind direction.

There you go. A certain lady will be crying in the pillow for a few years. What can I say, it's a gamers' world.

[rajpoot]

While the wind direction thingy is impressive, it is not something brand new .............I believe Pirates 2 had it too.....?

[Sheogorath]

My main fear regarding naval combat is that CA's interface looks an AWFUL lot like the Imperial Glory naval interface. And anybody who has played IG knows full well how impossible it was to manage anything more than two ships at once. It was also virtually impossible to, say, form a line of battle, and most fights basically turned into 'run in circles, then suddenly change direction to catch the computer by surprise' matches.
Hopefully CA was kind enough to include some formation controls, or at least will allow the deployment of ships prior to battle (which seems likely, from the other preview on the battle).

As to rockets on ships, I recall something about them seeing limited use with the British and Russians (two nations with the most contact with Eastern nations), mostly as a means of setting fire to rigging and so forth. They never really saw a lot of action, however, and were never really made famous. I dont think they were 'dedicated' rocket ships, either, just ships with rocket-launching apparatuses on them.

Steam ships were AROUND in the 1820's, I believe Russia launched its first naval steamship in 1821, the British some time around 1815 or so.
I believe MOST steam ships were of the 'gunboat' variety until the 1850's or so. Basically they had four or five big guns (howitzers, perhaps?) mostly intended for shore bombardment.

[Mailman653]

, quite frankly, we just weren't that important back then.

How true

[The_Reckoning]

Awesomeness:

http://uk.pc.gamespy.com/pc/empire-t.../891460p1.html

"You can make moves and conquer territory throughout the game that causes Napoleon to fail to show up and take command of France."

Yessssssss.

No more Mongol/Timurid-style scripted events.