Demo Discussion Thread

[Greyblades]

My computer might be falling behind in speed, because it takes 10 second just to make the main menu appear after a battle is won. It also takes 20-30 or 30+ seconds to load a battle. Even the EB mod, with lots of extra scripting, loads faster than that. I might have difficulty campaigning at that speed.

No thats happening to everyone, heck Monk (I think) was complaining about waiting more than 5 minutes to load a tutorial.

[Gregoshi]

Update: I had some time this evening so took the time (5+ minute loads) to drop the graphics to "low" and the resolution to near the bottom end (1280x720 I think). This made a big difference. Load times were more along the lines of 2-3 minutes with the load bar moving more often than not. The land tutorial and Brandywine battle (a close victory) weren't too bad from a playability standpoint. There was one noticable slow down as several units engaged at the secondary ford. The graphics, while not drop dead gorgeous on low, were acceptable (this from someone who remembers Pong) if you kept your elevation up high. Down low and close, men turned to smeared rectangles with arms and legs whole glided along the ground anywhere beyond close range. However, since I prefer controlling things from on high, this was no real inconvenience. I haven't tried the naval battle yet, so I can't comment on it.

The experience so far once I got the demo to perform at a passable level, wasn't too bad. However, I don't see me getting ETW until I get a new computer.

[pevergreen]

Smoke trails on bullets and cannon shots were altogether nonexistent. I find them distracting and annoying. M:TW2 got them right. I guess they are there to remind players who is shooting at what but I would rather do without them. I hope we can turn them off somehow just like the big flags and green arrows.

Much easier to turn those arrows and flags off now, from the options menu!

edit: impressions timeu!

I've played the Land battle tutorial and the Land battle.

Graphics were set to medium by the game, looks great. Units respond well, perform how they should and just look sooo cuuuute.

AI ambushed me and ran back a bit when it didnt look good. If I didn't have my general just behind my line of troops, I would have routed.

I ended up losing my general but I had about 300 infantry flank their artillery and melee them out. I lost about 150 to canister shot. Wow...so good. I saw one cannon shoot out and it ripped through 4 charging units. Killed about 15-20 per unit.

experience for melee units (only ones i checked) gives +1 to a few stats, like it used to.

My only issue at the moment is that when you zoom in, the game doesnt scroll fast enough.

For those of you who complain about poor performance, just think back to the M2TW demo. That was choppy as hell, must have been about 5 fps. The game came out and it was fine.

As for load times, the longest load ive had was about 50 seconds, and that was from tabbing out and in. Battles load and go back to menu in about 40 seconds, my computer aint no beast either, its a laptop.

[peacemaker]

argh. The demo died on me as soon as I tried to launch it, I guess I'll try to re-download it....

[Belgolas]

To get rid of the banners go into the options menu.

[Alexander the Pretty Good]

I've figured out what "skirmish" does. When enabled, the unit will avoid physical contact (turning and running automatically). Used it to finish off some brave but foolish American rifles once. They chased my skirmishing light infantry back into some Hessian line.

The AI is gutsy but not (usually) suicidal with charging infantry. I like it. If you aren't paying attention and they sneak up a long rifle on an outnumbered unit (light infantry seem to be targeted particularly) they'll run them right over.

[Evil_Maniac From Mars]

Only got through the land tutorial so far. My load times were alright, but my graphics were ranging from passable to terrible, so I'll have to readjust them slightly.

[Polemists]

Greetings all :), I'm not usually on during a friday, but it was a pleasant surprise to return to so much demo activity...and of course...the demo.

To the demo legion.


Know that much like liberty, we have fought and prevailed. We had our opponents in the monarchy (mods), the forces of oppression (slow ca devs) and even our countrymen (fellow orgahs). We prevailed.

Much like the legions of the past though, we have won our battle. It is time to disperse. To enjoy the fruits of our labor.

There shall be other demos though, other foreign fronts. When that time comes we shall rise up again. To fight tyrranny (Slow demo updates) wherever they may appear.

Vive le Liberty, Vive Le Demo


Well i'm still downloading it but tonight I shall be playing it :). I think it was well worth the effort.

[Evil_Maniac From Mars]

Right. I'm now getting an error saying that

The game is currently unavailable. Please try again at a later time.

...whenever I try to launch it. I have already tried redownloading. What gives?

[pevergreen]

Restart steam? If that doesn't work, reboot?

Also you could try launching the actual .exe

Go to your steam folder, steamapps, common, empire total war demo.

[Greyblades]

Greetings all :), I'm not usually on during a friday, but it was a pleasant surprise to return to so much demo activity...and of course...the demo.

To the demo legion.


Know that much like liberty, we have fought and prevailed. We had our opponents in the monarchy (mods), the forces of oppression (slow ca devs) and even our countrymen (fellow orgahs). We prevailed.

Much like the legions of the past though, we have won our battle. It is time to disperse. To enjoy the fruits of our labor.

There shall be other demos though, other foreign fronts. When that time comes we shall rise up again. To fight tyrranny (Slow demo updates) wherever they may appear.

Vive le Liberty, Vive Le Demo


Well i'm still downloading it but tonight I shall be playing it :). I think it was well worth the effort.

Who are you and what have you done with polemists. :P
Huh... i was kinda expecting some thing more... freak out-y

So what are you going to obsess about now the demos out?

[Megas Methuselah]

You're a deserter, Polemists. All you did today was enjoy RL while the rest of us played the demo to death and beyond.

Anyways, after winning my first go at the battle (losses, 471; kills, 800 and some), I decided to go again. Being a big fan of bayonet and cavalry charges, I decided to go for a thorough full-frontal assault across the first ford with all my troops in a charge.

God, it was bloody chaos. I slowly gained ground, and finally advanced to the town hall, fighting in melee the whole way. Me and the AI would just send routed units right back into the fray. Eventually, though, the AI brought in fresh units of Long Riflemen and Minutemen and won the battle through sheer force of numbers.

But it was sooo fun. And like pever said, the soldiers were soooo cuuute!




As for the graphics, I turned off shadows, bloom, grass. Everything else I set to high. The loads were long, but the battles were not laggy. It was ok. I'm going to hope that pever is right, in that the actual game will play out better in terms of performance.

[hoom]

Its fairly common for demos to be using older engine code with debugging code still in place = poor performance.
Also I think the way that CA scripts battles can sometimes have a negative impact on speed.

[Evil_Maniac From Mars]

Alright, turned out it was my firewall - I'd only allowed Empire to connect once, instead of forever. My opinion of the demo is that it is alright - but never try to CTRL + ALT + DEL out of it. Ever. The menu lag is immense.

[Swoosh So]

So i came here looking for info from peeps who have played the demo, so i click the sticky after seeing a mod post that theyre shutting down demo threads, and i find this completely stupid and useless sticky post... joy.

[Megas Methuselah]

... What?

Whatever. The mods are only against the people (i.e. Polemists) who would continually make posts about how much they wanted the demo. Those kinds of posters are patriots, IMHO.

[quadalpha]

Anyone else have a problem with limbering the horse arty? Once the horses/men/gun got stuck on each other and refuse to do anything.

Your Hessians will be under cannon fire from the very beginning, though moving them forward a bit onto the reverse slope seems to solve that problem. They will still be fired upon, but to no effect, and your horse arty can then get into position on your left. I haven't tried, but it seems that if you don't make a move to either ford, the Americans will quite happily take a pounding while trying to bombard your Hessians.

For those who haven't been to TWC's thread, Jack Lusted says:

- Use groups in the naval battle to make your ships follow the leader.
- Regarding scripts: Brandywine - Main force of AI is under AI control but only held in position, is then released to AI control after different times based on which ford you go to. Lagos - not scriped at all.

Edit:

From the official forums -

c:\Documents and Settings\**your name **\Application Data\The Creative Assembly\EmpireDemo2\scripts\preferences.empire_script.txt

and change the value:

battle_difficulty

I just checked mine, and it seems that the default setting for the demo is "normal" (there's also "easy", "hard", and "vhard").

[Mailman653]

ThePianist
Some distinguishing features are the extra flag beneath the national flag, which makes it really exciting. It means there can be regimental flags. Also the little flag is square for infantry, triangular for cavalry and concave pentagonal for artillery.

Which are the secondary flags your talking about? Cause I've only see the one flag the model carries and then the big marker flag which I turned off. I'd love to see regimental flags, been talking about that for ages. Even if its not with the "right" regiment just the fact of having that second flag there would be awesome.

[Polemists]

Well I guess I could have done a gaint spam post that just did Demo Demo Demo for a page, but really i'm just to ecastatic at having demo to do that. Plus it's 8 am in the morning and i'm sleepy.

Well other then waiting for the demo to download i'll probably get geared up about etw release in a week ro so :)

[Alexander the Pretty Good]

Thanks for the headsup re Jack, quadalpha. I'm a bit disappointed that the AI doesn't always shift the cannons if you go through the unprotected ford. I guess it figures that the cannons can shoot at (though not hit) targets almost the entire time, so it doesn't "think" that they need to be moved.

[knoddy]

played the naval battle, got my ass handed to me, but it was really good, the only thing i didnt like was the men jumping onto the enemy ship, not because they were jumping just cos they were jumping like 10 feet in the air lol. looked a bit weird, to all the people who thought it was arcady i dunno wot there problem is, YES it is a little unrealistic, but i found the turning circles not all that small. i dunno i liked it, im quite excited to get the full version and give it a whirl!

Cheers Knoddy

[Polemists]

For those of you having download problems, though I think more people over at Total War forum center are having problems rather then here

Steam Settings > Downloads > Download region and change it

Seems to be the only real advice over there, they have a 21 page and counting thread going for download issues and speeds but that seems to be the only relevant advice.

I look forward to testing it out in a few min when I head home :)

[Sisco Americanus]

In case there's anyone else out there like me who hasn't played a total war game in a while, let me assure you that There IS friendly fire in the naval battles. I took out the masts of three of my own ships with an accidental broadside down the front of the column....

[Marten]

Good morning gentleman,

after downloading, cursing steam, installing the game and watching ... here are the results from the german jury:

• After chanching the server to east coast, speed increased from average 52 KB/s on german, italian and dutch servers to 580 KB/s. I will keep that in mind for future downloads ...

• I started the pc anew after finished download. Then to the demo! First i disabled Steam. Nice Intro - think i've seen that before in some vid - the automatic settings for hardware say "High" on all options.

• My System: 2.4 Dual Core, XP32 and SP3, 2 GB RAM, 9600 GT with 1024 MB RAM. Resolution in game 1440 x 900, 4x anti-aliasing, shadows on medium, depth on. Average of 38 - 40 fps. I changed later to 1280 x 800 - result was smoother scrolling and faster camera action.

• Load times are similar to Med2 - maybe 5-10 sec longer. I played the land tutorial first - and i loved what i saw. Graphics are good, i had a bit "crackle" in sound- so i changed the sound options from "windows default" to "stereo headphones" - did it for me.

• I played the whole demo 2 times, got frightened first time when the screen seems to freeze after "victory" - but just 3 seconds or so. I won "Lagos" on first time with capturing 3 french ships and loosing 1 of my own. I missed a "follow" button like it was in imp glory. But grouping seems to force the ships to follow the leader. I think i will never play battles with more then 8-10 ships in my fleet ...

To remove the markers and flags: i had to do it every time again when i started the demo. Anyone some resolution for that?

My conclusion: I like it! Can't wait for the retail version. And i will buy 1 GB of RAM to be sure ...

Edit: Wooooooooooooooooooooot! I'm a member Baby! ;)

[Skullheadhq]

Argh... The demo is not available...all the waiting for nothing

Edit: Verify the Integrity of the game cache

[Polemists]

The demo is avaliable, dunno why your upset.

Anyhoo, hey guys when your downloading if it does updating or goes back to 0% just ignore it, if you go into your steam folder and search for Empire total war folder, right click on properties and you should see the number increase.

Mine was still saying 0% even when it went from 0-91mb and then to 138 mb.

So just watch the folder and not the little 0%, I switched my region to another region and it helped alot to, went from like 3kbps to 50 kbps.

Good luck downloading all :)

[Wausser]

Hmm just played the tutorials, pretty good load time(around 1-1.5 min), only the game crashed during the land battle..


My system: Intel Q8200 @2,33 Ghz, 4 GB Ram, Asus EAH4850 1GB @ Vista Ultimate

[InsaneApache]

I got it and ran it. It took about 10 minutes loading the opening, it still hadn't finished so I dropped out, turn off all the background programs and tried again. Same result.

So I havn't had chance to play it but, as I suspected, like Greg I'll have to fork out on a new system to run it. Admittedly I'm on an ancient machine but I'm still disapointed.

Another thing that hacked me off was being only able to play it whist online. My connex is a bit dodgy ATM so not a happy chappy here.

[hoom]

Well I had little issue downloading it in NZ.
No problem with the intro movie.
Auto settings were ok, set most stuff to high for my C2D e6600 @2.9ghz with 2GB DDR2 & Radeon 4870.

Weird flickering of the UI in both tutorials & the Naval Battle (haven't played the land battle), goes away after you change a graphics setting that forces the game to reload the scene.
Could be related to having forced AA & AF in Catalyst Control Centre or maybe being on Win7 x64 Beta?

Game runs ok otherwise even after I bumped everything to max settings.

Lost the naval battle trying to dismast & capture the frenchies
I think I lost a couple of my own ships in there

I believe the delays in loading after changing settings is because they are presumably using dynamically compiled shaders.
There are so many variables that affect shaders (resolution/texture detail/unit detail etc) that it can be best to recompile the code any time that its changed rather than to pre-compile for every possible option.
It means that you have to wait around when you change stuff but enables more effects to be used.
Other games do the same thing eg Battlefield2 takes ages to recompile the shaders when you make minor graphic changes too.

Also its re-loading the scene with the new settings.
In earlier games you couldn't change all settings from within a battle, had to go out to the main menu to make the changes & it would then load the changed effects next battle etc.

[Polemists]

Another thing that hacked me off was being only able to play it whist online. My connex is a bit dodgy ATM so not a happy chappy here.

Steam does have a offline mode, and empire total war full game can run in the offline mode.

Not sure about demo, but I assume it can run with steam in offline mode, since most demos can.