A Concern Regarding Preferences

[ArtillerySmoke]

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?

[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.

[ArtillerySmoke]

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.

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.

[peacemaker]

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.

[Beskar]

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)

[Barkhorn1x]

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.