Dear All,
So Empire has been out just over 24 hours now and it's great to see so many people having fun and playing the game we've all been working on for so long, thanks again for your patience.
Naturally the first day has thrown up a few issues that people are concerned about and I wanted to take this opporutinty to address a few of those.
Steam:
Preloading - Steam preloading was unfortunately unavailable, this was addressed in a previous statement, but I wanted to pass on our apologies again that this didn't take place. This occured for technical reasons outside CA's control. We are looking into a way of repaying the faith of those that preordered a while ago, more will be communicated as it develops.
Downloading times and patches - These vary a great deal depending on your connection, location, and indeed the server you are downloading from. We deliberately kept the day one patch small (100MB approx) so as to remove too much additional download pressure on your connections. Overall the download times seem to have been good, and despite heavy demand Steam coped well although I know it was a tough wait initially for those of you downloading at first. Again, thanks for your patience.
Why Steam - There has been a lot of conjecture that we used Steam solely for copy protection means and that this placed unnecessary demands on our fans whilst the pirates still went ahead and copied Empire. Part of the decision for Steam was indeed copy protection, I'd be lying if I said that wasn‘t the case. However no copy protection method is foolproof and we do recognise that less casual pirates will still copy the game. Steam offers us a variety of excellent multiplayer facets, an achievment system a strong userbase, good support and automatic patching to every one of our players. These are the primary reasons we chose to use it. I realise there are those people who simply do not like Steam and never will, that's fair enough, from a developer perspective it was never intended to harm fans and we believe it offers a genuine advantage to our title, after a few rounds of seamless 18th century warfare agtainst friends, hopefully you will too.
Nvidia Graphics Issues:
A few people have reported problems with some Nvidia graphics cards when playing Empire. The latest Nvidia drivers, that is those released yesterday (Approximately) have not been fully tested with Empire, meaning we cannot guarantee their stability. We test as fully as we can but when drivers are released so close to our release date, there's simply no way we can put them fully through their paces before you guys get the game. Rolling back to older drivers seems to solve the issue in most cases, I can say we've tested driver version 7.15.0011.8206 on a huge range on Nvidia cards and had no significant problems. But we're still working to see if there's anything we can do.
As well as the driver work arounds one of our graphics gurus here recommends turning off volumetric effects for the time being, in case that's whats going wrong with the drivers. It might also be helpful to step through the other options too 'SSAO', VSync etc.
Canada
There appears to have been some fault in distribution or delivery of Empire in many Canadian territories. SEGA are investigating this and we'll get back to you as soon as we have any more news. Thank you to everyone who's going out looking for the game and trying hard to get it, we're doing all we can to get it to you!
Trade Route Problems
We've become aware of an occasional problem with the trade route system when shipping goods with some factions to some cities. This is being addressed currently and will be fixed shortly. Which brings me neatly to my final point...
Support and Patches:
We fully intend to support Empire consistently post-release. We're very appreciative to everyone thats bought the title and you deserve our continued support as a result. Therefore I can confirm that we are currently working on a patch that will be automatically rolled out via Steam, sometime next week.
This patch will address the gameplay issue above, fix a few stability problems and improve upon Empire's general performance.
There is a patch schedule that means regular patches will be appearing after this point. To that end, if you have any problems gameplay or otherwise please report them in a thread on the technical section of the forum giving your dxdiag information and as much constructive feedback as possible. We want to make Empire the best Total War experience to date and with your help we can continue to do that.
As always, many thanks for your patience and your continued support. We will do all we can to reward that and support the title you have bought for the future.
Kind regards,
Kieran
Official: Empire - The first 24 hours
Originally Posted by Strike For The South
- Horseman of the 
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