smashed my copy of E:TW with a two pound beater

[A Very Super Market]

No no, that doesn't actually work.

[Skott]

If your pc/laptop isnt hooked up to the internet you should get a little popup saying it cant connect and asks if you want to play in offline mode. At least mine always does when I take my SFF pc on the road. I click on the offline promp and then fire up the game. You only need STEAM for the patches/updates for the game or to play MP.

[Megas Methuselah]

Crazy kid.

[Phog_of_War]

I chuckled a bit when I read the OP.

Not a big loss really when you consider it. Whats one man in the grand scheme of things?

In all seriousnes, it is easy enough to play this game without being online. I mean really, if your only problem is that you do not want to install Steam on your laptop then that is your loss. Many on this fourm, myself included, have said many great things about Steam. You dont even be online, just have the program and run in off-line mode.

You get no spam from Steam, reliable servers for MP, and overall it enhances my personal gaming experiance.

[Megas Methuselah]

I chuckled a bit when I read the OP.

Not a big loss really when you consider it. Whats one man in the grand scheme of things?

In all seriousnes, it is easy enough to play this game without being online. I mean really, if your only problem is that you do not want to install Steam on your laptop then that is your loss. Many on this fourm, myself included, have said many great things about Steam. You dont even be online, just have the program and run in off-line mode.

You get no spam from Steam, reliable servers for MP, and overall it enhances my personal gaming experiance.

[Grumfoss]

Otto Khan - Sorry you smashed your game (Personally I think your a Muppet and should really go and see a counselor about your anger issues) but you do realize that you can play it without the DVD in the drive and because of Steam you can download it again at a later date as the game is registered to you. So smashing your Disks was a waste of time.

As people have already said you can play the game offline so I really can't understand what your problem is?? Were you trying to Bootleg the game for your friend and you are angry because Steam won't let you?

If you are ranting because you don't like Steam then I think that you might as well give up gaming on the PC as in the future most, if not all, high budget games will be released on a 'Steam' like system, so either you get used to it or give up and play on a console.

I'm personally getting a little bit sick of these people slagging off Steam as being 'BIG BROTHER' sheesh what have you got to hide and I bet you are using Microsoft Windows which is doing loads of things in the background. PAH

[Graphic]

No no, that doesn't actually work.

I've done it.

*edit*

But it didn't work when I just tried it. Hmm, maybe they changed something in one of the patches.

[Tsavong]

Steam seems batter and more reliable than SecuROM my sister got Spore for Christmas and we had no end of trouble to get it to work in the end we phoned the customer support to get it to work after there online support failed. Where as Steam and Empire just well worked.

[kitbogha]

Hmm, come close to smashing it myself a few times but not due to Steam, which I have found works ok. The frustrating CTDs whenever I try to fight a campaign battle are my nemesis....

[Marquis of Roland]

Hmm, come close to smashing it myself a few times but not due to Steam, which I have found works ok. The frustrating CTDs whenever I try to fight a campaign battle are my nemesis....

Yeah me too, I don't understand it. I can play the same battles in custom and it never CTDs, but every 1 in 3 campaign battles CTD, no matter how few troops are fighting. What gives?

[Relic]

Lol. You smashed a no-CD game because of something that you didn't know you could do?
Alright! ...

[kitbogha]

Yeah me too, I don't understand it. I can play the same battles in custom and it never CTDs, but every 1 in 3 campaign battles CTD, no matter how few troops are fighting. What gives?

It's mightily frustrating. You are the only other person I have heard who has this problem. Why does it play on custom but not campaign???? I have been told that there may be several probs-
1) Not enough RAM, this seems feasible, although I have 2 1/2 Gig.
2) Wrong graphics card. I can't see how this can be the case-why would it play custom if the graphics card is not up to it???
Let me know if you work it out, I'd be your friend forever. It's a total game breaker for me. I have gone back to Kingdoms and M2TW.

[Marquis of Roland]

It's mightily frustrating. You are the only other person I have heard who has this problem. Why does it play on custom but not campaign???? I have been told that there may be several probs-
1) Not enough RAM, this seems feasible, although I have 2 1/2 Gig.
2) Wrong graphics card. I can't see how this can be the case-why would it play custom if the graphics card is not up to it???
Let me know if you work it out, I'd be your friend forever. It's a total game breaker for me. I have gone back to Kingdoms and M2TW.

Yea definitely will let you know. Right now I have a 2.67ghz dual core with 4gigs of ram and using geforce 8800gts with driver version 182.50. When I run custom battle, I am fighting with 2 full stacks and the FPS is good. I don't get it either, if its the hardware custom battle should have the same problems, right?

I updated the my driver about 5 min. before the patch started to download so I don't know how much of this is the new driver, but it happened before pre-patch without the new driver as well, only now I just get "Empire has stopped working (Appcrash)" instead of "Empire has run out of video memory".

So far I tried making the Nvidia settings higher for ETW but I don't think that worked. I am going to try the other solve that involves changing your empire.exe file later, haven't done it so far because doing those kind of things scare me

Edit:
vista 32-bit OS. wonder if upgrading to 64-bit will help solve issue.