A New Patch, New Problems

[d1ng0d0g]

Well I just got the new patch and the first few problems already arose, that were not present in the last patch.

* Loading times are like the unpatched version. Slow and tedious. But I can live with that, I'm patient.

* Resource hog. The game is incredibly slow.

* No Alt-Tabbing. It crashes the game horribly.

***

Good point, cannons actually seem to be able to hit the broad side of the barn now. And the range of fire is indicated in a red outline, so you won't stare yourself blind when trying to figure out whether a unit can shoot. That's all.

[FactionHeir]

Never mananaged to alt+tab/ctrl+esc ever in ETW once you have ended the turn or played a battle. Only works right when you load a campaign and haven't done much. Very annoying.

[Marquis of Roland]

1st crash, 1704 Prussian 1 general and 6 line infantry vs. P-L 1 pike, 1 regiment of horse, 1 general, and 1 militia in an open field with a few walls. Appears to be a memory leak

[jsberry]

When was the patch? All last weekend, I couldn't finish a turn without a crash. Is it just me?

[d1ng0d0g]

The patch came out roughly today, spread out all over the world. I think that I could get the patch around 17:30 CEST. But I heard that others got it at different times.

[Didz]

I give up, its impossible to get a decent game out of this AI, I've just wasted another 4 hours trying to dodge the random DOW's and I've had enough.

[Fridgebadger]

Alt Tabbing is definitely less stable than before - it does work sometimes, sometimes it crashed my pc and I had to do a hard boot (this happened with vanilla ETW, but was fixed in the first patch)... I only wanted to tab to task manager to see how the multi threading was going - There is evidence it's happening; there seems to be more activity on all the cores, and the main one is running about 66% rather than 99% like before (using a dual quad core) but there's zero effect to the frame rate...

[Zarky]

I started new Prussian campaing and utterly crushed Poland-Lithuania by taking 3/5 of their provinces and destroyed Saxony and most of their armies, they won't accept peace unless I return every single province...
On the other hand I was glad to see Austria attacking me because I expanded east (like the adviser says when starting Austrian campaing, that you might have to attack Poland-Lithuania to prevent Prussia and Russia from growing)
For some reason no one asks or accepts peace anymore.

[Marquis of Roland]

Looks like they made Austria a little more aggressive.

[mmk]

Pirate ships now attack merchantmen on tradespots! Darn!!!

[Marquis of Roland]

Pirate ships now attack merchantmen on tradespots! Darn!!!

W00T! More cannon-fodder = more XP for my Royal Navy

[Elmar Bijlsma]

My England campaign was all the way up to 1799 prior to the patch. Anticipating problems with playing a modded game post patch I turned off auto-updating on steam so I could complete my campaign successfully. Imagine my surprise then when I clicked on the game to complete those last turns that the game started to update anyway. NOOOOO!!!!! I cancelled and looked around the net for a bit. Try as I might I could find no way to play the game without it updating. Sure enough, update fuxxored my game.

Thank you CA, for bringing me Steam, the most annoying system to ever get between me and a game. Outsourcing ways to foul up my gaming experience, are we? And you guys were doing such a bang up job of it yourselves! :(
Only the most lazy of pirates is stopped from playing the game yet I, a legitimate customer gets his game interfered with. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
Could you PLEASE, for the love of all that is good, allow me some control over the game? What did I ever do to you? Why are you guys at CA thinking it's okay to be treating me like this? It's not.
Fix or do sumfink!

[Beskar]

Nothing wrong with the Steam system, it is great having your games up-to-date and bug free.

However, Empire: Total War is the exception because CA tries to kill bugs with more bugs. First they were the flies, so CA coded in some spiders... ... ...

[Phog_of_War]

I seem to suddenly have a video memory leak. Prussia 1705.

What ever the problem may be I am sure CA will hotfix it. God i hope they do.

[Skott]

For those afraid that the game will update upon start exe. I would suggest disconnecting the cat5 cable at the back of your pc. I know a person shouldnt have to do it but it will certainly stop it from updating and forcing the game to let you play in offline mode.

[Marcus Caelius]

Nothing wrong with the Steam system, it is great having your games up-to-date and bug free.

However, Empire: Total War is the exception because CA tries to kill bugs with more bugs. First they were the flies, so CA coded in some spiders... ... ...

There is everything wrong with Steam.

I am fully able to update my games myself, and anyway, many programs include their own search for updates which then allow you the chance to install when you are ready. It's hardly a rare technology.

Steam is absolutely unwanted and unneeded.

[Marquis of Roland]

I seem to suddenly have a video memory leak. Prussia 1705.

What ever the problem may be I am sure CA will hotfix it. God i hope they do.

Pretty much the same ol memory leak from before lol.

[Prodigal]

I seem to suddenly have a video memory leak. Prussia 1705.

What ever the problem may be I am sure CA will hotfix it. God i hope they do.

Pretty certain that's not patch related, personally find 5-6 battles the average prior to a ctd, or loss of map integrity.

The game's an incontinent resource eating monster.

[Didz]

Pirate ships now attack merchantmen on tradespots! Darn!!!

Yep! thats the first thing that happened to me post-patch, only in my case it wasn't the pirates but the Dutch trade fleet from the neighbouring trade port that attacked my trade fleet on its trade port. Took me a bit by surprise, I'd got used to trade ports being immune. What was worse was that the Dutch Trade Fleet consisted of one Fluyt, a sixth rate and a brig, whilst mine was just indiamen. Its certainly going to make the trade theatres a lot more lively now.

The only other thing I've noticed so far is that musketry seems to have got even less effective. but I'm not sure if thats the patch or the fact that I'm playing French.

[al Roumi]

The only other thing I've noticed so far is that musketry seems to have got even less effective. but I'm not sure if thats the patch or the fact that I'm playing French.

Musketry isn't less effective, it's the units that have been downgraded. Militia now have an accuracy of 10! in V1.2 it was around 15-20. The same goes for line infantry, their drill (accuracy and reload) scores are now lower too -along the lines of Russian line inf from v1.2.

I was playing Dutch on H, although the trade theatre shenannigans have spooked me a fair bit so I might play an aclimatising campaign as Prussia :)

[Didz]

Musketry isn't less effective, it's the units that have been downgraded. Militia now have an accuracy of 10! in V1.2 it was around 15-20. The same goes for line infantry, their drill (accuracy and reload) scores are now lower too -along the lines of Russian line inf from v1.2.

So it is the patch then?

I thought it was just a feature of the French Infantry, I just got charged and overrun by Dutch armed peasants who didn't even bother trying to fire. It was more like a battle from MTW, my infantry were using fire by ranks and not hitting a damned thing.

I think the modders will have to correct this as its gone too far the other way now. I was lucky in the Dutch battle that I still had a couple of the old pike units in my army and they managed to fight the armed mobs off.

[al Roumi]

I guess it's to make elite/guard units stand out more. In 1.2 and before a 3 chevron line infantry unit was more or less equivalent in reload and accuracy to a guard unit. Now it'll take about 5 chevrons (at a guess) to get line inf to guard level skills.

Given the changes to miltia, i worry for firelock armed citizenry. They'll only be usefull manning guns on a fort now!

[Phog_of_War]

Pretty certain that's not patch related, personally find 5-6 battles the average prior to a ctd, or loss of map integrity.

The game's an incontinent resource eating monster.

True, however this is the first time for CTD by memory leak. And I have somehow avoided CTD for the last few months. Just seemed odd, thats all.

[Marquis of Roland]

I thought it was just a feature of the French Infantry, I just got charged and overrun by Dutch armed peasants who didn't even bother trying to fire. It was more like a battle from MTW, my infantry were using fire by ranks and not hitting a damned thing.

In every TW game made, French infantry fails

[Beskar]

There is everything wrong with Steam.

I am fully able to update my games myself, and anyway, many programs include their own search for updates which then allow you the chance to install when you are ready. It's hardly a rare technology.

Steam is absolutely unwanted and unneeded.

I mean, a really handy distribution network with minimum fuss, auto-update and a host of very good features which allows you to install without need of a CD, quickly fix issues without a total re-install and all other extremely useful benefits.

versus

SecuROM with can never be removed from your computer, very buggy, hijacking spyware piece of rubbish which only allows you to install your game 3 times, regardless of machine, penalising customers greatly which is bundled with every EA game from Spore, Sims, etc. If you don't update, it can cause your game to simply stop working.


Now, which one would you prefer? I can tell you now, if you had SecuROM, you wouldn't even be playing Total War by now as you probably would have used up your installs already due to rubbish coding on CA's end.

Stop blaming Steam and start blaming CA. It is not Steams fault that the programmers can't code their own games.

[Sheogorath]

Good point, cannons actually seem to be able to hit the broad side of the barn now. And the range of fire is indicated in a red outline, so you won't stare yourself blind when trying to figure out whether a unit can shoot. That's all.

I've noticed this too. Instead of killing 1 unit per ten shots, cannons now seem to take out at least one unit per shot.

Not exactly ideal, but small steps are good, even if giant leaps would be better.

@Beskar
I think it's 'stop blaming Steam and CA and start blaming Sega.'

[Wausser]

Since the new patch, the game hangs on me after 5-10. My screen just turns black and the sound freezes. The only thing I can do is reset.

[Delosian]

I can't load my saved games without it crashing. It only just happened, the 1.3 patch was already installed and then I saved it, now I cannot reload those games (the saved games before 1.3 patch was installed load perfectly). I don't have the DLC unit pack installed.

This is the crash message:

AppName: empire.exe AppVer: 1.3.0.0 ModName: empire.exe
ModVer: 1.3.0.0 Offset: 00798d52

[Beskar]

@Beskar
I think it's 'stop blaming Steam and CA and start blaming Sega.'

Hah, while I might accept that Sega's idea to have DLC, I think CA are the ones who programme the game, thus, they are the ones not sorting the bugs out.

Empire: Total War is the only game, I admit, I have seen where there are so many problems. Most games are usually over-hyped saying they got more than what is there but Empire: Total War isn't necessarily have that as the case, it has been all the break downs and other things that occurred.

[Daveybaby]

Finally got around to trying the new patch last night. Have to agree with the OP, the loading times seem to have increased, and the game actually feels less responsive than it did before, e.g. there is now a noticable delay between clicking the turn button and anything actually happening. Same thing with telling units to run in battles, so that i end up doing it twice and they end up walking again. This is weird, because pre-patch everything was running just fine, with pretty much everything on highest settings.

Also after about 10-15 minutes play my PC will suddenly just shut down, no warning. Although it does play that nice little windows shutdown jingle so it's obviously doing it properly and not crashing. And there aren't any errors in the system logs. This is very weird. And very, very annoying.

Gameplay feels much improved though. Well, combat does, anyway. Difficult to tell if the strategic/diplomatic game is any better, because i havent managed to keep the game running for long enough to find out.