First, I apologize if this is the wrong place to post this, but I just joined the guild and I cannot access the Colliseum thread.

Yesterday a friend told me about the Total War Series and the Rome game. I went to the site and it looked awesome. I downloaded the demo and tried to play it but I had severe problems. The game loaded well enough and the play only jagged on occassion (there would a shutter back and forth).

I have a Dell Inspiron Laptop with a Pentium 4 1.69 ghz, 640 mb of RAM, and an ATI Technologies Mobility Radeon 7500C video card with 16 mb of video memory. I'm not sure I can add more video memory to this machine.

As I said, the game loads quickly enough and easily. The game play itself isn't a real problem. But I have problems with the graphics: leaders, in particular, either show up as a shadow image (as do the elephants) and sometimes the horses don't show at all (the riders look like their sitting on air).

Is there a way to fix this other than getting a new video card or more video memory? Anyone else have this problem? This looks like a great game but I sure don't want to spend 50 dollars on it if I can't play it on my system.

Thanks for your help.

The Shadow One