I just noticed that Empire had been released for the better part of a month now. Have any WAFFers bought it and played it and any comments on it?

On another note Max Payne 3 is slated for release in Q4, so here's hoping it is better than the movie...what were they thinking with that!

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"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it."
George Bernard Shaw

There was a thread on this in the Den but that was a while back.

Its good however i have a few gripes.

The graphics don't seem that awesome at least with land battles when compared to Medieval II. I think the animations are better but the textures seem a bit average. Sea battles look great however. light infantry units are damned cool and so are cannons when you use grape shot. The diplomacy element is also very much improved, foreign allies don't just randomly betray you for no reason like in previous games and they can bring more to the negotiating table than simply trade deals, they offer to trade provinces and technologies as well. The fortress building element is also damn cool as you can upgrade from basic wooden ones to stone artillery forts and then into star forts.

The actual AI is a lot better than it used to be, with the previous games i would get used to the gameplay on normal difficulty and then advance to hard for a longer campaign. With this one tried it on normal and had to go to easy to get the basics.

Been having some bugs with it however, sometimes selecting your fleets causes the entire game to crash. having looked into this on the net it seems that it only occurs if you only have high end units in the fleet. A patch to fix this would be nice

Pretty much what he said, though I've seen the AI do some really stupid things. I really dislike the fact that the characters turns to sprites the minute I zoom out slightly (and I'm running on a fairly decent machine). At this point having played several campaigns I'm waiting for a decent bunch of mods to add a little more favor... 'till then it's DoW2 for me.

DoW2 is my adrenaline rush while Empire is my time killer.

The AI does do some very weird things. As Poland or Sweden, Prussia has twice given my East Prussia (a well developed key city) for lesser provinces and offering me their early tech and money with it, for no foreseeable reason. It tends to be to give them the lesser city of Gdnask... which is a very favourable trade.
You can then turn around and invade Prussia.

Other then that, it is a very well balanced game, the government types are also something interesting, as well as research...

The harder difficulties make the game really challenging, especially maintaining Empires.

Siege of Tobruk - One German POW said: "I cannot understand you Australians. In Poland, France, and Belgium, once the tanks got through the soldiers took it for granted that they were beaten. But you are like demons. The tanks break through and your infantry still keep fighting." Rommel wrote of seeing "a batch of some fifty or sixty Australian prisoners ... marched off close behind usimmensely big and powerful men, who without question represented an elite formation of the British Empire, a fact that was also evident in battle."


"As a Internet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one."

I played Shogun and Medieval TW. Loved both games. I also have the Viking Invastion extension but never played it.


Mobile airpower

"The enemy dies relaxed," observed a Lockheed Martin manager.

I preferred the context of Shogun and Rome more so than the others but the one I'd played the most (thanks to the massive modding community) is Medieval II. I can't wait to see what kinds of mods come out for Empire (the American Civil War is a given I guess).

Since they have finally brought out the lastest patch, I like the game and new options / bigger map.

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A German Soldier doesnt die, he goes to hell and regroups !

Did anyone get the special forces edition?

//"Since they have finally brought out the lastest patch, I like the game and new options / bigger map."//



I got the game a few days ago, and Im experiencing much the same problems. Does one have to manually download the patch, or are all updates automatically updated by 'steam'?

Allso, what do you mean by bigger maps? More territory outside Europe or simply bigger nations with more towns in them?

The updates on Steam are usually automatic, if you right-click the icon for Empire in the "my games" panel on steam you should see a "update news" link. Last update I have is from March 30th.

finished a grand campaign as Britain, but for some reason it didn't unlock all the smaller states to play with like i was told it would. Any ideas?

It's not supposed to as far as I know, there are mods that unlock the smaller factions, but you don't really have goals; though choosing emergent factions like Quebec crash the game.

I played with Prussia so far and India. I usually play the "Hohenfriederberger" in background when letting my formations attack, really a great picture

India is really great to play because you can slowly approach Europe once you conquered the Sub-Continent.

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A German Soldier doesnt die, he goes to hell and regroups !

<b>It's not supposed to as far as I know, there are mods that unlock the smaller factions, but you don't really have goals; though choosing emergent factions like Quebec crash the game.</b>

Ah, fair enough. My mate must have been telling me porkies :(

And I was looking forward to playing as the State of Wurttemberg.

All cowards (and wise people) like to play as Great Britain in these sort of strategic games being protected by the Sea and being able to concentrate on the fleets and taking over colonies and trade routs while the competitors have to split their resources on huge land armies

I only played as Britain as I like the to watch my little red line march against some fuzzy wuzzies :P

But seriously, I'm going to start as Poland next. Should be interesting...

Poland would be easier to defend if it exchanged all its huge land with Switzerland

Is that a strategic tip?

No just a bad joke hope no swiss people or polish people are offended (Central Europeans may not always understand irony as good as swedes where irony is very common )



Poland is a beautiful country rich with history and fertile fields its just hard to defend

Haha. Well if it's anything like playing as them in Medieval Total War then yeah, it's bloody hard.

They are piss easy to defend in Total war. The south has key defence points and once Prussia is subdued, there is only two threats if you don't use diplomacy... Sweden and Ottoman Empire.

Like I said once the south is protected (with as much as two forts) Sweden is rather pissy in game terms.

Both Britain and Poland are constitutional monarchies. This means they get less tax while making more money in their cities and encourage trade, they keep both middle class/low class and upper class happy very easily unlike both the Republic and Absolute Monarchies (Both being more intune with the lower/middle classes and upper respectively, as Prussia I have cities with 20+ upper class happiness but nearly zero lower class).

Also, wars and nationalism effect Absolute monarchies more. Even if you can't beat a country at war, if you prolong it long enough and have the said nation lose enough battles popularity crashes hard. But if they take one or two provinces quickly they become almost unstoppably supported.

I also noticed Great Britain can get choked of its trade very easily which can crumble Britain quickly, especially when you verse naval powers.

Siege of Tobruk - One German POW said: "I cannot understand you Australians. In Poland, France, and Belgium, once the tanks got through the soldiers took it for granted that they were beaten. But you are like demons. The tanks break through and your infantry still keep fighting." Rommel wrote of seeing "a batch of some fifty or sixty Australian prisoners ... marched off close behind usimmensely big and powerful men, who without question represented an elite formation of the British Empire, a fact that was also evident in battle."


"As a Internet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one."

own it, love it despite running it on a laptop with a lousy video card.

Anybody trying out mods?

Dont think any mods come out yet...at least the big ones with new factions.

Still playing MTW2 atm. Only getting ETW about 6-8 months down he road and hopefully they had release the much needed patches and fixes by then.

Wonder what the next Total War will be? 19th Century Empire building? WW1?

sig test

At some "historic" point the formation battles are outdated, wonder how they will go on than.

Although I can imagine some "Combat Mission" style battles in a "Total War" - WW1 related game.

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A German Soldier doesnt die, he goes to hell and regroups !

<b>At some "historic" point the formation battles are outdated, wonder how they will go on than.</b>

Exactly, and given that they have given a progressive history of events I'm wondering how they will do it. Perhaps the Napoleonic Wars, Prussian wars of unification, Boer War etc?

I would be lying however if I said that a WW1 incarnation wouldn't be interesting!

Got it, the special forces edition that is. There are a few things that makes me lose interest in it. First of which, the short time span. 100 years isn't that very long, since I bought the game yesterday and already I've gotten past 10 years with little effort.

Second, I'm running it on a decent computer, and still each turn takes forever to process.

Thanks, but no thanks. I'm sticking with EU3.

Have you tried turning of show computer moves? That way when you end a turn you dont need to wait to see computer moves it can help you.

Thank you, I'll give it a try.

Just finished the grand campaign with Prussia. It's good, but it still has quite a few bugs, even with all the updates so far it's almost unplayable at some points.

Is it worth buying for the multiplayer content/

I mean is the mp fun, I've never played TBS games before so Im a bit hesitant. Right now Im playin RA3..stupidly fun game, lol.


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