Loading ...Empire : Total War
The first riddle in this game is to get the bloody thing working. There are cross border talks and a peace corp forming to march on Creative Assembly and Steam, oh and Nividia to start development with the right code and drivers! Apparently the latest Nvidia drivers don’t work with the game. CA have been bayonetted repeatedly on this one… Readon.
This is what I did to get my game working: 8800GTS, 191 Nvidia drivers.
Fearing the 196 Nvidia Drivers would make the game even more unplayable, I gave it a shot!! I was using 191 drivers before hand and had the choppy jumping graphic textures.
I used Driver Cleaner Pro 1.5 Build 14 freeware. (and followed his instructions to the letter for removing old Nividia drivers)
E.g: Disconnect from router/wifi, remove Nvidia using Add/remove prog. Reboot in safe mode. Cancel hardware Install wizard, Run Driver cleaner, empty recycle bin, reboot, install drivers.
Switched V sync on and Texture Filtering to Bilinear, I think these two are the most important. Shader quality low. Shadows off. And pretty much everything else high.
The Vync On fix and Texture filters I read on a different thread/forum, can’t remember where.
It seems to be totally random from user to user, but this worked and is working SO FAR for me. Played for about an hour, no visible problems. Campaign map is a wee bit laggy in places, but playable.
And Finally!! I got this biatch working. Everyone on the forums with Nvidia drivers have to roll back to 185 or soemthing. Also, I never play RTSs with shadows either so I switched them off. I lowered the shader quality too for pig iron.
I’m really getting into it, I love the tech tree they included and the politics side of things, I learned last night that the only way to change government is to start a revolution. When the revolution starts, you lose control of your empire but gain control of the rebels and have to invade the capital!! If you lose the fight you lose the campaign. Fairly realistic I thought.
Trade is brilliant too, you can build trade vessels and sail to places around Africa and India and trade in Ivory and spices for extra cash, as Russia I’m using my fur pelts, and I recently annexed Mesopotamia and set up Cotton plantations!! Huzzah!
I was at war with the Ottoman Empire, I captured 1 port and was trying to get my Navy on the go, but the Turks had a huge navy and were blockading me. My navy sat in the port for decades LOL. Something like 20 turns. But all his money was in a sea war, where Russia pwns at a land war, so I took all his European regions and pushed him right back to Egypt. Bulgaria, Hungary and all the South Eastern Europe states surrendered to me right away. I like the way you can have an army in a city, but it also tells you that in the event of a siege or an attack the populace will take up arms and fight with you. The thing I haven’t mastered at the moment is the naval battles, I tried a custom battle and didn’t know what was going on in time and I lost. I forgot about several ships and they sailed away, probably off the edge of the world! They are huge and can drag on, one fellow gamer told me a massive fleet battle took 2 1/2 hours. I think I will be auto resolving them in future. I’m much better at land based warfare!! Tally Ho!
I think it’s alot like Civ (with trade, politics, research) but on a smaller scale, but then again you have the battles too.
At the moment I’m research box formations, plug bayonets and fire by rank! Which will have me pwn the battlefield. You can garrison buildings in townships and build siege defenses, like stockades, hedgehogs and trenches. The artillery is savage. The bigger guns can land shells almost anywhere on the map. I was attacked by rocket artillery in one battle and would lose up to half a regiment in one successful attack. The body count is insane in this game. When a good shot hits a regiment it tears right through the line, and you can see the bodys fly over and the numbers on his flag drop. You can use canister shots when the men are at close range, once they come inside the kill zone, they will never make it to combat stance once the canisters hit them! They flee right away lol
It’s fairly well done I think, when a cavalry regiment is charging and they hit the lines they can wipe out a full regiment of foot, or on the other hand if the regiment of foot get a shot off it can almost wipe out all the horse. I try to interlock the fields of fire so my men back each other up. Cavalry charges are lethal, in one scuffle, I had about 6 regiments but only a hand full in each, maybe 50 horse in total and they decimated about 250 men using charge, disengage, charge tactics.
Body Count ftw.
