Empire: Total War's upcoming patch

[Skott]

Played last night and today. Stability wise the game is still fine for me as was patch 1.2. I tried alt+tabbing multiple times during various parts of my game play and encountered no CTD. Not experiencing any lag in naval battles or land battles to really speak of either. I did see more naval activity in the trade zones so I guess its true that your trade ships will now need constant protection. I experienced a protectorate declaration of war for the very first time. Never had a protectorate declare war against me before. Actually I had two protectorates that were friendly with me declare war while playing as France today. Westphalia/Rhineland and Bavaria. Might be a one time thing but I'll watch if it happens again as I go through more faction campaigns. I'd prefer a protectorate not to DoW on me but thats just me.

The very first thing I noticed after patching was the red lines that the units now display for their firing range. I'm guessing some folks complained the old white lines were too hard to see especially in snow so CA changed them to a funky orangy-red. Personally I liked the old more obscure lines but its more of a personal thing I suppose. I dont make movies to upload onto youtube and such so its no biggie to me but some might be put off by it. Its definately more easily viewable now. Not sure if you can turn it off. I have never looked into it to know for sure.

 

[brblx]

diplomacy still blows ass. and they did nothing with the territorial expansion bug that makes everyone hate you without reason if you play as a western country.

fuck this game, these are the most incompetent developers i've ever seen.

 

[Koudelka]

Originally posted by: brblx
diplomacy still blows ass. and they did nothing with the territorial expansion bug that makes everyone hate you without reason if you play as a western country.

fuck this game, these are the most incompetent developers i've ever seen.

What bug do you mention?

Expanding your empire makes everyone hate you more and more i would imagine out of fear.

I was a bit surprised when i took over 10 countries in 5 rounds and looked at my diplomacy and my relations had lowered with every single faction. But, if you think about it, it makes sense. Its not really hate, but fear and suspicion.

 

[Sylvanas]

Originally posted by: brblx
diplomacy still blows ass. and they did nothing with the territorial expansion bug that makes everyone hate you without reason if you play as a western country.

fuck this game, these are the most incompetent developers i've ever seen.

The more regions you capture the more all other nations will become suspicious of you. In the diplomacy tab look at 'Territorial expansion' if that is a negative number it can impact upon your standing with them. If you are playing as Prussia or something you can expect minor nations to probably declare war as you expand in the region.

 

[brblx]

i know about the 'feature.' but do you know how it is implemented?

if you take a territory ANYWHERE in the world from ANY christian nation, you get negative points from every other christian nation. same with the muslim countries. as maratha you can basically do whatever the hell you want after you beat the mughals, and everyone will love you.

if someone declares war on you and you take the territory BACK, you get penalty with everyone. swap the territory three or four times? you get three or four penalties.

there is zero possibility of expanding as a european country without territorial expansion bonuses far in excess of the +100 gift, making everyone eventually want to declare war on you. it decays so slowly that to beat the game, you would probably need in excess of 200 turns go slowly enough to keep relations good, even if just taking the required areas.

broke game is broke. these assclowns are just too LAZY to implement anything right.

 

[Koudelka]

I will admit.. i do hate CA. They are extremely lazy and greedy. They also dont give a shit about any of their customers unless it involves them getting their money.

Did you see how fast they made a public statement about some of ETW's new units not being given to the players properly by Steam? They'll charge us for content they should have put into the game at start, and then make us wait 2 years before they patch their steaming pile of crap.

I'll say it now, i LOVED MTW2.. i could play it forever, even now. But i find ETW to be one of the worst of the series ever made.

I almost bought their new units since they were only 3.50.. but they dont deserve a cent more of my money until they decide to fix this pile of shit. 1.3 only fixed a fraction of the errors/bugs.

 

[Zenoth]

Originally posted by: brblx
i know about the 'feature.' but do you know how it is implemented?

if you take a territory ANYWHERE in the world from ANY christian nation, you get negative points from every other christian nation. same with the muslim countries. as maratha you can basically do whatever the hell you want after you beat the mughals, and everyone will love you.

if someone declares war on you and you take the territory BACK, you get penalty with everyone. swap the territory three or four times? you get three or four penalties.

there is zero possibility of expanding as a european country without territorial expansion bonuses far in excess of the +100 gift, making everyone eventually want to declare war on you. it decays so slowly that to beat the game, you would probably need in excess of 200 turns go slowly enough to keep relations good, even if just taking the required areas.

broke game is broke. these assclowns are just too LAZY to implement anything right.

It was the same in Medieval 2, as a Christian faction, if you attack any other Christian faction then pretty much the rest of Christendom wants to rape your ass, unless you pretty much kiss the Pope's own by doing every single missions he throws at you successfully, if you manage to do that then the relations will be so high as to compensate against the "will" of the other Christian factions to attack you. The same thing goes between Islamic factions, but if you play for instance as the Byzantine Empire you're not bound to anyone and you can rape as much as you feel like while the others mutually kill themselves, you can basically sit there and let the Christians murder themselves, while you'll be at war against one or two factions at most (usually against the Turks and the Hungarians).

What most people fail to realize is that Empire: Total War's development team is the same than previous Total War games as far back as Shogun. So such issues are certainly to be expected, they will inevitably repeat themselves unless those guys learn new things over time and know how to fix their own mishaps. In Empire's case however I don't think it's about A.I programming talent, but simply about how diplomacy essentially works in real life, and more importantly, how it worked back then during that time period the game covers, and how to reflect that reality best in the game into coding, they know how to code, but I have the feeling they don't know what they have to do, they should consult some real historians when making games like that. As far as I know the Civilization game series is known to have superb diplomacy A.I, and that might simply be because the guys working there know more about such things historically speaking.

All of that is just my observation of course, I'm not pretending it's true, but it's how I feel. But despite all of that I still believe that Empire is the best polished of all the Total War games, some Total War players claiming the opposite really need to try their best and remember how much of a real mess Medieval 2 was prior to patch 1.2, it was considered literally unplayable, and even the on-line mode back then was messed-up. The sole reason why Medieval 2 became "better than Empire currently is" is due to its patch 1.2 and the Kingdoms expansion pack which introduced worthy campaigns, if you remove those two things, heck... even if you just remove what had been fixed in patch 1.2 (which takes like 30 minutes to install) then M2TW suddenly becomes a pile of junk not even worthy to be thrown in a waste basket. And it was similar with Rome, not as heavy as M2, but similar, I really had fun with Rome mostly after patch 1.3 was released.

History is just repeating itself basically (logically so, it's the same team, keep that in mind), but to repeat myself, in comparison to other Total War games, Empire is the best polished of them all, and I do refer to its vanilla state completely un-patched (compared to the others under the same condition).

 

[Koudelka]

Originally posted by: Zenoth

Originally posted by: brblx
i know about the 'feature.' but do you know how it is implemented?

if you take a territory ANYWHERE in the world from ANY christian nation, you get negative points from every other christian nation. same with the muslim countries. as maratha you can basically do whatever the hell you want after you beat the mughals, and everyone will love you.

if someone declares war on you and you take the territory BACK, you get penalty with everyone. swap the territory three or four times? you get three or four penalties.

there is zero possibility of expanding as a european country without territorial expansion bonuses far in excess of the +100 gift, making everyone eventually want to declare war on you. it decays so slowly that to beat the game, you would probably need in excess of 200 turns go slowly enough to keep relations good, even if just taking the required areas.

broke game is broke. these assclowns are just too LAZY to implement anything right.

It was the same in Medieval 2, as a Christian faction, if you attack any other Christian faction then pretty much the rest of Christendom wants to rape your ass

Stop right there.

Pope did not give a shit who attacked you even if the christian faction declared war on YOU first for NO reason. Pope would still hate you for defending yourself.

Do not even attempt to compare anything about MTW2's diplomacy features to anything. MTW2's diplomacy with the pope was fucked up as could possibly be and everyone knows that. Even CA. Not that i'm mad, but MTW2's faction with the pope was one of the biggest flops ever.

 

[Zenoth]

Originally posted by: Koudelka

Originally posted by: Zenoth

Originally posted by: brblx
i know about the 'feature.' but do you know how it is implemented?

if you take a territory ANYWHERE in the world from ANY christian nation, you get negative points from every other christian nation. same with the muslim countries. as maratha you can basically do whatever the hell you want after you beat the mughals, and everyone will love you.

if someone declares war on you and you take the territory BACK, you get penalty with everyone. swap the territory three or four times? you get three or four penalties.

there is zero possibility of expanding as a european country without territorial expansion bonuses far in excess of the +100 gift, making everyone eventually want to declare war on you. it decays so slowly that to beat the game, you would probably need in excess of 200 turns go slowly enough to keep relations good, even if just taking the required areas.

broke game is broke. these assclowns are just too LAZY to implement anything right.

It was the same in Medieval 2, as a Christian faction, if you attack any other Christian faction then pretty much the rest of Christendom wants to rape your ass

Stop right there.

Pope did not give a shit who attacked you even if the christian faction declared war on YOU first for NO reason. Pope would still hate you for defending yourself.

Do not even attempt to compare anything about MTW2's diplomacy features to anything. MTW2's diplomacy with the pope was fucked up as could possibly be and everyone knows that. Even CA. Not that i'm mad, but MTW2's faction with the pope was one of the biggest flops ever.

Hmmm, no, I beg to differ.

I still remember a recent game I played, un-modded, in Kingdoms, in which I played as Spain, and at the beginning of the campaign I formed alliances and trade agreements. All was well and dandy for about 30 turns (yes that much, without a single war declared in the East, West and the vast Russian territory). Then, suddenly within a few turns the Holy Roman Empire faction's appreciation by the Pope goes down the drain, apparently they were attacking France. What happens next? The HRE gets excommunicated. Then HRE resumes war against France, I decide to send reinforcements when Paris is surrounded, my two armies and the French army from inside Paris battle against the HRE armies sent at the French capital, it lasts like that for a good dozen turns. Then, something that surprises me each time it happens, the Pope decides to send a Crusade against HRE.

And then, I skip a good number of turns here to describe what happens, eventually HRE is wiped out from the map and France maintains its "outstanding" relation with the Pope (a new Pope was elected by then). Then eventually like any good A.I faction France decides to attack me out of nowhere. I had "perfect" relations with Pope (full stars, did all missions correctly, none of them failed ever). Within two or three turns France gets excommunicated, and then without me asking for a Crusade that same Pope sends a Crusade against France (target is none other than Paris) and a good five or six other Christian factions joined the Crusade, and within about twenty turns France is no more (Paris fell after two or three turns, it was already very weakened by previous HRE attempts).

So, no, the Pope did care about who attacked me, but for that to happen I think I really needed the perfect relations stance, and that's the part of the coding which I believe was messed-up, the conditions for such a thing to happen were so ridiculously difficult to meet that it seemed virtually impossible that the Pope would "care about who attacks you", but despite the odds it was technically possible, I did experience it, it was rare, I admit, I think I saw that about four or five times ever since I play M2, but it was certainly feasible.

 

[TehMac]

Originally posted by: Koudelka
I will admit.. i do hate CA. They are extremely lazy and greedy. They also dont give a shit about any of their customers unless it involves them getting their money.

Did you see how fast they made a public statement about some of ETW's new units not being given to the players properly by Steam? They'll charge us for content they should have put into the game at start, and then make us wait 2 years before they patch their steaming pile of crap.

I'll say it now, i LOVED MTW2..

I hated Medieval 2. That game was boring and garbage.

 

[brblx]

my point is more generally that religion has been ruining TW games, and though they appeared to gloss over it in this one, they made religion secretly break diplomacy because they're effing lazy. that's not acceptable. it should be possible to at least play the game AS HISTORY PLAYED OUT and not be at war with everyone over your religion.

 

[TehMac]

Ah, but CA would say they don't want you to play the same way history played out. Essentially, it's history's shit, your (their) rules. That said, I don't really care much anymore, I just tend to steam roller over factions. When it comes to the land battles, I'm kind of pissed off. I don't know if it's just me, but sometimes the pathfinding can be really shit.

I clicked on some musketeers who were in a line formation to attack a smaller unit in the square formation. So I right clicked, and the fucking gobs ran the other way! I've experienced this a number of times, and it's really aggravating. I got so fed up, I just ordered a bayo charge, which had the same result. I finally right clicked right in front of the enemy musketeers and then right clicked. That solved the problem, but really CA? I should have to do that?

I don't see why they can't come out with games that actually work. You'd think they have enough money by now. Are they socialist over there, has the Labour party nationalized them too?

 

[Sylvanas]

Patch 1.3 multi-threaded performance test as you can see, huge gains- double performance. Phenom2's see some massive gains very glad I have my 955.

 

[TehMac]

Nice, good to see some multi threading actually worked. I didn't install my game til then, but I played a bit of the GC last night, and crap, it is pretty deep, compared to previous games. There's a lot more going on, and it all is pretty entertaining, more or less. I found myself getting really bored in Medieval 2. They really butchered the atmosphere, the music was lame, the map was unexciting, the factions were bland, the whole "cities vs. castles" was just annoying to me.

I really loved Rome Total War though.

 

[ElFenix]

i wonder if this fixes the unit graphic flickering problem i have

pushed out on steam yet? didn't notice the update notification

Originally posted by: Sylvanas
Patch 1.3 multi-threaded performance test as you can see, huge gains- double performance. Phenom2's see some massive gains very glad I have my 955.

sweet, should see double the fps on my old opteron if this thing works right

Originally posted by: TehMac

I really loved Rome Total War though.

been playing BI lately. starting off with 100 squalor is ridiculous. massed peasants and intentionally spreading plague go!

 

[TehMac]

Yeah, that bit of BI I didn't like. When I was younger I used cheat codes to give myself tons of money. That's something I kind of hate about Total War, I never can get a good battle off on the first few turns, I'm always on risk of running low on money. When I try to build up infrastructure, I run out of money as well!

 

[xdarweshx]

Hay guys,

i have been a fan of Total war games for long time now, since Shogun Total War. I always wait a few months before i buy the game to allow for patches and updates. Actually, i bought Empire total war about a month ago but waited since i heard many complains regarding the game. Now i have finally installed the game and pathed it to 1.3 through Steam agent.

I still have the crashing issues people were talking about. I am also suffering from the problem of missing Save files. After i save the game and leave i am surprised that the save files for the entire last turn is deleted. Finally, i am facing some lag during the land battles when i max the graphic settings eventhough i am running the game on Radeon 4890.

Am i doing something wrong here? or is there other people suffering the same?

One more thing, i am running the game on Windows 7 64bit. the windows website says the game is compatible to windows 7 64bit.

 

[Sylvanas]

Originally posted by: xdarweshx
Hay guys,

i have been a fan of Total war games for long time now, since Shogun Total War. I always wait a few months before i buy the game to allow for patches and updates. Actually, i bought Empire total war about a month ago but waited since i heard many complains regarding the game. Now i have finally installed the game and pathed it to 1.3 through Steam agent.

I still have the crashing issues people were talking about. I am also suffering from the problem of missing Save files. After i save the game and leave i am surprised that the save files for the entire last turn is deleted. Finally, i am facing some lag during the land battles when i max the graphic settings eventhough i am running the game on Radeon 4890.

Am i doing something wrong here? or is there other people suffering the same?

One more thing, i am running the game on Windows 7 64bit. the windows website says the game is compatible to windows 7 64bit.

Latest drivers?

 

[xdarweshx]

Yes, both my windows and my graphic card are updated to the latest.

 

[xdarweshx]

Yesterday i completed episode 3 of the road to independance campain. During Episode 4 i see NO crashes and NO savings lost.. IT IS GREAT. i do, however, have some lag and the graphics during battles mostly, but sometimes in the map when i am using ULTRA settings. isn't my PC powerful enough to handle the graphics with Radeon 4890?

 

[Crazed Milk Pile]

It's about time, the vanilla game needs some serious AI upgrades.

 

[Koudelka]

I decided to play it again for a couple hours. I notice no difference whatsoever.

Mind you, my load times were never that bad. But i have ZERO improvement in any aspect of the game and i'm running an i7.. and all this talk of multi-threading performance increases.

They still have the tree shadow flickering bug, too. WHY must they fix all the retarded shit first.

I dont give a shit about adding more musket fire sound effects. FIX THE BUGS FIRST!

All the time they spent on the new units, including the one they have up for sale now trying to suck more money out us, could have been spent fixing a plethora of bugs like shadow flickering.

More proof they dont give a shit about anyone but more money. Screw the bugs, lets add more units to the game that should have been including in the beginning and charge them for it.