Empire: Total War Demo Now on Steam

I dunno, running everything on ultra and am blown away. Kickass water effects compared to prior titles and different faces on troops when switched to ultra. Good smoke, too. Am floored. I do hope the ai can be turned up a bit tho - they are a bit slow to move thier 24s after you swing to the left. Give me Georgie's force and it'd be armageddon for the lobsterbacks

Hmph... I have the visuals cranked up as far as they'll go and I'm not impressed at all. Doesn't look anything like the videos or shots. Now, very high is grayed out, so maybe it's just disabled in the demo? Even still my demo is broken apparently because everyone else thinks it looks amazing.

Grief so far?

What nontechnical (I cant open the game) issues do fokes have?

I have only seen 2 things that might cause grief:
1: Movement near obstacles such as houses and rocks still seems moderately broken
2: AI has made some pretty darn fatal errors while fighting me on land and sea (Problem is I don't know what difficulty level it is in this demo; I'm hoping Very low)

So uh...am I alone with the long loading times? Like...really..really...long.

My impressions from an RTS noob:

I fucking love it. I've never played any of the previous games, so I wasn't sure what I was getting into. First off the graphics are awesome. With my system (X2 4600+, 3gb of ram, 8800gts 640mb, Vista 64), it automatically detected and set the graphics options for me which was mostly high (There's an ultra setting) except shadows at medium. I had no frame rate issues at 1680x1050 w/ no aa. I was blown away at the detail. What I love is all the bullets and cannonballs seem to be individually calculated. So standing behind a hill or something will protect you from artillery. If the cannonballs land before your troops they will bounce and still kill your troops.

About the gameplay, I still have a lot to learn. There's a tutorial in the beginning which does a decent job, but when they drop you into an actual battle with over 10 units to control it was a bit overwhelming. The battle was about an hour long, and I lost. I started out horribly in the beginning because I was stupid and basically ordered my guys to stand out in the open and get shelled to death (Including my general). As my army died it left me with a much smaller number of guys to control and I was able to use my guys much more effectively. Seeing cavalry run full speed into a line is awesome to watch. Eventually I had two infantry units (About 50 people total) vs a few of their artillery, and as I charged the artillery my guys took the cannon equivalent of a shotgun blast to the face and died. Those that remained ran away.

The only two negatives that I have is that moving and positing your troops is kind of a pain. I didn't discover the "turn" button towards the end so I'm sure that could've helped me. Then the actual combat itself looks a little weird sometimes. When you're telling your guys to fire some of them just look like they're standing there, but eventually they start firing. I don't know if they're reloading or waiting or what, but it looks a little strange. Melee combat suffers from the same thing where some just stand around while others are fighting. Sometimes I wish you could control specific people during melee combat. These issues are pretty minor though.

Overall I was extremely impressed. I haven't played the ship combat yet, so I'll be playing that later tonight. I didn't really know anything about this game, and I wasn't exactly looking forward to it. However now that I've played it, I'll probably purchase it. Horrary for demos!

Anyone tried it yet? Or are servers all around the world as flooded as the one my steam must be trying to contact ? :)

Hell yes. Come get some, frogs!

http://www.foxhawk.com/Files/Images/comegetsome.PNG

I cannot get it to load. I keep launching it and it freezes in the legal text screen. Anybody else experiencing this? I did a restart and it didn't help.

I was so looking forward to this :(

The weird thing is that I always liked the strategy map part of Total War games, and could play them for hours. But the tactical battles I could never get into.

Anyone having trouble getting this to launch, try restarting Steam after you finish the download. Worked for me.

I'm so happy :D based on this demo this game is going to meet my very high expectations. It's incredible!!! and the graphics are absolutely stunningly gorgeous... The gunsmoke that shrouds the enemy ranks of infantry, so that you can only make out the vague shapes of their men... the gradual destruction of the wooden ships by cannon fire, and watching them slowly take water and sink, with men jumping overboard...

I thought the demo was going to relieve my anticipation for the full release, but it has failed. Now I'm just doubly excited.

have to wait another day to download

no multi???? :(

i just jizzed all over the graphics