Major Empire: Total War Patch Coming Next Week

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A significant patch for Creative Assembly's excellent, but rather buggy strategy game Empire: Total War is expected to be finished by next week, according to the company.

"There are over 70 bug fixes in this upgrade, plus a tonne of balance and feature tweaks," said Creative Assembly communications director Kieran Brigden in a post on the game's official forums. Amongst many fixes to crashing problems and other issues, the patch will also partially address the naval AI--though Brigden noted that the system will still remain somewhat incomplete post-patch.

"The technology behind naval invasions is actually really rather heavy and is still causing some issues," said Brigden. "The gameplay upgrade will make naval invasions possible but they will be rare. The AI now has a proper mechanism for the planning involved and can execute that mechanism when required, however increasing its frequency is a balance issue we haven't been able to get fixed in time for this upgrade."

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    April 24, 2009 7:09 PM

    Still waiting on confirmation of all the game-ruining bugs being squashed before purchasing.

    *Fingers crossed*

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      April 24, 2009 7:46 PM

      Same here, then I'll buy it.

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      April 24, 2009 8:07 PM

      I pre-ordered it and this game has been nothing but a headache. After the first 3 patches I played a bit which I really started to enjoy the game but then was plagued by more bugs. I don't think I will play this game for a while even after this new patch.

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      April 24, 2009 8:23 PM

      Yeah, I'm in the same boat. I want to play this game, but don't want to fight the bugs. Hopefully this will fix the game and then I can finally buy it.

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      April 24, 2009 8:35 PM

      I play on a q6600 system with 4 Gigs of Ram and run Vista 64. I've got about 50 hours into this game, and it has crashed on me a total of once. After a 9 hour stretch I did have to restart because it bogging the memory down, but other than that it's been entirely playable.

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        April 24, 2009 9:21 PM

        What about load times?

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          April 26, 2009 9:23 AM

          Battle load times are long, I find myself letting the cpu resolve the fight just so I don't have to wait.

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        April 24, 2009 10:02 PM

        I have a similar system and don't crash either. But the campaign map stutters when I move around (even though FPS is 60-ish), and load times are freaking long. I think this patch does improve the campaign map performance, not sure about load times though.

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        April 24, 2009 11:10 PM

        I too have rarely crashed after clocking several hours, but whats the damn point right now? The AI is so ridiculously passive it feels like playing against a pack of retarded monkeys.

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          April 25, 2009 12:33 AM

          My feelings exactly. Either the AI does almost nothing, or they are a one region troop factory that sends 1 unit at a time at you. It's shocking they released this game in such a sorry shape.

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          April 25, 2009 1:17 AM

          On which difficulty setting? I was playing on hard as Austria and although I wasn't having too much trouble taking over my neighbours, at one point Sweden sent a pretty strong army in and took one of my cities. Took me by surprise, had to rush armies from my war with the Italian states up north.
          I guess they got pissed at me grabbing St Petersburg from them and giving it back to the Russians in exchange for Moldova ^^
          But I sort of see your point, the AI could be much more ambitious in the way they attack you. But in no way shape or form is it a game breaker.

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          April 25, 2009 3:11 AM

          I used to be a huge Total War fan, but the AI (especially the world map AI) has been absolutely terrible in every Total War after Shogun. In Shogun it had so few choices on which way to move and attack, it just seemed smarter.

          In Rome I remember killing thousands of enemy troops during sieges because they would just stand there weathering arrows FOREVER if you broke their siege equipment. They'd just stand there getting pelted. I'd put it on 10x time or whatever and come back and killed 90 percent of them.

          On the campaign map they'd sent all these small little armies around that were pathetically small, and the few times they sent big armies they'd be completely unbalanced, like all foot soldiers, so you could just kite them for 30 minutes with cavalry archers, exit the battle map, rinse and repeat until you thinned them down to almost nothing.

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        April 25, 2009 8:33 AM

        have a similar system and a similar experience. never crashed yet.

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      April 25, 2009 1:09 AM

      I have had this game since launch, and none of the bugs have been remotely game-ruining for me.

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      April 25, 2009 2:06 PM

      Same. And then we'll see whether I buy or not, kind of turned off by its terrible launch.

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      April 26, 2009 1:38 AM

      Just go for it, there is no way they aren't going to milk this game with expansions, and it has to be bugfree before then, buy it now and have a lot of fun with it ;)

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