Sorry you are having so many issues. I downloaded from steam and it just worked. It looks like people who purchased the boxed version are the ones with install issues.
You would think Valve would know how to get this right by now after the orange box and HL:E2.
For those of you waiting around for the CPU to make it’s move: you can turn that off on the option menu. I turned off “show CPU moves” and on my PC the CPU takes all of 3 seconds to go. the only exception is when it does something that affects me directly, like move a fleet or army to engage me in battle.
Here’s something important about the battlefield AI. On the various TW discussion forums, the consensus has come to be that the AI doesn’t know how to handle it if you increase the troop size above normal. The consensus is that if troop size is normal or smaller the AI is actually pretty decent.
I do not have the game yet myself so I can not corroborate this personally.
It was cracked within a day of its release. Par for the course.
At any rate, my badass 2.2 mhz single core processor doesn’t seem to be able to handle it well. Just another excuse for me to get a new system.
I’m under the impression that you do, although you only need the internet for the installation. From what I’ve read, once you install and enroll you won’t need the disks to play, I haven’t tried though.
Yeah, got the update. I’ve installed it on my home PC and the install went well. It’s running a bit slower than I recall on my customers laptop though.
I have a couple of questions for people who have played through a lot. First question deals with trade. What are the Indiaman ships for? Are they just stripped down war ships or can you use them for trade somehow? I am playing to Brits and I’ve taken over a bunch of islands in the Caribbean, but even though they have ports I don’t see any trade lines to any of them.
Next question is…how the hell do you capture a ship during a sea battle?? I’ve dismasted ships and had them say they have surrendered, I’ve made ships surrender during boarding actions…and yet when the battle is over there is no indication I’ve captured anything. It really sucks when you are fighting pirates and they have ships with the gold number 1 over them (meaning, I presume, that they are trade ships) and instead of capturing them it simply shows them sunk (with prize money set to zero). I’ve had better luck capturing ships and getting prize money by just doing the auto calculation, so there must be something I’m missing here.
Also, just as a general question, what technologies are you researching? Any thoughts on good lines to go for?
The trade ships are insane gold generators but you have to make them early (or be willing to take trade lanes by force) for them to be good. First you sail them to international waters (white squares at the edge of the map) when it brings up the global map you’ll see little circles that represent trade centers. You point your ships there and when you arrive you’ll see little yellow circles. If you put a trade ship in an empty circle it’ll start a trade lane. This trade lane will trade with you and any of your allies you have a trade agreement with. They seem to generate 500-1000 a turn for me. The AI leaves them alone as well unless you go to war with that faction. As for regular trade lanes obviously you need a port that can support trade lanes and it should start up trade lanes passively. They get a huge boost when you set up trade agreements with other nations though. Every nation seems to take a trade ‘slot’ from your port so you have to keep upgrading those trade ports if you want to have trade ship lanes plus trade partners.
Are you sinking the ships after they surrendered? Sometimes your ships like to send a few extra shots into them and they sink so slowly that maybe you didn’t notice you sank them? That’s the only thing I can think of. I usually capture ships by weakening them with regular shot until most of their guns are down then raking them with grape shot until they surrender. This doesn’t always work but it’s better then boarding for me. The times I tried to board I was either repelled (even when I outnumbered them two to one) or the AI simply seemed too confused to do it.
I re-did the American campaign. American Hero is definitely bugged for me. Also America hasn’t unlocked on the main Campaign. Grrrrr. I’m keeping a save just a few turns away from the last part of the campaign so hopefully if they patch it I’ll be able to load up and just hit end turn a few times.
Oh another thought do you have plantations/fur centers/etc set up? They boost trade as well. If you don’t have any perhaps there’s nothing to trade or you don’t have anything your trade partners want? I’m not sure if it works that way but it might be worth looking into if you haven’t developed any of those things.
I finally got it to work (some of the blame rests with me) , anyway, as a Total War rookie I have a few questions:
Sometimes when I ctrl group my pretty front line and click them to move forward every unit takes off in a different direction. This happen to anyone else?
In the government screen it shows who you have to Secretary of the Navy and such and lists their opposition, is the only difference the number of stars they have next to their name or is there more I have to consider?
Pirates are raiding my trade routs, I was getting a glass of milk so I didn’t see where it happened and now I can’t find them to stop them. Is there a ‘current conflict’ button or something?
I’m having a problem with the graphics - the game won’t let me set textures at higher than “medium”, which, as far as unit detail goes, looks worse than R;TW, let alone Medieval. I’m prett sure my rig can handle High, so why won’t they let me try?
Is there any way to get around this? My troops’ arms aren’t connected to their bodies!
The shader model dictates some of the settings so that some of the higher and ultra settings are only available if you are running with shader model 3 (high). Which of course requires you to have a fully DX 9c compliant video card. I don’t think texture is one of those settings though.
Higher texture settings, more intensive graphics enhancements, graphics filters (AF,AA) and higher resolutions all demand higher video memory. How much memory does your video card have, and have you tried lowering the resolution the game runs at?
It’s a GeForce 8600GT with 256MB (the computer itself is a dual core of some sort with 2.5 gigs of RAM, running on XP). A good card when I bought it… a year and a half ago. Hmm.
Lowering the resolution doesn’t open any detail options, but I reinstalled the game, and now it looks a bit better. I still can’t run it in High Detail, but at least the Medium doesn’t look like Low. I wish it would let me try, though.
Rome and Medieval II locked you out of all kinds of graphics settings if they thought (often erroneously) that your card couldn’t handle them. Empire may be doing the same thing. In the case of those two, it was a simple .ini file edit to unlock the settings.
.ini files are just text files with configuration data. Stuff like “FogOfWar=1” or “PlayIntroMovie=0.” You can edit them with Notepad (save a backup copy first!) If Empire is doing this the same way, the relevant file is likely in the main game folder. The graphics stuff was a little more complicated than my example - iirc there was a sort of table listing various parameters of graphics cards followed by max allowable resolution and the like. It’s a new game engine, though, so I don’t know. I still don’t have a copy myself.
My video card (GeForce 9000 series) let’s me adjust the video levels. The default is high on everything, but I’ve set it lower as the game just isn’t playing that well on my system. I think I have almost everything set to medium right now, and there is still some huge delays…though, curiously, most of them seem to be on the strategic map (when I click on a fleet in port there is about a 30 second delay before I can do anything with the fleet, for instance).
I absolutely love this game, which makes the problems even more heart breaking for me. I’m loving the tactical battles, even the sea battles (I just had one of my first major fleet battles between serious capital ships and it was incredible). I love the tech tree they introduced. But even though my system is well within the minimum requirements the game just plays poorly…slow, freezes, choppy and even blowing me out to desktop twice since I installed it yesterday.
I hope they are able to fix the problems with it soon as this could either be the best or the worst game of the series. It has the potential to be the best IMHO…but right now from my own perspective it’s the worst.
FWIW I’m running kinda choppy too, and shouldn’t be. Everything was set High by the installation, but I turned it down to Medium after things lagged out too bad a couple times. The thing is, I think I see the same lag now and then on Medium. I expect they can tune the performance some with patches. I sure hope. I’m upgrading from 2gb to 4gb system memory soon, and I’ll see if that helps anything.
I don’t know if anyone’s brought this up yet, but they are actually releasing the first patch next week to deal with a variety of bugs as well as performance issues. There are some rumblings in the Total War community that Sega pushed this game out the door prematurely. Since the game went gold, they’ve been working on a patch to “finish” the game.
