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Empire: Total War Demo is Coming Tomorrow

SecuROM would not break your system unless you were terribly unlucky with some obscure optical drive. Seriously, anyone claiming that SecuROM gives people issues is just repeating all of the talking points on the internet.

Publishers should just play around with data encryption instead... protecting the key is another issue though.
 
heh. my steam is actually 125 megs right now. not in use, nothing downloading. piece of shit.

hehe steam defense force. pathetic. I love having these games completely tied down to an account, and let's not stop there, let's put them inside a program I have to have running at all times which itself is a slow piece of crap that not only fucks with the directory shit of the games and wow won't even let me install the games wherever I want it randomly won't run the games for idiotic reasons. superb. it's actually fantastic.

valve should take a lesson from gfw live and just include a miniversion of steam right into games aswell or something as an alternative. what the shit.
 
Joseph Merrick said:
hehe steam defense force. pathetic.
Click to expand...

the fact that you can't get a grasp on why people might want to argue the benefits of steam, based on their own rationally evaluated grounds, kinda negates any relevance that your charming little ramble may have had.

or atleast reduces it to "IT DOES THESE THINGS AND I DON'T LIKE IT." which, y'know, is fine.

i'm all for a debate, i can empathise with pretty much every reason pc gamers would want to keep their games autonomous. but don't label me with this "defense force" shit and expect me to respect a word you have to say.
 
Joseph Merrick said:
heh. my steam is actually 125 megs right now. not in use, nothing downloading. piece of shit.

hehe steam defense force. pathetic. I love having these games completely tied down to an account, and let's not stop there, let's put them inside a program I have to have running at all times which itself is a slow piece of crap that not only fucks with the directory shit of the games and wow won't even let me install the games wherever I want it randomly won't run the games for idiotic reasons. superb. it's actually fantastic.

valve should take a lesson from gfw live and just include a miniversion of steam right into games aswell or something as an alternative. what the shit.
Click to expand...


My steam is using 7MB right now. Fix your shit and stop being a douche. Thanks.
 
Fragamemnon said:
112M right now on my gaming PC for whatever reason, with more reads/writes than any other program running by far, without doing a damn thing (haven't launched a game from it, just playing some Victoria at the moment). Client-based DRM is shit, client-based DRM that totally removes my choice to handoff a game to a coworker or hock it on ebay when I am done with it is even more shit.

I'd rather keep the CD in the drive, given the choice.
Click to expand...
Yeah, as others have mentioned, something is definitely wrong.

I started Steam, opened and closed about 4 graphic-intensive games then checked the overhead. Still around 8 megabytes.

Maybe you're leaving the Steam window open? That increases the overhead. Especially if you're using the in-Steam internet browser. That's about the only way my overhead gets anywhere near 100 MB.

(your complaint about used games is entirely valid, BTW. I very rarely sell or lend a game though, so it's not a dealbreaker)
 
Might finally take the plunge and get myself a beast capable of maxing this behemoth out. If im gonna do it, I might as well do it properly.
 
Joseph Merrick said:
heh. my steam is actually 125 megs right now. not in use, nothing downloading. piece of shit.

hehe steam defense force. pathetic. I love having these games completely tied down to an account, and let's not stop there, let's put them inside a program I have to have running at all times which itself is a slow piece of crap that not only fucks with the directory shit of the games and wow won't even let me install the games wherever I want it randomly won't run the games for idiotic reasons. superb. it's actually fantastic.
Click to expand...

I'd rather have CD based DRM than Steam too. I bought a couple games off Steam, didn't like them, if I bought it at a store I would've just thrown it on eBay with a minimal stupid tax, now I'm stuck with them forever, yea Steam is great, let me buy all my games from there going forward.
 
Downloading now, I don't how big it is exactly because I can find an exact figure and installed size does not equal download size. I'm guessing between 1 and 1.5 gigs.
 
Really looking forward to the demo. Those colonials will honor their king even if it means killing every last one of them in the process.

Steam could deal with the boxed copy authentication issue by allowing retail activations to be "revoked" in the client (removing the local game install and removing the games from the Games list).

As for the > 100M usage I was seeing, it was due to the beta involvement-I removed myself from it and it went down to 60M, which isn't unreasonable. Random-ass I/O is still crazy, and I'd like for Steam to provide some sort of client less mode in the future, given that none of its competitors require a client to be running to play their games.
 
Anyone know if the retail version is going to have online activation DRM? If it is I might as well buy it on Steam.
 
This is a steamworks title, so it will require steam to run. Even the retail box.

When I get this, I think I'll get the retail box version like I did with Dawn of War 2. Get the best of both worlds. I still like getting boxes and packaging, but like the conveniance of steam. The DoW2 retail box comes with a small manual with some details and a tech tree foldout sheet which is handy. Hopefully the Empire box has something similar.
 
Well game doesn't work for me. I was hoping to get by at 10fps on my old Athlon XP + 6800GT system but all I get in the game is scrambled images.
 
Does this shit load EXTREMELY slow for anyone else?

I mean damn I start it up and it takes like 5 minutes to get to the menu and by then HUP gotta go to work.

Tried it on a

AMD athlon X2 6000+
4GB of ram
and a 8800GT 512mb

Or maybe my ram is shit idk
 
I turned the game off the first time, cause I thought it froze.

It loads slow as fuck!

Something isn't right with this demo.
 
I've had a few games (Dark Messiah of M&M comes to mind) take FOREVER the first time I loaded it up but then went much faster on subsequent starts. Haven't restarted the demo to see, though. That said, when I started playing the loading was a bit long but quitting to menu and then trying again (wanted to bump up gfx) had a noticeable increase in speed.

e8400
Radeon 4850
4 gigs ram
Vista 64.

Hitting "automatic" in visuals cranked everything up to Ultra, no hardware shadows, vsync, or some other shadow thing (may turn them on later). Ran very well in ground combat, amazingly well in sea combat. Bigger battles may get slowdown but who knows for now. Looks pretty amazing. Even on medium settings (where it defaulted initially) the ground stuff looked pretty good, just didn't get grass as far and the terrain textures were kinda meh, also didn't seem to have as many effects.

Watching cannonballs skip across the ground and knock down buildings is a hoot. Ocean combat reminded me a lot of Sea Dogs, but (although possibly because it was a tutorial and I know my units were invincible) without the often-aggravating wind management (or at least, not as much).

Probably will preorder this weekend to get the free Rome Gold.

edit: ok, restarted demo and it got past the Steam "loading" box instantly (literally less than a second), under a minute to get to main menu.
 
I am not bugying this game. I don't want to spend time learning how to play a game, no matter how incredibly rewarding. I have barely 30 minutes per day to play games, and I already wasted 1 hour on this and it wasn't that fun. Also, the setting turns me off.

My specs:
Core i7 @ 3.3Ghz
GTX295
6GB DDR3 1600Mhz+
Vista 64


Initial load:
The game took 1 minute and a half at most to load for me.
Graphics:

Max Settings, everything clicked on beyond Ultra. 4xAA 1600x1050, Max AF.

Empire2009-02-2011-25-11-53.jpg


Although the fps is low during the close ups, it was still highly playable since the real decisions were made in the high view mode. Also, FRAPS took away 7-5 fps out of every SS. Also, keep in mind Nvidia hasn't released drivers for this game.

Empire2009-02-2011-22-00-29.jpg


The game was highly playable at this extreme settings, even with the illusion of low framerate, my mouse cursor moved really fast whenever I needed to make decisions.

More pics:

lol at my decision making. When I saw that my units wouldn't go forward I knew I had f'd up.

Empire2009-02-2011-25-00-28.jpg


I don't know wtf I am doing

Empire2009-02-2011-22-25-43.jpg


PS: I don't have Sea Battles shots, but they ran much faster.

Gay kitty love. Not my kitties.

DSCF0783.jpg
 
saelz8 said:
I turned the game off the first time, cause I thought it froze.

It loads slow as fuck!

Something isn't right with this demo.
Click to expand...

Yeah, mine was doing the same. I also had this weird black blur effect going on around my units. Turned off particle effects, distortion, shadows- anything that could possibly cause it- and it was still there.

Game itself is ace, though, as are the visuals during the naval battles. It is, as godhandiscen's wonderful post above illustrates, pretty intimidating though, but I'm perfectly fine with having to learn quite a bit about the game to appreciate its nuances and succeed. :P (Provided the campaign has a nice difficulty curve to it.) I'm also interested in seeing how the turn based stuff figures into it all. (Never played a total war game before)
 
I have only played the tutorials so far but it's quite enjoyable, without going too deep into it the depth to the land and sea battles is obvious.

Load times are just atrocious though. It started up faster the second time and seems a little quicker but battles still take way too long to load imo. Since we're going to be doing this a lot come the campaign I hope the full game is a lot more optimised in terms of loading. Graphics and performance seems pretty good.
 
godhandiscen said:
I have barely 30 minutes per day to play games.

My specs:
Core i7 @ 3.3Ghz
GTX295
6GB DDR3 1600Mhz+
Vista 64
Click to expand...

That beast of a machine needs more loving!

At 80% now, though only getting 20k a second now :(
 
Sanjay said:
That beast of a machine needs more loving!

At 80% now, though only getting 20k a second now :(
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What is more sad is that I mostly end up playing Tower Defence or other similar flash based games at school :(
 
Played the brits/us battle, and I really like it. I was really skeptical about how well CA would pull off guns, but they did gud. The pie-shaped indicators telling you your firing range, garrisoning, etc. And they finally made the WASD controls the default ones. :lol

And it runs pretty well for me, too. My specs:
E6600 @ 3GHz
8800 GTS 320 @ 650/1030
2GB RAM

It defaulted to all high with 4x/16x. I turned it down to 2x/8x and turned on SSAO and something else which I now forget. So I have everything ticked except hardware shadows and DoF, 1680*1050, 2x/8x. Runs between 30-40, I never noticed a drop below 30, so it's good enough for a Total War game. I might muck a bit more with the settings, try turning on hw shadows and DOF, because I only ran the one battle.

So excited :D
 
epmode said:
Yeah, as others have mentioned, something is definitely wrong.

I started Steam, opened and closed about 4 graphic-intensive games then checked the overhead. Still around 8 megabytes.

Maybe you're leaving the Steam window open? That increases the overhead. Especially if you're using the in-Steam internet browser. That's about the only way my overhead gets anywhere near 100 MB.

(your complaint about used games is entirely valid, BTW. I very rarely sell or lend a game though, so it's not a dealbreaker)
Click to expand...

I think some of the issues are because of how memory is shown. What's sad is that I studied computer engineering type stuff and I -still- don't remember the details: In task manager (at least on Windows 7) Steam shows at like 10MB or something, if the client's minimized to the system tray (and downloading a game). But if you actually go to the resource monitor, you can see the the actual commit size, or whatever, is like 160MB. Firefox is using maybe 700-800MB, but I have like 8 windows and some 50+ tabs scattered about, with like 8 GAF threads, and so forth.

I didn't notice memory or disk reads being excessive...there was a lot of disk usage, but I'm downloading the 2GB demo right now so that's reasonable that it'd be writing.

If anyone has some legitimate complaints, please bring them to my attention...Steam is pretty much the best system I know, despite their flaws and some of the flaws of the Source engine or Valve games. My only big complaint about Valve is my eternal fear that my account will get hacked and the person will get VAC banned, thus meaning that there is NO chance of me ever playing TF2/Left 4 Dead online again. At least I'd still be able to play single-player games.
 
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