Empire: Total War Demo Now Exclusively on Steam

[Hectic Glenn]

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[br]Not scheduled for release on Steam until 4th March, Empire: Total War has made an early appearance on Steam with a free demo which provides a short glimpse of the kind of epic engagements available in the full version.

The demo offers players the opportunity to take on the American Army and the French Navy from The Creative Assembly's own "home" side, playing as the British Empire in the "Battle of Brandywine Creek" and the "Battle of Lagos."

To install the demo go to the Steam games Empire: Total War page, where you can pre-order too. In fact...if you pre-purchase Empire: Total War on Steam you will receive "Rome Total War Gold Edition" for free with your purchase.

 

[DigiQ8]

That was my news post.

 

[Eejit]

15 gigs?
Eeek.

 

[Hectic Glenn]

Is it? Well the demo is only 2gigs, downloading it now!

 

[Mutley]

2gb Demo and really slow d/l speeds... yey.

 

[OmegaX]

Not too slow here... Around 1.9 MB/s

 

[Mutley]

Not too slow here... Around 1.9 MB/s

If it's not stuck on "Preparing to download..." I get upto 20kb/s. Pisses me off. Only with Steam too.

 

[L3TUC3]

40 kb/s for me. I guess EU users are leeching off the same server.

 

[Ennui]

Excellent, can't wait for this to finish downloading/installing. I've been looking forward to this game like crazy.

My download speed is much lower than usual too, fluctuating between 200-500kbps. Usually I get 2-3mbps.

 

[Lucid]

A 2gb demo? Jesus christ.
Wish I was on my gaming PC instead of my shitty laptop atm. :frown:

 

[Sledgehammer]

Bioshock's demo was the same size. The L4D demo was even larger if I recall correctly.

Very slow download. But hey, it looks sweet.

 

[fix-cz]

Sooooooo slooooooow Most European servers are overloaded with 10-40KB/s download speed. I had to switch to Taiwan servers - speed over 200KB/s.

 

[Mutley]

Sooooooo slooooooow Most European servers are overloaded with 10-40KB/s download speed. I had to switch to Taiwan servers - speed over 200KB/s.

How do you change servers? :|

 

[L3TUC3]

How do you change servers? :|

View > Settings > Downloads > Download Region

Steam servers are too busy to handle your request. Please try again in a few minutes.

Ooorgle.

 

[Mutley]

Wow, swapping to Taiwan has made my Steam download faster than it has in the last 3 years set to UK.

 

[Krynn72]

I find it interesting that people still go "holy shit?! ___ gigs?!" with every demo and/or game.

FILE SIZES FOR GAMES ARE GOING TO CONTINUE TO INCREASE YOU KNOBS. GET OVER IT.

I just finished playing all the demo offers. Its looks like a great game, but i'm going to hold off on buying it until they release a couple patches for it. I was getting sound glitches, formation glitches and whenever I would tell my artillery to pack up so they could move, they would do so, then immediately start unpacking again. It ended up killing them.

Also, Naval battles are ****ing sweeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeet!

Still like Rome: TW better though.

 

[Lucid]

Are naval battles easily manageable? A few early reviews say that naval battles turn into unmanageable cluster f*cks and in turn become very tedious to play out.

This is essentially the deciding factor in whether or not I buy the game.

 

[Mutley]

It's hard to apply tactics I find, simply because they are such slow and combersome units - it means you need to think lots of steps ahead in order to get something together.

Controlling them is easy though.

 

[Eejit]

Naval battles can get a bit out of hand with a fleet, but are very fun with a single ship to control. Practice might help ofc.

You could always just choose for naval battles to autoresolve when playing campaign.

 

[Krynn72]

Yeah, they can get pretty unmanageable once the ships are engaged. I found it to be pretty similar to the way the game plays out in an all-infantry battle where you basically just march your army into theirs and wait for something to happen that lets you adjust your tactics. The way my naval battle went, was just a cluster**** at the start, where guns were firing every which way and I couldn't really tell who was winning, but then several of their ships fell, and I was able to take the ships who used to be engaged with them off and then use them to do co-ordinated broadside volleys on other enemy ships while they were engaged with my other ships. I thought it was pretty fun, but I will definitely autoresolve large battles unless its with an extremely important fleet (carrying a general and his army or something).

 

[Lucid]

Somewhat disappointing to hear, sounds like it has the same problem as Imperial Glory's naval battles which are in no way fun to control, all of the ships look alike and aren't even color coded or anything.

But, I look forward to trying it myself soon.

 

[Sheepo]

I'll check this out.

 

[Jimmeh]

Seems like an awesome game, but like Krynn said it's a pretty buggy demo. Other than the annoying loading times it's like there's a whole bunch of missing sounds or something. Silent calvary, sucky melee sounds. I had four units bayonet charge the enemy line and it sounded like there was about three people fighting. At one point my artillery crew just stopped responding to any commands - they'd acknowledge it but wouldn't do shit.

All in all - I really enjoyed the land battle, I completed it a few times and the AI did pretty well to mix things up. I had an epic battle between both main armies in the area to the north-west approaching the town-hall - it was just immense. The naval battle was pretty overwhelming though. After about 30 seconds I didn't have a clue what I was doing. Hopefully it's just something that takes a little while to get used to.