Hey everyone,

Got Empire Total War yesterday, downloaded it fine, and installed it fine from Steam.

I opened up the game, played a few turns on the Campaign map to get a feel for it, and it worked fine. I didn't have much time before I had to go to sleep, so I thought i'd give the battlefield a try. So I load it up, and after waiting a hell of a long time for it to just load, I get into the battle. I finish setting up my army, and i'm good to go. About a minute into the battle, the screen freezes. Oooookay... So I click around randomly with my mouse, and the loading screen pops back up, but it doesn't move or show that it's loading anything. Then, after about ten or fifteen seconds, it goes back to the battle (Which, by the way, has now gone out of my favor, since apparently crap still happens in the battle despite my being taken out of it.). I ignored it the first time, but it kept happening. Frustrated as hell with what now strikes me as an incredibly broken game, I shut it off.

Tonight I got off of work, and decided to give it a shot. I made sure all my drivers were updated, and even deleted and reinstalled my Empire Total War installation. So I got back into the game after all of this, and gave it another shot. This time it was a battle fought from the campaign. Again, I got the same damn problem. I tried scaling down the graphics options, and not even that worked. The thing is that when the battle is actually going, I have perfectly smooth performance and animation, no missing textures, perfect audio, and whatnot. No lag, nothing. Hell, I had ZERO problems with the demo, which worked like a charm for me. My system is more than capable of handling the game, and it ran MTW2 on max settings. I really think this is a problem with the game, or the download from Steam.

I'm wondering if anyone else has had this problem, and if they know any fixes for it? I'm getting frustrated as hell with this. I've been waiting for this game for months now.

And what do you all think is up with all the problems? Broken game? Steam's fault for botching up?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Here are my computer specs, by the way:

Intel Core 2 Duo 2.66ghz/2.67ghz
3gb of RAM
NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTS 512
Sound Blaster X-Fi Xtreme Audio