I'm trying to get more complex and comprehensive image of the game's current status without any emotional ballast or hearsay.
If you could post yours issues or confirm / deny the ones I have seen. I'm very interested in what's the game like from both technical and game play standpoint later on in grand campaign where I have not been able to get due to numerous CTDs.
Please, keep it civil, rational, focused and report ONLY issues you have personally experienced.
Optionally, if you are getting game breaking technical issues, try to add your hardware specs, OS and at least graphic and sound driver specs preferably in spoiler section at the end of your post. Run 'dxdiag' command to get the data. Also some indication to the nature of CTD can be read from Windows event log (right click on 'Computer' icon or link in Start menu, select 'Manage' and than Event viewer / Windows Logs / Application).
Thanks in advance.
This is MY experience with the game so far:
Technical issues
- Frequent "random" CTDs on campaign map with the rate at about 1 CTD per 4-5 turns. Sometimes triggered by no apparent UI action (click, mouse move, etc.) = game crashes even when you are doing absolutely nothing. [constant]
- Few repeatable and fairly unavoidable CTDs triggered by particular action during grand campaign. [occasional]
- Some ship stacks causing incredibly long (~20 secs) lags when clicked, moved or docked in port. Restoring save or adding ship/s to problematic stack sometimes helps and sometimes not. [occasional]
- Unit textures get saturated with blue hue while forming a square frame of blue color centered on the unit. [rare]
- Erratic unreliable swapping of UI focus. When moving multiple units outside a city, port or town - n.g. you select an army, then a rake, then move the rake, but what gets moved is the army. Other side of the coin and probably part of the same problem is vice versa situation - you select city, then army stack in open, but bottom screen detail panel still shows details of the city and not the army as it should. [frequent]
For those interested which hw & sw I have tried the game to work on see this post. (in short: I've tested the game on two different and proven gaming rigs after fresh install of two different OSes and still got lots of CTDs).
AI issues
- Absurdly passive both in CM and battle (namely when defending). [constant]
- Broken sieges: botched path finding and general inability of AI to cope with fortifications results in completely clueless behavior occasionally overruled by stonewall passivity where majority of defending army masses around fort flag and gets slaughtered by single arty without any response or movement whatsoever. [constant]
- Reserves or cooperating armies are very often summoned in player's deployment zone sometimes right among player's ranks. [occasional]
- Cavalry unable to execute charge attack in timely fashion (in cooperation with infantry; different speeds separates forces and cavalry charges alone) or effective manner (it stops attack just before defending line or attacks in too flat angle, not in line's center and without any resemblance of formation and thus most of the momentum hits the void). [common]
- AI garrisons available buildings and waits to be destroyed by artillery (with the unit inside) with no counter-action whatsoever. [common]
- AI ignores player's garrisoned units and gets slaughter by them while aimlessly fooling around. [common]
- Path finding issues / stuck individuals on fences or abandoned artillery pieces. [common]
- Unit is unable to execute fire when not all members are standing in formation. See above point to understand why this is a problem. [common]
- AI sometimes attempts a flanking maneuver, but it tries to execute it with whole army. [rare]
- No naval invasions. [constant]
- Groups are not working in naval combat. Ships stop following the leader after a while. [constant]
- AI spams adverse region swap deals like mad. [common]
- AI often refuses generous diplomatic offers for no apparent reason. (Trade agreements with additional goodies to very friendly faction, peace treaties to hopelessly loosing faction accompanied with massive number of goodies, etc.) [occasional]
Other (mostly balancing) game play issues
- North American natives are overpowered and their battle formations and tactics bear no similarity with reality of those times.
- Mortars seem to be totally ineffective - they have terrible accuracy and when they occasionally hit they inflict no or little damage. (Some claim that percussion shells make all the difference, but due to technical issues I have never been able to get that far in campaign)
- Units "magically" summoned in AI defended city. Most apparent when invading isolated island where reserves have no way to came from and town hall or barracks are certainly incapable of producing such amount of troops in 1 turn. Most likely triggered by invading army's proximity (in "no-fog-of-war" range), because it never happen when I wait with an army outside that range and then move and attack in one turn.
- Ability of small nations to muster and keep large armies they have no economic base for. (Maybe it is an "issue" on hard or very hard difficulty setting only.)
- Naval combat with more than 5 ships is a micromanagement nightmare (can be done only by constant use of pause-order-run) mostly because non-functional group behavior.
- Grape shot and chain shot largely ineffective.
- Naval boarding does not work or its rules are strange and unclear. I've stopped to board after loosing superior (both in size and quality) ships several times to inferior opponent even after some grape shot prelude.
- Marginal differences in speed and maneuverability between small and large ships makes tactical use of smaller crafts impossible or at least very unlikely.
- Pirate's flyutes and galleons are too strong.
Technical details:
Spoiler Alert, click show to read: