The (Old) Official ETW Criticism Thread

[Theoo]

I have a very serious solution to this problem. Sega, the Creative Assembly or whoever it is running the show, you need to fire everyone on staff at empire total war. The programmers, the game testers, everyone. You also need to return the $ to every single person that bought this POS you call a game!

wow you ar genios. how dide CA not figur out this fix . my freind you ar a legend

everyeon that read my post. i recomend you buy etw. it realy good . game .

[TofuZombie]

Eh.. I've had not one single CTD, and with exception of no naval invasions, I've seen no bugs yet.

I think the game is awesome, and with time, could be amazing.

[Dclutch04]

Eh.. I've had not one single CTD, and with exception of no naval invasions, I've seen no bugs yet.

I think the game is awesome, and with time, could be amazing.

No offense, but i'd have to guess, if you havent had a single CTD its because you havent gotten to exploring with a Navy yet. Its terrible, everytime my game tries to calculate and display the travel distance bubble, it crashes. The game is severely flawed.

[ljuboja]

No offense, but i'd have to guess, if you havent had a single CTD its because you havent gotten to exploring with a Navy yet. Its terrible, everytime my game tries to calculate and display the travel distance bubble, it crashes. The game is severely flawed.

selecting and telling navies to move, or selecting individual ships take ages for me, i've never had a crash doing it, but whenever i deal with navies, i do need a swivel chair


i do however have a seperate rant...
i'm prussia and was fighting the dutch, during the course of the fighting, i offered a peace treaty to britain (who had join on the dutch's side), they then demanded 190000 in return to end a war that had seen no fighting between me and them, i then defeated the dutch, destroyed the faction and tried the brits again, they demanded, after losing their ally, their reason for fighting anyway, and any foothold on the continent, 290000, which incidently was all my money.
And they say diplomacy has improved...

[Dclutch04]

wow you ar genios. how dide CA not figur out this fix . my freind you ar a legend

everyeon that read my post. i recomend you buy etw. it realy good . game .

I'm a what? genios? Did you know that if you click the little check ABC in the upper right hand corner of the reply box, it actually spell checks your total gibberish before you post it. What I find even more hillarious than your sad attempt at the English language is that anyone who's read through more than 3 of the posts in this "rant" will know that the game is flawed and unfinished.
Im severely disappointed at all the people that are just claiming "oh the modders will fix the game". I'm sorry, the modders make mods for games, while many of them are very good at what they do, it is not their job to finish and fix broken games because software companies dont and wont spend the time and money to fix them. How was this game even released? Can anyone say Rush to Production? Im not sure how they claim to have beta-tested this game, when anyone thats obviously played a grand campaign for more than 20 yrs or a single-player battle against any skilled bot can realize the game is flawed.

[Theoo]

I'm a what? genios? Did you know that if you click the little check ABC in the upper right hand corner of the reply box, it actually spell checks your total gibberish before you post it. What I find even more hillarious than your sad attempt at the English language is that anyone who's read through more than 3 of the posts in this "rant" will know that the game is flawed and unfinished.
Im severely disappointed at all the people that are just claiming "oh the modders will fix the game". I'm sorry, the modders make mods for games, while many of them are very good at what they do, it is not their job to finish and fix broken games because software companies dont and wont spend the time and money to fix them. How was this game even released? Can anyone say Rush to Production? Im not sure how they claim to have beta-tested this game, when anyone thats obviously played a grand campaign for more than 20 yrs or a single-player battle against any skilled bot can realize the game is flawed.

i gievd you complimient and you get angried ? wats wrong wit you

[Modestus]

Right since this is a rant thread I am going to ing rant, I presume the censor will ing work so.....

Turn ing 185, my first real ing campaign and I have dealt with every problem that people have experienced and finally I get my campaign completely corrupted on turn ing 185, Jesus Christ why not turn 85.

This game is a piece of rushed unadulterated pile of and the bloody developers should be forced to play it and judging from their responses that's one thing they did not do.

Loud screaming turn ing 185 AAAhhhhhh.

[Dclutch04]

i gievd you complimient and you get angried ? wats wrong wit you

compliment? with my understanding of the english language (from birth) it certainly doesnt sound like one to me. It sounds more like sarcasm. How could it be a compliment? Im saying ETW is a waste of time and $$, and your telling everyone that reads ur post to "go buy it, it good game"? how is that a compliment? genios

[Legio]

Merged rant threads. PM me if you have any questions.

[WarnerVH]

Well I know that we have had over 100 pages of rants and raves about Empire Total War and I haven't read but 10 or so of the 100+ pages; but I have had this game now for about one month and have played only the battlemap portion of the game because I can not get over the bugs in the battle engine and can't bare to play the bigger portion of the game.

Here is my own 2 cents about this games....

My biggest complaint is how restrictive it feels over the fluidness of the previous M2TW series even in vanilla mode of M2TW. It is restrictive and I do not know why they did the following restrictions when the previous version did not have these restrictions.

These restrictions are as follows...
1st) I MUST have STEAM playing. WHY? The point? I say if you want to use STEAM download STEAM and run it. I should not have to buy a CD/DVD copy of the game and then have to download the game from STEAM for 11 hours when I could have simply had a normal CD Install SetUp option like in previous versions of the Total War Series.

2nd)The Special Forces STEAM expansion... WHY? The Point? Why is it that I have to pay any money to get a few more units that could have been released with the game? This makes me believe that CA has integrated a hard coded program that will not even allow you to make or add units to the game. Only time will tell on that point.

3rd) This I think is the most annoying restriction for me. You can't even choose the amount of money/points to construct you army. I could be wrong; but I cannot find any way to alter without hacking the game which would allow me to specify the amount of florins/money/generationpoints to build an army in the single battle/custom battle portion of the game. Side note, no random army.

4th) Interface of the entire custom battle set up . Want to upgrade a unit. Click it, hit the upgrade buttons. Want to upgrade another unit after upgrade a unit three picks ago. You have to click and highlight the unit or you will simply upgrade the last unit you upgraded earlier. Why? None of the other interfaces of the last previous game reverted to this method.

5th) In battle the interface is outright intrusive and the hot keys are simply annoying if you leave them as default. But the unit cards are very hard to read. I have many times clicked the wrong unit card and did not realize it until it was too late.

6th) I find the whole game sluggish. I have to click or highlite a unit in some way and then wait for the game to recognize I have just selected the unit card. If I simply select unit card and move unit I will get nothing. This could be my PC; but I have a dual 2.4 Opteron with 3 gigs of Ram and an NVidia GeForce 9800 512MB GT. I've even tried running lowest graphy setting in 800x600 resolution and found it sluggish.

7th) Unit Combat AI and Behavior AI is just wierd at times. Myself and a friend has had this in multiplayer and single player and it must be one of the many bugs of the game. When you select and position a unit on the map it will sometimes walk/run to the area you ordered it to move and then face the opposite direction you intended to have it face. I have made sure the "arrow" was pointed in the right direction many times and it appears to be a random bug.

8th) The speed of the units walking across the battle field and unit movement in general feels WAY TOO FAST. I don't understand why so fast? Is this what 3x games have turned into, who can click the fastest? What happened to real strategy.

9th) Multiplayer games, there is no chat feature in game that I can find. How do you co ordinate with your team?

10th) I seem to have found that in ETW multiplayer deployment that the FIRST person to end his deployment phase in a multiplayer battle starts off a countdown clock the forces everybody else to set up or risk having your army half way deployed when the battle starts automaticaly. WHY?

11th)What happened to the variety in muliplayer maps? only like 10 (haven't counted) land maps.

12th)Must have STEAM Running online mode to recall replays. ????

13th)Muliplayer battles. Yes I'd like to have one. I think given the two odds --Russian roulette -- or making it completely through a multiplayer game without crashing, I'd have better odds at Russian roulette.

I could go on but these are my biggest complaints that make the game almost unplayable. I hope that some modder like those from Stainless Steel do some great modding or I have a feeling I will be going back to M2TW. Which I still play more; but might give up ETW untill it gets a little better and stable.

[THOMASkwok]

Pathfinding uhhh!!
I saw a unit fleeing, and the fled right into a side of unclimbable hill, and they got stuck, their feet were still moving, but they were incapable of swerving around it, or avoiding it. So my muskets just killed them all

[nimoto]

I never understood why they'd decide to call it a "special forces" expansion. It seems so random. It's as if the Thirteen Colonies get SEALs-

[Rellus]

JUST bought this game and I can't even play it. I managed to make it to turn 24 on my Prussian campaign saving after I did anything because of multiple crashes to the desk top in starting campagins before this. And now when i load my game it just randomly crashes and wont even start.

So i tried to start a new Spanish campaign and it's doing the same thing. Absolutely ridiculous.

[renegade765]

This song pretty much sums up my opinion of Empire..http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I7r5nrpqD28.. Well that might be kinda intense but man I really feel dissapointed with CA..Still have a glimmer of faith though..

[Alte]

We want to see some dev and publisher heads rolling for this "game"

[Sardonicus]

We want to see some dev and publisher heads rolling for this "game"

Naa, I understand your frustration, but I really don't wanna see any heads roll.
I have to try and keep in mind the thousands apon thousands of hours I've enjoyed playing all the previous TW titles.
That has to count for a little something.

That being said, if this one doesn't get fixed, it'll be my last TW game.
Makes me sad really, like losing a dear friend.

[Alte]

Naa, I understand your frustration, but I really don't wanna see any heads roll.
I have to try and keep in mind the thousands apon thousands of hours I've enjoyed playing all the previous TW titles.
That has to count for a little something.

That being said, if this one doesn't get fixed, it'll be my last TW game.
Makes me sad really, like losing a dear friend.

We want those s fired period.

Sacrifice a few(devs) for the life of many(TW games).

I am not a big expert for musket era but why the ...uck is line infantry unable to fire behind the first rank (no tech discovered) WHY

Why is there no first rank on his knees, second standing, third getting his muskets between the men of the second rank(and the best thing they do it when in square or behind the wall, altough the bug doesnt allow them to fire). And there is no real platoon firing, and i mean all guns the same time but no, the idiots are slower than zombies in figuring out that tha cavalary is going to trample them and they use the stupid slo mo fire rank after another. Preserving ammo ppl, for what i have yet to have a battle when my men were out of it.

[Dclutch04]

I dont know about the rest of you all, but i'm thinking that CA and its developers should follow the idea of US Senator Chuck Grassley's idea for the AIG execs, they "perhaps should "resign or go commit suicide"

[legiox89]

Anyone agree? I just bought this game and I regret and disapointed, ive read this game was good and i had my expectations but this is faar from good. first of all, the game is slow, loading times before battle is round 20 seconds which is enough frustration, then when it comes to battle, u wont even get a challange, the Al is hopeless, just like cattle to slaughter, it raids your towns, villages with hopelessly outnumber, like only 1 unit!, then forces me to come and get him, totally pointless, waste of time, its no total war. I played as Rossia and besieged St.Petrsburg of Sweden with large army, but i get an opponent with 2 units and they refuse to surrender. instead i get more raids on my lands and i have to deal with them 1 by one with all those loading times, its so boring, its like RTW al was far better than this "improvement".

[Arn]

and I'm sure you played rome total war without any patches as well