Missed out on ETW, considering Napoloen, but why so much negativity?

Hi guys, unfortunately I missed out on ETW, a week after I bought the game I ran into some life issues and am just now getting back into the grove again. I plan to play the game as much as possible in the next few days to try and get back some of what I missed, before possibly purchasing Napoleon.

But one thing keeps coming up; it seems like the community dislikes Empire as a whole, and thinks it was almost a waste of a game. I missed out on all the big bugs and issues, so I'm kind of in the dark as to why that would be, and why it seems like there is such a dark light when it comes to interest in Napoleon.

So I was wondering if someone could fill me in on all the major problems I seemed to avoid, and why some are screaming "doomsday" for Napoleon.

Originally Posted by Knighty

Hi guys, unfortunately I missed out on ETW, a week after I bought the game I ran into some life issues and am just now getting back into the grove again. I plan to play the game as much as possible in the next few days to try and get back some of what I missed, before possibly purchasing Napoleon.

But one thing keeps coming up; it seems like the community dislikes Empire as a whole, and thinks it was almost a waste of a game. I missed out on all the big bugs and issues, so I'm kind of in the dark as to why that would be, and why it seems like there is such a dark light when it comes to interest in Napoleon.

So I was wondering if someone could fill me in on all the major problems I seemed to avoid, and why some are screaming "doomsday" for Napoleon.

A lot of people are upset about how Empire unfolded, and rightly so in many cases. It was released with many problems and not all of them have been addressed. Add to that the lack of Modder support (Which was promised before release) and you have an angry community on your hands.

As for Empire being a waste. I wouldn't say that, i've had hundreds of hours of enjoyment from it (Granted, with mods like Darth's) It's brilliant in some ways, but incredibly frustrating in others.

We're being promised a lot with napoleon, which reminds a lot of us of the same promises we were given with Empire. So it's understandable and perfectly reasonable to be skeptical this time around. That said... i still have faith that CA can turn this around and give us the game that Empire should have been.

Time will tell.

You lucked out and didn't miss out on Empire.

The entire battle Siege process is totally broken and stupid. The AI runs around the fort, uses grappling hooks to scale the walls, and the arty is ineffectively used and doesn't ever breach. Even the modders can't fix it.

I still find the battle AI horrible but opinions on this are mixed. CA ofcourse walked away from it and isn't patching.

I wouldn't touch NTW either as CA is looking for AI programmers and NTW is on the horizon to be released.

Have they released the mod tools now? Or are they still un-released and the modders are left to their own devices? I guess I should ask if they've made any announcements regarding mods for Napoleon either.

Originally Posted by Knighty

Have they released the mod tools now? Or are they still un-released and the modders are left to their own devices? I guess I should ask if they've made any announcements regarding mods for Napoleon either.

They've said nothing in relation to Modding or Mod tools for several months now. Except for i think, a planned Unit editor to be included with Napoleon, but not much detail on that at the moment, other than you'll be able to modify the uniforms.

Originally Posted by SonofSparta

They've said nothing in relation to Modding or Mod tools for several months now. Except for i think, a planned Unit editor to be included with Napoleon, but not much detail on that at the moment, other than you'll be able to modify the uniforms.

I remeber reading somewhere that they plan to release the modding tools for Empire right after Napoleon comes out. I guess they don't want the modders beating them to Napoleon and taking the effect of their new game away. I feel its somewhat reasonable. The core of Empire is pretty good (excpet for sieges).

ETW was released buggy and unfinished. CA lied about game features nowhere to be found. CA admits it was a botched release but "major patch" support for the game is done.

Community is not as stupid as CA thinks and sets the Internet and metauser scores ablaze.

In a brief nutshell, that's why there's negativity. All CA has to do is fix what they charged for, but for some reason, they refuse to. It's going to affect them, more than they realize.

I have about completely given up on ETW ever getting some love from CA; except the kind we have to pay money for; but that is in the past and nothing to do about it. It will influence how I act after NTW is released however. CA will have to earn my money this time. No more of this buying on trust crap. Those days are over.

On the contrary, I think it is largely tough-love. It is my favourite game. We are just frustrated it took forever to address the CTD issues, and in some cases (including mine) at how we feel the full potential of the game was not realised - notably in terms of the downgrading of the battlefield cities to mere villages, the failure to integrate more realistic features such as supply-lines - and to a lesser extent, insufficient variety in units. Thankfully, some of these questions have been addressed thanks to the modding community on this forum e.g. size of battles, variety of units. But it took forever for CA to get its act together on the CTD.

Ironically, my old PC, which could only play this game with extreme lag, never once crashed the game, whereas my new PC (specs in my signature) constantly did so. I felt cheated by this give the much-vaunted "works great with i7 core". So I think another aspect of the bitterness is that a good few gamers shelled out on a new PC and ended up with surprisingly poor performance - at first anyway. For my own part, most of that is now in the past. I have managed to reduce the lag by overclocking my CPU, while dramatically increasing the scale of battles by editing the preferences.txt file. While disappointed they are not going to make NTW integratable with ETW, we can at least hope the baptism of fire ETW endured have been an educational process for CA and will ensure we don't get a repeat of the mistakes this time around.

Having said that - it's still a great game. Just a late-bloomer.

Originally Posted by Lord Faucon

Face it, Medieval 1 was the pinnacle of Total War games. Modders, those noble souls, have since maintained the illusion of greatness of the series. Look at Empire. People were so hyped because they expected it to be just as grand as their Medieval 2 mods. Naturally they were disappointed by the vanilla game.

how are we going to be able to fill you on so many things that it'll take a professional archivist to compile?

Read through the "Rage!" thread-it neatly encapsulates many of the problems with the game. Many of those have been fixed (especially the diplomacy which became a lot better after patches 1.4 - 1.5) but it should help explain some of the negativity. Prior to release, ETW was hailed as the best thing since sliced bread, nothing could have lived up to the hype and post release many people feel CA didn't do enough to make good on the promises it made.

Also, this forum may seem overly negative because posts complaining about the game aren't removed.

Lastly, if you've got a lot of time, go through the "bugs and issues" and "official complaints" threads.

As for me, I got a lot of fun out of ETW, but a lot of frustration too. With the right mods it can be great, but for me it is nowhere near as entertaining or immersive as RTW.

NTW will have to be golden and CA's post release support will have to be really on the ball to get over the bad taste in a lot of fans' mouth.

I would say ignore the past--most of it doesn't apply to you anyway, since you haven't really touched it until it was in its latest patch 1.5 form.

A majority of the criticism stems from problems with initial release and early patches. There are still issues remaining with patch 1.5, but that can probably be summed up with one word: sieges. And that's all you really need to know. Otherwise, play the game yourself since you have it already and see how you like it--it'll be a good indicator on whether or not you'll enjoy NTW since the time periods are so similar.

There is so much negativity because ETW is BAD. This filters over to lack of support for NTW.

Get ETW if you want and find out for yourself.. or better still, read the prerelease propaganda on what ETW was supposed to do and see now what it doesn`t. Then read on what mike Simpson says as he pretty much admits that ETW was a failure. In many cases ETW does less than previous Total wars do.

A little research will reveal much.

Originally Posted by Humble Warrior

There is so much negativity because ETW is BAD. This filters over to lack of support for NTW.

Get ETW if you want and find out for yourself.. or better still, read the prerelease propaganda on what ETW was supposed to do and see now what it doesn`t. Then read on what mike Simpson says as he pretty much admits that ETW was a failure. In many cases ETW does less than previous Total wars do.

A little research will reveal much.

For some reason while reading this post I remembered the Uncyclopedia article on Empire... Oh wait, that article had a lot of links to this pre-release propaganda (some of which were quoted and emphasized in the article)... Maybe that's a good place to start http://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/Empire:_Total_War

I say just wait for Napoleon, it at least cannot be any worse then ETW 1.5! Thank god, and most likely will be better, we hope!

I think most of the negativity comes from what happened around the time of the game's release. ETW was supposed to have been out in shops by around September 2008 but it got delayed for months. CA reassured fans by saying that this was done in order to sort out bugs, and that ETW would no doubt be the best game in the series' history. Hype for the game reached stratospheric levels.

Come March 2009 the gaming magazines and review sites were praising ETW to high heaven, I quote:

Total PC Gaming
"The greatest strategy game of all time." 100%

Game Informer
"This is one of the most sophisticated, entertaining, and historically accurate strategy games ever made." 95%

IGN
"...deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as the greatest names in gaming history." 9.5/10

This only increased people's excitement for the game.
Then the public finally got to play it. And they got a taste of the masses of bugs, crashes and missing features. AI was extremly poor, and even fundamental features didn't work - like distorted music, sound cutting off, the game being slow and jerky even on high end machines with the graphics set low, and soldiers refusing to take orders during battles. Some of the bugs were very silly, like asking an agent to leave a city, only to have the army depart instead. The game was practically drowning in faulty features, bugs, glitches and poor presentation (no option for managing saved games on the loading menu for instance). Even the much vaunted new naval battles managed to disappoint. The game was so faulty for the majority of people that it was practically unplayable.
As a result, there was a backlash against CA and professional game reviewers. Many fans felt that they had been lied to or duped into buying a faulty game. Some people seemed to take this rather personally.

The fact that we had to wait several months for big patches to sort this out only frustrated people even more. There was/is a sense that the fans' requests weren't/aren't being listened to by the designers.

Personally, I was very disappointed with the game after release. I didn't play it for months. But the new patches have improved the game immensely, and after a while I found that I enjoyed playing it. CA got a lot of stuff right with game, but unfortunately there's still a lot of stuff that just doesn't work very well. I still have faith in CA to deliver a great game, as ETW is the only real blemish on their CV, and even then they managed to improve the game and make it fun.

I love Empire with or without flaws it's a great game, and should be given a chance. As for Napolean i say play empire first and if you enjoy it, purchase it.

Let's face it, the TW series lives on its real-time battles.

Battle AI in ETW is a mess.

You'll find any number of cases where people show (and you would soon find yourself should you play it) that you can kill vast numbers of enemies with relatively small losses. I've seen examples of 20:1 as a common enough ratio of AI:player losses.

The AI can't maintain a sensible formation. It can't coordinate forces (as in time cav charges to coincide with engaging with musekts along your line, which stems in part from my first point). It advances on you when you have superior forces and/or it has an artillery advantage. Its infantry will form square formations when under musket/cannon fire (talk about FAIL), even if you don't have cav.

There are so many examples of stupid, ineffective battle behaviour it would take a few hundred lines to list them.

The net effect of all this is that the AI is incapable of providing a reliable challenge in fights. Even those it might be expected to win/come close to winning it loses, and often badly at that.

When you add several strategic issues, the game simply fails in my mind to provide a significant, interesting game.

This problem then exacerbates other issues, even when those are objectively small in nature. IF the experience were reliably challenging or fun, people would overlook minor issues/frustrations. When the experience is poor, predictable and tedious, people find the other issues a case of adding insults to injury.

That, to me, is why there's a fair amount of 'aggro'. Much of it is deserved, but it is then accentuated by the total experience being a large disappointment.

The last factor is the total spouting from that Kieren tool. CA promised many things and failed to deliver on many; failing in ways that are hugely apparent to anyone with perception more acute than that of a house brick. But not to CA. They might just as well call all of us, THEIR CUSTOMERS, liars.

Want a recent example? Kieren stated in an interview that CA has always valued and supported modders, or words to that effect (there's a thread with the interview in it somewhere here). So, where are the mod tools CA 'promised'? Not released. There you go. An utter load of shite straight from the mouth of CA's PR clown.

As I said, it's possible to on and on; you really need to read a fair bit on the forum to learn it all.....

I will add that I've not tried mods yet.

Some people seem to be satisfied. I can only conclude their expectations are considerably lower than mine (but I make no suggestion that any position is "right").

You might enjoy it, you might not. Knowing what I now know, I would save my $$ for something else, and I'm certainly not buying NTW.

Cheers

For me, it's the complete lack of mod support 9 months after the fact. A couple of months I could understand, but in an era when almost every game comes with at the very least a map editor, and many these days come with a full SDK, I think it's inexcusable, ESPECIALLY since the tools were promised to us. Personally I bought the game on assurances that mod tools would be released. I wanted to see what the game was like and what I could do before the tools came out... but they never did. The community produced some fantastic, quality stuff on their own, but it still rubs me the wrong way. I have no intention of buying NTW until there is some mod support for it.