Windows 7: A pain in the ass

[Balbor]

After playing some M2TW and briefly ETW i decided to go back and pay EB again. The last time i played it was on Windows XP and since then I have upgraded to Windows7 Ultimate.

I installed Rome, which by default went into the Program Files (x86) folder, i then installed the 1.3 patch and 1.5 patch. Mad a copy of the folder outside the Program Files folder and installed EB 1.1 + 1.2 patch, but it would not start, returning to the desktop a second after the screen went black. Turned out Rome was still only version 1.0 and the updates had not worked. 1.3 had installed into the Program Files (not the x86 one) and i have no idea where it placed the 1.5 stuff. The desktop short-cut it had created kept giving an error about a missing mss32.dll file, but launching from the RomeTW.exe in the Rome - Total War was ok, and creating a new short-cut from that worked ok.

I tried installing the 1.3 patch again, but it just came up with 3 options, one was repair and another was uninstall, so i tried uninstalling it, this seemed to of uninstalled other stuff as starting the patch exe said that the game was no longer installed even though i could clearly see it. I decided to bin everything and cheat. I grabbed a full install of RTW + BI + Alex which i had backed up from my XP system and use that, and EB seemed to install and work OK from that.

Can anyone tell me how to install Rome Total war and then patch it to 1.5 properly?

[XSamatan]

Hi,

did you try to install RTW to another direction? Changing the default to anything other then Program Files could help. I had problems with other games patching under Win7 too, disabling the UAC whilst the update-progress solved that for me.

If you run EB and receive lags either on campaign or battle map, disable all shadows and anti-aliasing, this helped in the most cases.

XSamatan

[Balbor]

It took me all day but i finally got there. I created a new folder and installed a vanilla RTW followed by BI (to take it up to 1.3) and then the 1.6 patch. Then i copied that into another folder and installed EB 1.1 (tested it) then 1.2 (tested it) and finally the fixes. The initially had a little trouble installing the EB12_on_ALX.exe as it kept throwing up missing skeletons so after recopying a fresh RTW+BI 1.6, backed up the EB file and reinstalled the Alex engine files and it loaded up. I was going to try the EAEM mod, but all those super slave armies don't seem right.

The validateInstall.bat won't work, says there's a problem with Java but oh well.

[XSamatan]

OK, so it works now for you?

The validation can malfunction under Vista/Win7, but if it runs now, you don't need it (besides, after installing ALEX it will show up many,many,many added files...).

XSamatan

[Balbor]

i had it running before as i had a copy of Rome installed on another hard drive, but i wanted to make sure i could install it anew, i might back the clear 1.6 up onto dvd now.