Playing in Iraq and Afghanistan

I have been trying to load and play Empire and Napoleon for three weeks now but am unable to. I am in Iraq right now and when the internet works I have a 9-15k connection. I will be heading to Afghanistan ina couple of months and doubt that I'll have any internet connection. Steam is telling me 11 days, 2 hours to initialize Napoleon and 18 hours 23 minutes to initialize Empire. It seems to reset everytime that my internet goes down. Is there a way to play offline and just install everything from the disk?

Yes, you can play offline. But I hope you bought the CDs and not the digital download version..

Just stop the Steam download (steam always does like this, it happened to me too), go to Steam Library, right click on ETW&NTW and uninstall them from your PC. Then, install with the CDs. Unfortunately, you will still have to download the patches (you can't stop that), which are like 2GBs for ETw and 2 for NTW. If your net or PC stops while in the middle of the download, don't panic. The download will continue after you have net again (but if it was at 56% for example it will start from 50%...).

I recommend you choosing only one game to play in your mission/travel, maybe ETW, considering it has Iraq&Afghanistan, too, and you can beat Persians/take the world with them.