Ha alright, I did not know you could do that with Steam, good to know.

I did not play much with pikemen so I am not sure how actually effective they are, good to read they are not totally useless

Btw, shouldnt the title of your post be "Protecting your artillery" instead of "Protecting your cavalry" (Under the Tip of the Week 1 Title)

I am waiting a lot on the new gameplay patch, might want to give ETW another try after if I see a satisfying list of fix in it.

I never used much the pikemen yar, might have been good to try them more. To protect my artillery I was usually also using my own cavalry. AI cavalry either do a front charge totally useless or try to go around you and target either your artillery or your general.

About the next patch I am still regularly checking the official forum and twcenter so I will wait to hear feedbacks on the new patch once it's out.
For now CA is still only "laying down the groundwork for the AI Naval invasion", they said they will be "rare" for now... which for me is the biggest confirmation I needed that the game was really released in beta stage

Sounds interesting, I will wait few days to see on the forums if people really like it. The "rare" naval invasion is at least something

Apparently income has been nerfed a LOT and that will limit how many troops you can field (which is kinda a good thing imo). Some people are also reporting bugs while using some of the most popular mods (IS, Darthmode etc.) putting their income to 0, it's quite recommended to uninstall all mods for now until they have been updated.

Seems the difficulty has also been increased a LOT and AI is much more aggressive on the campain map (another good thing imo)...

Hum, overall I might want to come back and try a campain, won't happen so soon though since I am totally tied up for at least a week

Yar, same here, I first thought it was more line infantry.

Weird bug, i never saw that before.

Did you try to switch off some of the graphics options to see which one could be related?

One thing I wondered about the General: does it give a bonus on the whole battlefield or does he have to be in a certain radius around the troops?

I "think" it's battlefield-wide but it's not really "realistic" in a way since you can hide it behind a forest and leave it him there for the whole battle just to get this bonus, kinda "cowardly" for a general

Okey, interesting. Would have been good if we could see these radius in some way though. CA can say they want to keep a "realism" of it though... both ways have pro/cons

I am kind of a completionist myself so enjoy going after achievement. While I did not manage to get many in ETW yet I did not know you could farm lots of them by hosting a "multiplayer" game against a AI, good to know

About the mission one, I feel all nations were actually supposed to get missions during the grand campain like in the previous TW (from the Roman Senat, from the Pope etc) and it was kinda cut by CA before launch without taking out the achievement. I guess doing the RTI first few scenarios few times would be enough.

Oh well, I will do these when I get myself to reinstalle TW (might be soon, seems patching made the game better)

Thanks for the tips frags, good post as usual from you

One precision also that I noticed about the "kill X people" achievement, it does not count if you auto-resolve the battles during the campain, you have to really fight the battles to have the counter goes up. Well, in a way it's logical for it to work this way but for someone like me who do end up auto-resolving quite often during campain, it's going to be tough

I personally managed to get the "American Hero" one which is actually "bugged" (or at least was when I did it) and you need to do some stupid steps to unlock it. I got the steps from the twcenter forum and do not remember them right now. You won't get it by doing the RTI in a normal way.

Found back how to get the American Hero:

1. Play through the Road To Independence campaign until you have all eight required regions and in total one less region than you need to win.
2. Do not take the last region or the campaign will end!
3. Maintain this number of regions until the Winter of the final year of the campaign.
4. Take the final region and watch the victory video.
5. Click 'Continue' and end the turn one more time.
6. Congratulations, you are an American Hero!


Steam forum

Pain in the butt but it works, I got that achievement this way

True that I think when people read about grenadiers they usually think of the Napoleon's Guard ones and especially the "1er Regiment de Grenadiers" (1st Foot Grenadier's regiment) which was the best of the "Old Guard" which was itself the best Napoleon's army. These guys were monsters and among the most honored and toughest bastards French army produced.

Personally I love Grenadiers both in history and in ETW, they pack a very high firepower and are amazing for flanking or 2nd line duty. And they have that "tough" background Let line units soak up the ennemy fire and start dropping those death eggs, they rip ennemies apart quickly.

The janissaries were really good also in history and were feared on battlefield (I actually think they started grenadier units way before European's countries did)

And yar, free units is great!

New units are still only eye candy when the game crash for me but at least these look good.

By the way, I have new machine now and I am getting again some CTD during battles now

Will have to play around, maybe I need to downgrade my graphic drivers a bit or something

They could be available to you only if you have a monarchy (and thus go with a revolution).

Or if I am not wrong like for France if you have a Monarchy you have "royal guards" but if you have republic you have "Republican Guard" or something (I never saw them myself but I think I saw that on forums).

They could call them Republican Guard, Consular Guard or whatever. Use Royal Guard if monarchy.

From what I read naval invasion are still very very limited and even more for inter-theatre invasion (like UK go to India).

This post has been edited by Gormaz: Jun 4 2009, 03:23 PM

Yar, it makes playing pretty sad with the game in such state so long after release.

I was just farming some achievements recently (and testing Ultra graphics on new machine ), might try a campain again but first CTD and I am out again I think.

Dunno, I just find the game "hollow" and not fun compared to previous TW games, Medieval struck me for a very long time. Rome even more... I just can't get sticked to ETW for some reason

At least they seem to really target the countries that were very lacking in units variety, that's a good point.

I read that the last patch really messed up the Battle AI, did you guys really notice that?

I was tempted to play again but now the game is crashing again (I got a new machine so I guess it's that)

Any Nvidia player here? Which drivers are you using? I thought I read the latest drivers had some crash issues and that I had to go back to previous ones (but I dunno which ones)

Remember which Nvida driver version you have? I am using the 185.something and quite often during ground battle I have CTD

---

Added on June 11, 2009, 1:54 pmI found this little thing today through the TWCenter forum:

Hearts of Iron 3

Basically it's the Hearts of Iron 3 official forum dev replying to someone's question about AI and if the way they coded it was the same as ETW for example. The reply of the dev is:

"Sorry, I don't have time to talk about our AI atm, but I was not aware of there being an AI in Empire Total War."

That itself is quite a "harsh but funny" statement... but CA replied on page 2

"@Johan:

Hi there Johan. This is Kieran from the Creative Assembly, the chaps behind Empire.

Forgive me if I cut to the chase, It's not particularly sporting (Or accurate) to suggest Empire 'has no AI'.

I appreciate I may have misread your remark, but I note several other readers have taken it the same way and in two subsequent posts you havn't bothered to correct them, so I can only assume it was your intention to take a swipe at Empire.

If I'm wrong, please do let me know. Otherwise meet me on Hang Man's Hill at midday, the weapon is swords.

Yours,
Kieran "

I find that pretty funny that CA felt like they had to reply to that. For me it kinda show they do not feel that confident about their AI...

Reply from Paradox (page 3, first post):

"Sorry.

Just was irritated after paying for the game at releasedate and basically winning every single battle first try.

Then having the AI being unable to build armies that were challenging (even if you had no clue about the gamemechanics, which the manual did not explain.)

Basically I was able to knock out denmark in 1 year as Sweden by just marching the troops i had at start to christiania and kobenhavn.

It felt like "build something random, and move armies randomly at weak positions". The AI in eu1 was a bigger challenge and that one could not handle more than 2 targets per country.

We've been slaughtered for bad ai in games as well, but I'd expect that if you got a budget over 1M USD you'd be able to have at least 1 guy at AI for a year "

Again, very harsh but very true statement from Paradox.

CA replied by:

"First, thanks for buying Empire.

Second, if I may, as we know the fans will have their say and are the last, and most critical line of judgement. Rightly so as they're our customers.

So, as a player, we appreciated your feedback and interest in Empire.

Hopefully you'll feel more challenged with the upcoming release of the new Multiplayer Campaign beta. I'm sure one of our many AI programmers would be up for a game if you're looking for opposition.."

So basically he suggest to wait for multiplayer campain.... does that mean the game will still have a crappy AI by then?!

Overall I really laughed that CA got so protective, I guess they really took a lot of flak for ETW release and are getting pissed off about it

This post has been edited by Gormaz: Jun 11 2009, 01:54 PM

Yar, I was (and I wasnt the only one by far) pretty sure SEGA was pushing CA to release it, finished or not. There were so many "obvious" flaws with the system at release that I do not even believe CA by themselves would have release it in this state, seriously some really huge flaws.

Personally I WOULD play with my new machine since now I can really enjoy ultra graphics and very fast loading, but now I am back to beginning with recurrent CTD so well... I think I will take it back in few months when they really iron the creases

About the "secret thing coming" I think I got few ideas of what that could be and right now I would not be surprised for anything. On top of my head I could think of them:

- Announcing a paid "expansion" with "improved AI" and "multiplayer campain" which were both supposed to be fixed/added for free
- SEGA announcing that after X patches there will no more development of patches for ETW (they done this for MTW I think, 2 patches then "please buy the Xpac")

I know you might be under NDA so I won't ask anything, but just the fact to know you are under NDA gives me some clues of what that new thing could be (now this is a complicated sentence!)


@rickysay: I would agree but it's not totally fair to compare, MTW2 is now completely patched, with one xpac out and with lots and lots of huge mods into it. While ETA is "only" out for 4 months and they are not finished with it yet.

I read MTW2 at release was pretty much full of bugs as well so it's kind of toss up there

This post has been edited by Gormaz: Jun 12 2009, 03:30 PM

My mouth, I will keep it shut.

Let's see what they bring, to be honest my "trust" into SEGA/CA took a huge hit with ETW so I am kinda ready for "anything" now

This post has been edited by Gormaz: Jun 12 2009, 03:43 PM

And if I remember well they said they improved the speed of AI turn also in the next patch. I would not expect miracle but every little bit can help