You can do it but it's kinda broken by the new Zone of Control thinggy.

Basically you need to bring your "support" army inside the ZoC of the army you want to fight first.

Then attack with your main army.

It can fail if the ennemy does an intercept on your support army.

But it seems they totally broke the way reinforcements enter the battle from previous TW.

In previous TW if on the campain the reinforcement were on the east of you, on the battle map they would enter by the east.

In ETW it seems they always enter from behind you which is totally stupid (most probably yet another bug).

Same for your own reinforcement, they enter behind the ennemies...

My Steam Community Id is Gormaz (originality ftw )

I would be interested by some battles for the fun and training, I am still pretty noob though

I do not actually get what you mean.

Do you mean like if you have two line infantry units that took casualties and are now at like 40 men each, to regroup them in one unit of 80 men? From what I know this is not possible.

Or did you mean how to group units together so they move together on the battle map? (like keep formation thinggy?)

This post has been edited by Gormaz: Mar 18 2009, 01:53 PM

Thanks frags, I will try to train up a bit before that, the Battles for me do not crash, only the great campain so it should be fine.

@RegentCid: yar, I think also because it's very new for lots of us, need to take into account the wind, broasides etc.
Land battles are still pretty "familiar" from the previous TW or other games even if the new era made some pretty big changes from the other TW.

I enjoy the naval battles a lot but only with few ships on each side otherwise it becomes pretty messy for me until now.

Yar, I personally like to have like 3-4 ships max on your side only so you can micro them (different types of cannonballs, manual broadsides) etc.

More than that and you simply do not have the time to fully exploit the possibilities imo. I can't imagine handling full stack of ships battle...

And yes, if you have heavy ships against smaller one, the smaller ones can just avoid you and run to the wind, turn a bit, broadside and move away until they reload, your big ships would not be able to do anything... but if the smaller ships make one mistake, he is going to suffer

For me since I never managed to play a grand campain for very long (they crash and my saves get corrupted) so I never managed to get all the very advanced ships or troops. I think biggest ship I had was a 3rd rate with Britain and Fire Ranks tech for land battles.

I have done some custom battles against Ai with more advanced stuff to try out... god the artillery become a beast at higher level troops!

This post has been edited by Gormaz: Mar 18 2009, 02:32 PM

Well, I managed to bring down a 5th rate with 2 sloops before by managing to stand behind it for most of the time (took me a long time though and it was against AI so it's definitely not applicable often and in multi)

I was not really thinking of a "Sloop Vs 1st or 2nd rate" kind of fight, there you are indeed pretty much screwed yar ^^

But if your ships are just 1-2 "level" smaller, moving around is the way to go imo

Ships also take more damage from stern or bow shots from what I can see, they tend to sink way faster when you hit them there than when you hit the flanks (which is actually realist, stern and bow were the biggest weakpoints of wood ships)

Again, I have never handle ships bigger than 3rd rate before since my campain crashes so my experience is limited to smaller ships, and there is less difference between each ships at this level I think (Galleons are a pure beast though)

Yar, India is really good for making lots of money.

As UK I made an alliance with Marathas and pwned the Mughals and conquered their cities... but then Marathas are very aggressive and started a war with me, then my saves got corrupted and I could not continue.

As France after 2-3 turns I sent one stack to take over Mysore (which is an Indian country with 1 region in the middle of the southern India), the battle was kinda tough but I made it, its a very good starting point for invading India, except that at the beginning it does not have a port (so no exportation possible). Then Marathas took over Goa from the Portuguese and were about to start a war with me I think... then my game got corrupted also.

Now I think sending one expedition to Mysore and create lots of Indiaman ships to take over the trade nodes are going to be stuff I am going to do on turn 1 of all my GC when CA fix the corruption bug, trade is definitely the way to go to make money.

Did you ever see the UK trying to invade you actually? (I am actually curious about it)

As Marathas I would say it's not too hard since the AI almost never carry troops by boat, so UK can't do much to you in India except pirate your trade routes (which can be annoying though)

Same for Portugal in Goa, you will have to bother with only what they can build in there, they won't bring back reinforcements from Europe.

Then you are the exception because from what I can read on forums it's a known bug the AI will almost never ferry troops by boats (CA has also recognized it's bugged), whatever the difficulty level

During my French campain I played on VH/H and I did not see anyone else in Indian except me and the ones that started there. When I played UK I left it undefended and nobody ever tried to invade

Good to know it at least "can" happen until CA fix it.

This post has been edited by Gormaz: Mar 19 2009, 02:14 PM

I did not notice much issues with sounds, sometimes artillery does not make sounds but seriously I can live with that until they fix it. Not being able to play a grand campain for more than 20-30 turns is way more troublesome for me than any sounds issue I coud be getting getting.

For me it's not really my saves get corrupted but more than after a while during AI turns it's crashing on some minor faction's turn, giving me a white screen for few seconds and then CTD. If I reload the campain after that, same story.

If I reload a save few turns before, it works for few turns then same story. I am not going to go back and forth to try to progress.

Still no news of the patch btw, the "early this week" of CA is getting stale

Yar, I do give them some leeway in the patch, I just hope sometimes they could communicate more with the players by giving some updates about the patch etc.
There are pros and cons for both way (telling people updates or keeping them in the dark) anyway, I just personally prefer to be told what is going on whether it's good or bad news.

And yar, SLI is not supported, multi-core neither. They are supposed to use add multi-core support in a much later patch.

Geforce 7900 (on dell laptop) here

No much lag but I have most options at low/medium (and I cut the useless options like shadows or nice sky for battles)

Yar, I seems to be one of the few that are pretty badly touched by the bugs, I am not the only one but seems my case is one of the worst I have read. But even if my config is pretty low some folks are getting same as me with much higher machines.

Good to know at least others are enjoying the campains


Oh, and I need a new machine >_<

Some people are getting some crazy long turns, seems to be a bug. Some people saying one AI turns can take few minutes.

Most of the times I find not really necessary to put an army in farms and co, just keep your army in one stack and can chase around the AI troops if they start destroying your farms

And yes, tonight I should be fine for few battles in a row, yesterday was pretty fun even if we lost

This post has been edited by Gormaz: Mar 20 2009, 08:59 AM

Patches will download automatically with Steam (except if you manually cancel this), you have nothing to do, no worries.

For Crashes... I am getting quite a lot as well, can mostly hope for the patches to come and fix them I guess.

No worries, it done it, you can't start the game if there is an update pending. It must have done it without you noticing.

You were connected online since we played yesterday so definitely Steam was able to check if update or not

Well, my mortars did not do much last night (I am way too much used to the AI always attacking)

They are good if you defend, otherwise they can only be glorified pompom boys from the back since they can't reach your ennemies. This or take the smaller ones that can be carried by horse

I agree with the bigger unit size but smaller army size, would make it for more interesting (it's kinda tough to handle so many units) and leave us able to micro them more (like I almost forgot to use my grenades on my grenadiers last night).

This post has been edited by Gormaz: Mar 20 2009, 04:13 PM

Well, I AM French, I am just living in Malaysia

But yar, it was pretty fun yesterday, I do hope my computer can be more stable though (still no patch today )

Can see people trying different things (like Fuj army with like 10 mortars ) which is good, we are playing for fun anyway

Edit: more news about patch, it's delayed:


Hi guys,

We are currently working on our next Empire: Total War update. We have introduced a tougher test cycle to ensure the release goes as smoothly as possible and are also trying to get a few more fixes into it.

Thanks for your patience and I will update you early next week on its progress.

Have a great weekend,

Mark O'Connell
(aka SenseiTW)

Patch Info link



This post has been edited by Gormaz: Mar 21 2009, 11:05 AM

I was kinda winning (it was a bit touch and go though) but then I have a white-screen-CTD

No worry frags, I dun mind French jokes (I SURRENDER!) and yar Je parles français bien entendu

For me I just wish they would be a bit more communicative and not put a 4 lines message on Friday evening telling us they will update us "early next week" while the week before they said the PATCH will be out earlier last week. A bit more up-to-date communication would go a long way in making me wait more patiently.

So for now I feel:

- the "by using Steam we can release smaller patch very easily and very frequently" slogan they gave us is now kinda mock
- Now we have only an estimated time for a news update... not for the patch itself... way to go CA!

Oh well...

More info about next patch is supposed to come "early this week" from what CA said, but well... right now I won't believe any date they say anymore.

I also could play the 4th chapter of RTI well but I also had a bloody lag during AI turn (much longer than the normal Grand Campain), I am not sure why. I felt like some memory leak was there since the whole game was slower than during a normal Campain, it was weird.

You can't if it's their capital region (which as you suspected is why it does not show in the list in the diplomacy menu). A quick "war -> conquest of the region -> sue for peace" can work usually, but do not expect them to love you or do a trade agreement after that

Or you could try to wait to see if another country manage to conquer it (and then declare war on this faction), but it's highly unlikely, the Marathas usually dominate India totally if nobody come bother them

This post has been edited by Gormaz: Mar 23 2009, 09:57 AM