I have that too, Dell XPS right?

The battle load times are just fine for me (I don't do too many anyways) but the AI turn takes FOREVER!!! It drives me insane!!

I just got the special forces collection from gamestop. I'm kinda scared of opening it because I want the USS Constitution too, but it's not on the box, and the card they gave me was just to DL Rome TW. Anyone else know if I'm missing something?

Meh... I can't belive anyone but a Tw n00b get ETW before it's been out a year or two. Creative Assembly have proven that they don't care much for updates or customers. If you like TW gaming, don't get the game untill you see a mod you like.

Yeah, all those modders are just n00bs. Why even play their mods, their such n00bs?

If you go into options you can turn off CPU movement which greatly increases the AI turn time.

The game rocks, its like Sins on earth with load times.

Special Forces gets only the units listed (I think there are SIX of them).  The other special units like Death's Head Hussars or USS Constitution are special pre-order units a person will get ONE of them at RANDOM depending on which RETAILER they pre-ordered through.

For example the Prussian Deaths Head Hussars are with a pre-order from GAME and I believe the USS Constitution is with a pre-order through some European Distributor and the Amazon unit is with a pre-order through AMAZON!

In short, the PRE-ORDER special units have NOTHING to do with the 6 special units in the SPECIAL FORCES pack.

thanks,

the Monk

That was if you buy it from Best Buy, you get the USS Constitution.

Yeah i did that, they still take ages But then I figured, that if i turn them on, then i have somethin to watch in between turns, but its not worth the waste of life.

So cpu movements off and out of the room in between turns, or texting which is convienent too.

 Hehe, we can't complain to much about AI turns though. After all, it should be the AI complaining about our crazy long turns!

On another note, does anyone know if the Steam downloaded ETW comes with a manual?

Not sure but I thought I saw something about the manual mentioned on Empire: Total War's website.

Yes, there's a manual. Just right click the game on Steam and select View Player Manual and it'll give you a pdf download.

ah, ok thanks!

Great game so far. Miffed about the constitution. Txt seems a bit small in the game though.  Really enjoying my game so far. No problems either.

I picked it up the other day, runs great on my system, except a few problems.

I dont know if im the only one in this pickle, im playing russia and i think its turn 32, the game crashes, i changed graphic settings and all, but still crashes at the end of that turn,  its really bugging me since I am dominating the land area, dont really want to talk about my fleet.... 2 sloops.

As for load times, sometimes the game loads superfast other times it takes a few minutes.

Running:

Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit

AMD athlon 6400+ 3.2ghz dual core

4gb Ram

Geforce 9800 GT 1gb

Reading the tech forums it sounds like if you use 64-bit, your ganna be screwed for a bit, that and the latest Nvidia drivers weren't properly tested as they were rushed for this game and are causing problems.

Last night I was getting random crashes on the Road to Independence campaign. A few were when hitting End Turn, but thankfully it autosaves so I didn't lose much. But the last one was 40 minutes into a long siege..

Lol, i had one on like turn 57ish of the Dutch. Another was like 8 turns in with the french (haven't had too much luck with them). there was another but i don't remember when or with whom.

-Phalnax

Once mom gets off pc, i'm conquering the globe for a few hours til college calls me back lol

Ya, I would have to agree with the text being to small. That and in many cases there is just to much of it! I for one feel very compelled to read any text which appears on my screen... Which means I spend half my time reading the description text on units and buildings! The three paragraph building descriptions are nice for learing some interesting tidbits, but IMO they are just to distracting when put in the game itself.

What makes the small text even more problematic is the fact that I have a 19" screen with a resolution of 1680x1050, while most 19" screens are 1440x900. This makes text even smaller than it normally would be since my pixels are smaller.

They already figured out how to unlock the SF units, so glad I spent extra $$ on that.

I saved this replay of a battle I had during the grand campaign. The odds were against me and I ended up winning the battle by a good margin.

So I fired up the replay and I noticed that my units did the same thing they did in the battle... but then I thought "Hmm, I don't remember the AI doing that!" And then at the end I LOST THE BATTLE.

So why do the AI do different moves than they did? The replay obviously wasn't a replay because the end result was so dramatically different (they won by a good margin that time)

Picked the game up yesterday on a rush buy *damn credit card...the temptation is too strong* and installed it on my Seanix duo core (2.00Gz), XP, 2Gb ram and Geforce Go 7700. Now you'll suspect that I can't run high settings (let alone medium) but under LOW settings... my little laptop runs flawlessly!

Overall the game is AWESOME! And I drool at the beauty of naval battles! Come on, you gotta love the realism that when a ship gets hit you ACTUALLY HAVE A GAP at that point, the sinkings are awesome and boardings are extremely fun yet show that it takes time to acomplish (manoeuvre, hook, pull in, fight it out)!

Sieges are AWESOME as now (can't remember if we had that before) you can garrison buildings when you siege or defend a fort which is SOOO COOL).

Can't w8 to load it on my desktop one of these days (HP pavillon Elite m9340f, Quad core (2.4gz), Vista, 6Gb ram (+4-8 through ready boost if I want), Gefore 9500Gs). Only then will I see the ultimate beauty of the game !

My rating: 9.5/10

-.5 being the screwed up idea of HAVING TO BE CONNECTED TO STEAM TO PLAY. Come on...talk about being complete a**holes. Not being able to play if I don't have a ready connection!   

Comments are welcome

Ever hear of "offline mode" for STEAM?   hehe    

*Slaps self*

DAMN IT!

The sieges are nice, but I gotta admit I miss the TW2 sieges with ladders, towers, catapults and trebuchets. Bit more variery! Here you sort of just tech up different cannon shells for your cannons, and infantry come equipped with ropes to scale walls.

I think sieges would be 10 times cooler if you assaulted a major costal city/port and you could bombard the fort with your navy :3

I wish that too, or soften up a city before the invasion. Like one of the options next to Demand Surrender. Naval Bombardment.  But this would require it's own ship with a mortar or a ship such as the Rocket Ship or whatever it's called.

Have they ever heard of the National Anthem? That's when the British were bombarding the US Fort of Fort McHenry (which I visited a few years ago lol).