Be Excellent To Each Other

I'm eying up this on the weekend deal on Steam for £15. And the superlative-laden reviews all over the Internets. Is this really that good? Should I get it? I tend to really like strategy games for a few hours, then start to get bogged down in midgame complexity, particularly in heavyweight titles. The bits of my brain that are dissatisfied with anything but the exact best course of action get involved and lead to serious analysis paralysis, which eventually puts me off the game. Having said that, I do really enjoy 4X games. Does anyone here have this? Advise me hivemind!

Have you played any of the previous Total War games?

No, despite thinking of each one, "hmm, that looks good". All the way back to Shogun.

Ah right. Well, I was gonna say "it's like the old ones but with naval battles and nice graffix and that". I think one of the things I've always liked about the series (and I haven't actually played Empire yet), is that you can get as deep as you want with it. I started playing Shogun when I can't have been much older than 13/14, and I thoroughly enjoyed it, gradually getting more and more into the minute details as I grew older and the new titles came out.

I can't really offer good solid buying advice on this one though, because like I said I haven't played it. But I seriously doubt you'd be disappointed if you gave it some time and effort.

Ah hell, maybe I'll give it a whirl for £15. I'm actually being put off slightly by the lack of resell on Steam; if it was £15 in a shop I'd pick it up, knowing I could Goozex it if I didn't get on with it.

On the other hand, can I just say that installing Steam on a new machine and watching it grab all your games, all patched and up to date, is acebestness. I am giving serious thought to buying Steam's copy of UT2004 (for £7) rather than installing my DVD version and then going through the enormous rigmarole of downloading 1/2gig in various files from FilePlanet to bring it up to date.

It might be worthwhile re: UT2004. I really like Steam. I think it wrongly has a fair bit of dislike, mainly because early adopters (myself included) were plagued with downtime and bugs and all kinds of crap, and that reputation has stuck for a lot of people, but now it's a completely different thing altogether.

Totally. The last time I reinstalled UT2004 it took bloody hours to get it all straightened out. £7 isn't much money. Or, for £23, I could get UT2k4 and UT3 (with a bunch of older UTs I'll never play thrown in for good measure). Hmmmm. That would mean I had the hat trick of UT3 formats (360, PS3, and PC).

Is that the pack where you get the original Unreal and Unreal 2 as well? If so, good deal! And UT3 would look pretty damn good on your new system I reckon.

Yes, and yes, and fuck it, I bought it. And Empire: Total War.

It's UT3, UT2k4, UT99, Unreal and Unreal II for £22. And Empire: Total War is 15 fucking gigabytes! Holy crap!

Rome: Total war was excelelnt, as was medieval total war.

Wahoo!

Can't go wrong for £15, which is about as much playtime as you'll get out of it before the bugged-to-fuckedness and general unfinished nature of the game become apparent. The raft of patches and fixes have done fuck all. However, it does look beautiful and it is playable if you like that sort of thing (I do) and have a decent patience threshold (I don't.) Even leaving the bugs aside, it gets repetitive remarkably quickly for such a complex game.

Enormous patch is rumoured to be out this week, says the innerwebs. I read about the bugginess.

I wasn't too sure after the demo. Medieval, Medieval II and Rome I'd all heartily recommend, but I found the rifle fights just didn't seem to work as well in the format as the hand to hand combat.

I bought Medieval II, and found it to be entertaining, but annoying. Much like Civ, everyone seems desperate to be at war with you all the time, and I found the units to be incredibly unresponsive on the battlefield.

It's usually possible to avoid fighting wars you don't want to, but I should remind you the game is called Total War, impling war is a fairly large chunk of it.

Well indeed - it's just when it's war with everyone at the same time that it becomes irritating. Also, there's a disproportionate amount of treason, especially involving my largest armies at any given time.

i love Total War games but they're huge timesinks. That's why i didn't buy the last one. The enemy AI always have been a little off also.

Probably my favorite is the Barbarian Invasion expansion for Rome. The games are shorter and the enemies are very agressive. It's total war indeed.

And 15£? here is 25€. Steam is really taking the piss.

The £15 price is a special deal this weekend, mind. Or is €25 your weekend price? What is the tax rate on that?

25€ is the weekend price. I have no idea on the tax rate, but seeing that they charge the same on every non-UK country in europe (countries with completely different taxes) that's not the issue.

Steam, since the end of last year, has been doing 1€=1$, ignoring the fact that the € is much more close to the £.

Anyway, their loss. The prices are ridiculous

Well that's rather crap, isn't it?

BIT LATE, but I got this for free the other week with my new graphics card, and it's taken ages to download. Anyway:

It's not that great really. I often find mysself just autoturning the battles, I'm only really interested in the strat layer. It's not much of an improvement over the first 3 games in the series (shogun, medieval, and rome. I didn't play medieval II and only played the demo of rome). Speaking of the strat layer, syncing the armies movement is a bloody pain. Making two armies arrive at the same battle at the same time, without starting the battle before the other units get there (or before you've had change to move them) is a shit. Why the hell is the armies movement realtime and not-undoable?

What I find more interesting, however, are the following statistics from the steam achievments:
http://steamcommunity.com/stats/EmpireT ... hievements

Only 76% of people bothered to conquer another region....what the hell did the other 25% do with the game? Only play the tactical battles, possibly? Buy the game and not play it?!
Only 16% of people played it online.
5.2% of all people (that's around a third of the above) bother to play more than 10 games online.
only 2.7% of people have actually WON 10 multiplayer games.
Only 7.4% of people used the quick battle option -- clearly this is a game for people who like their slowness.
More people completed the game on medium that on easy
Not a single person has massacred a million enemies.

So, I had a boxed copy of this delivered to me on the cheap. What do I find on the back of the box, which wasn't noted anywhere on the website? "Requires internet connection and free steam account to activate".

Fuck that in the face. Anyone know how to activate without doing that? This is a stand on principle - I have an old steam account, and I can take a picture of myself holding up the box, CD and receipt if it makes you feel any better - but they can fuck off with their tricks or I'll save myself the hassle and just pirate the next one instead.

Piracy is your only option.

That's what I was thinking. But I don't want to download the whole thing, not least as that would make having the CD pointless. I was wondering if there's a simpler way to bypass the infuriating 'activation' process. Goddamned internet shops giving inadequate details.

Also, while I'm on that subject, does anyone else get really annoyed when you hear about a game, but when you look at the game's own fucking website, there're hundreds of idiotic supposed FAQs (which are often just thinly veiled marketing, of course) and pointless details about how many wizards can fist how many on-screen space marines at once, but either a buried away or entirely absent system requirements page?

Welp, the game I bought entirely legally for the most I'll ever pay for any game (give or take inflation, natch) has been broken by valve. Looks like I'll be pirating my first game this year. For fuck's sake.