03-28-2011, 03:07 PM
I have most of the Total War games, and encouraged by a friend who has a big interest in Japanese ancient warfare even though Rome is more my thing, I pre-ordered this some time back and got it through the mail on the day of the release. There were some problems installing it, my desktop PC's DVD drive would not read the disks, so I had to use my laptop to copy the disk contents onto an external drive and then install it onto my desktop computer via that. Initially it tries to then download the thing from Steam during the installation process (see developer's forum for a workaround), but if you faff about it eventually forgoes that and installs from locally.
Having been a bit of a pain in the ass to install, it was a while before I got around to having a look at it, but my buddy and I started a co-operative campaign on it (this is one of the major changes to this iteration of Total War - co-operative multiplayer campaigning). I have to say this works supremely well, being very stable and with no disconnections or crashes.
As far as the game goes, it is sort of similar to previous Total War games, but everything is much more well-rounded and optimised, with better built-in help and a much more intuitive interface that is not so different from previous iterations as to be confusing. Enemy AI on the tactical conquest map is vastly improved and makes for a more challenging game, the battle maps are much prettier (both on land and sea) being more graphically detailed, but in spite of this, are well optimised and run okay even with the details turned up to full throttle.
So in short, so far so good in spite of the installations hassles. Worth a look if you like ancient warfare.
Al
Having been a bit of a pain in the ass to install, it was a while before I got around to having a look at it, but my buddy and I started a co-operative campaign on it (this is one of the major changes to this iteration of Total War - co-operative multiplayer campaigning). I have to say this works supremely well, being very stable and with no disconnections or crashes.
As far as the game goes, it is sort of similar to previous Total War games, but everything is much more well-rounded and optimised, with better built-in help and a much more intuitive interface that is not so different from previous iterations as to be confusing. Enemy AI on the tactical conquest map is vastly improved and makes for a more challenging game, the battle maps are much prettier (both on land and sea) being more graphically detailed, but in spite of this, are well optimised and run okay even with the details turned up to full throttle.
So in short, so far so good in spite of the installations hassles. Worth a look if you like ancient warfare.
Al
Alan Bradbury
