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Empire: Total War

Eyecandy

Empire: Total War improves the visual look of the game a lot and you can run the game at "high" setting on any fairly modern system (something like GeForce 9800 series or Radeon HD4800 series). On the CPU side, you do want at least two cores, but as the engine doesn't fully multithread, performance of a single core is important for Empire: Total War.

Lowest setting available, units still recognizable if ugly.	Medium settings, playable on the YouGamers minimum system.
High settings, playable on the YouGamers recommended system.	Very High settings, playable most of the time on the YouGamers recommended system.

As can be expected, Depth of Field and SSAO effects take a heavy toll on the framerate on any hardware you can buy today, but it is nice that the game offers extra eye candy for future systems as well.

Unfortunately there are some background visuals that don't quite match the visual finesse of the armies and the ships - this is most evident in buildings and forts which are often covered in very low resolution textures.

Boarding enemy ship is nice to watch, but you can't influence the fight in any way.

Holding the high ground against some French who are predictably running away...

As for the performance across different hardware, it is... uneven. The engine seems to have some outstanding bugs that cause odd slowdowns in real time battles with settings that, at first, appear to run quite fine on a given system. While the theoretical minimum requirements are fairly low, due to this you need a relatively modern system to keep the game playable even with reduced settings and what you see as average framerate when you play your first battle may not accurately reflect later battles. Personally I had to tone down the settings from maximum (no SSAO) even when running on a GeForce GTX 285 due to slowdowns in some battles - it just became impossible to order units around at sub-15fps framerate.

In addition to the framerate issues during battles, the main map is also pretty harsh on weaker systems. Sure, the framerate doesn't matter that much for turn-based activities on the campaign map, but it is still somewhat annoying - especially as the performance appears to degrade in late stages of the game. This may be related to some crash bugs that can happen simply due to the player clicking on a specific piece on the map - and the only way to work around these crashes is to load an earlier save (you had an earlier save, right?) and trying to do some things a bit differently and hope the game doesn't end up in a bugged state.

Page 1: IntroductionPage 2: GameplayPage 3: Gameplay, cont.Page 4: Visuals and PerformancePage 5: Summary, Scores

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