Empire: Total War demo on Steam

By Robert Purchese Published 20 February, 2009

Bonaparte like it's 1799.

Valve and SEGA and Creative Assembly have popped an Empire: Total War demo on Steam.

The sampler offers a chance to romp around the 18th Century as the British Empire, attempting to wrestle Philadelphia from the grasp of the Americans and finally putting an end to French naval invasion plans. What cheek.

The Empire: Total War demo weighs just over 2GB, and can be nabbed from the Steam website now.

Empire: Total War launches on 4th March and has us terribly excited. Star attraction will be fully-implemented naval warfare, but Creative Assembly has poured plenty of effort in elsewhere.

The idea of a more streamlined, approachable and manageable Total War sounds very promising, especially as none of the depth or complexity has suffered.

March over to our Empire: Total War gamepage to find out more. Expect our thoughts in the run up to release.

Picture of Robert.

About Robert Purchese

Bertie is Eurogamer's Senior Staff Writer. When he's not hunting down news stories he's often found playing with his kids or gabbling about fantasy games and strange online worlds.

Read more articles from Robert by visiting the Robert Purchese archive page.

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Comments (34) Latest comment 3 years ago

Comments threads automatically close after 30 days, but please feel free to continue chatting on the forum!

  • Tyranix #1 3 years ago

    Woohoo I've been looking forward to this game for so long and now finally get to play it. I just hope my laptop is up to the task >.> If not, then it's time to build me a pc.

  • Quine #2 3 years ago

    Squee!

  • Wite_Noiz #3 3 years ago

    Might need some kind of "going away" party on March 3rd - good bye social life!

  • Waffleaber #4 3 years ago

    Great, what was a few street fighter bouts then down the pub has now turned into a couple of street fighter bouts followed by PC fiddling trying to get this to run on my old bastard PC followed by more street fighter.

    Oh and recommended specs so I know what to upgrade cheers.

  • hiddenranbir #5 3 years ago

    Installing...slowly. :(

    Both are battles Britain pwnzed in!

  • finian #6 3 years ago

    Just looked at the system requirements and it needs 15 gb of hdd space, what the fuck??

  • Liam64 #7 3 years ago

    That's the full game, finian.

  • Grimrita #8 3 years ago

    almost 3 hours and STILL downloading.Great idea Sega to give an exclusive to Steam - way to limit peoples options

  • SixFootHalfling #9 3 years ago

    75Kb DL speed

    Is not happy :(

    was over optimistic

    20Kb/s DL speed
    Edited by 1 at 20/02/09 @ 18:51

  • Promey #10 3 years ago

    Downloading at 5.6Kb/s here. Isnt Steam awesome.

  • Red930 #11 3 years ago

    What a great demo! Looking like a great game, refined from Rome, great looking, takes ages to load though!

  • makeamazing #12 3 years ago

    Cant be bothered to download the demo, might as well just wait for the full game its easier :)

  • finian #13 3 years ago

    Ya Liam64 I know. I was just thinkin that it was a bit excessive, I think the biggest game Ive had installed was 8gb. Im really going to have to clear out my hdd for this one

  • merkdot #14 3 years ago

    yes, great strapline.

  • Grimrita #15 3 years ago

    Here is a tip that works for those with slow downloads.

    Because Steam is crap, it restricts your download speeds depending on location. I switched to US - East coast and jumped from average 8.17KBS to over 500KBS after it restarted.

  • JusticeMoses #16 3 years ago

    Thanks for the tip Grimrita, didn't jump to 500kb/s for me but it was certainly a damn sight better then 5kb/s after swapping to East Coast US.

  • Darren #17 3 years ago

    I'm getting 880 Kb/sec here... it's downloaded 19% of the demo in less than 10 minutes. Early morning Saturday downloads for the win! :D

  • Darren #18 3 years ago

    Downloaded! :)

  • E-Raz0r #19 3 years ago

    I only get around 100 kb. Guess I got up too late. Yesterday night I only got around 20.

  • jesperj5 #20 3 years ago

    Why is it that Steam does not use the wonderful technology of Bittorrent when shifting this amount of data?

    This is a place where it would actually be both useful and legal .

  • Grimrita #21 3 years ago

    Yet another demo/beta that shows the flaws of Steam. I cant login, so that means I cant play some of my games. Brilliant. If you are going to provide a service, make sure that the damn thing work.

  • Rorsch #22 3 years ago

    Hummm, I love the series and used to play good enough... just got owned on the demo, these XVIII battles aren't my style

  • PuppyFiddler #23 3 years ago

    The graphics aren't a huge leap over Medieval 2 and there's some brutal animations for units that are about 200m in the distance -I'm talking worse that an 8bit game's animation and this is with everything maxed out. Up close is great though and the water effects are lovely. The sounds leaves a lot to be desired though, the death moans are stupid and for some reason infantry and cavalry running make no sound or hardly any and if two cavalry units are fighting it out all you hear is the odd sword clashing with no shouting, it could be much better. Nowhere near as good as Medieval 2's from what I've seen.

    For those curious I get an average in the land battle of about 20fps with a q6600 and GTX285@ 1920x1200 with everything fullon with 2xaa 16af. The sea battles are a lot easier on frame rates.

    The gameplay is the same but with better ai and you now get a first person view from any infantry unit! I don't think lines of muskets will be as fun as Medieval's melee combat but it's different. The sea battles are very slow but detailed - I think a lot of peopel would auto-calculate them after a while.

  • Lacero #24 3 years ago

    The worst load times I've ever seen.

    It's not just that they're really long, but that quite a few load points don't have a progress bar. And the ones that do just pause the progress bar during the long bits so it doesn't move.

    Also it crashes if you alt-tab.

  • grantc7 #25 3 years ago

    Really enjoyed the naval battle and won without losing any ships. Yay me! Very satisfying indeed.

  • KillerMonkey #26 3 years ago

    Jezus Christ almighty this is dissapointing. Compared to Medieval 2 it looks only slightly better but runs absolutely horrible. Load times suck massively. It took 5 mins of loading to change resolution. WTF?

    I do like that the cannons fire much more snappily, no cannoneers loitering around doing nothing. And the naval battles are seriously cool. I just hope they fix the technical issues before release, or patch it out quickly.

  • UncleLou #27 3 years ago

    Jezus Christ almighty this is dissapointing. Compared to Medieval 2 it looks only slightly better but runs absolutely horrible. Load times suck massively. It took 5 mins of loading to change resolution. WTF?


    Weird - runs almost as good as Medieval on mine. Landscapes look significantly better. Changing the options takes about 30 seconds max.

    Something wrong with your hardware, maybe?

  • KillerMonkey #28 3 years ago

    "Weird - runs almost as good as Medieval on mine. Landscapes look significantly better. Changing the options takes about 30 seconds max.

    Something wrong with your hardware, maybe?"
    Maybe there is, but this little laptop runs M2 silky smooth at 1650x1050 with pretty short loading times.
    I'll try defragging, maybe that's the problem but I doubt that will affect the in-game performance.


  • Rorsch #29 3 years ago

    Forget my last post, i'm getting the hang of the battles and the game is starting to rock! Just needed to see the strategies in a new light... *FIRE!!!*

  • autogunner #30 3 years ago

    hi guys, dont cancel your preorders on the demo bugs because it was exactly the same last time with the medieval 2 demo

  • Branoic #31 3 years ago

    Regarding the animations and missing sounds etc, I've heard that this is the result of a lot of resources stripped from the demo in order to reduce its download size, and I tend to believe this. I couldn't see a developer of the calibre of CA actually happy with the laughable death cries and shouts heard in the demo.

  • Ranger_Ryu #32 3 years ago

    Shame I can't try the game actually I need 1 more gig of RAM to paly the game since I only have 1 gig of RAM and I'm using Vista

  • hiddenranbir #33 3 years ago

    The detail is amazing. I almost lost my naval battle because I was zoomed in on the ongoings aboard my flagship for too long. It is hard not to, especially when you've ordered them to board!

    Rule Britannia!

  • E-Raz0r #34 3 years ago

    I'm going to buy this. So much FUN!

    I think the graphics are a lot better than in Medieval 2. The menues are sharper, you can cause more destruction and they finally fixed the size of the trees. It looks a lot more realistic and polished now.