Empire Total War Launches For Linux Gamers

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Empire Total War Launches For Linux Gamers

As some more good Linux news today, Empire: Total War has officially launched on Steam for Linux gamers...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTg1ODY

[bakgwailo]

Great early birthday present for me, I was thinking about hitting up the pubs after work today, but, now I know what I will be doing. Bring on Shogun2 and M2 (with mod support for The Third Age)! Hopefully CA can get their shit together and finally get their in house port of R2 (now that the game is pretty much not broken) out the door for Linux - only almost a year late at this point

[chris200x9]

My first total war game, yay!

[madjr]

Feral interactive is awesome!

[iniudan]

My first total war game, yay!

Sadly Empire is the Total War game, that people like the least, in great part because the AI can't handle naval invasion.

If you ever want to try other Total War game, the best entry point are the original Rome and it expansion Barbarian Invasion (it also got quite a few excellent mod, Europa Barbarorum to name one), Medieval 2 Kingdom (much better then the original release, but Stainless Steel mod is excellent if you want to play the original campaign, there also a Middle Earth mod, called the Third Age), Napoleon (which is basically a more focused Empire and on a map that doesn't cause the glaring naval AI problem) and Shogun 2 (all campaign are pretty good, but Rise of the Samurai the least interesting campaign, due to poor unit variety, while Fall of the Samurai is the most polished).

As for the original Shogun and Medieval, I cannot really speak for those, the games are old enough to have a combat GUI that I find terrible, thus I have a hard time judging the quality of the gameplay.

[Chaz]

I'm surprised they bothered. Empire was a buggy mess and it seemed like they were just abandoning it when they released Napoleon so soon afterward. Then again, Rome was also horribly buggy, and that's the one I fell in love with. In that game spearmen in phalanx formation could not walk forward and could not actually fight with their spears; they would just sort of vibrate sideways. Then when the enemy finally came to them they would abandon their spears and fight with little knives. And spearmen in phalanx formation are the core of every army for every Greek faction! I played Rome a ton and loved it, but it drives me nuts that with every game they manage to botch things in some obvious and stupid way. I uninstalled Rome 2 after a couple hours of play.

[madjr]

Still I think the port was still worth it, the reviews on steam and metascore is still good.

Mostly it opens for the doors for many more sega titles, not just rome2 like it was originally planned

[nomadewolf]

meh...
I would rather have Rome I or Medieval II
This and Rome II are the worst games in the series!...

[mmstick]

I can vouch that the game runs perfectly smooth on Ultra at 4K resolution with the open source Gallium3D and Catalyst drivers on my Radeon HD 7950. Loading times and framerate is actually much higher than the Windows version, and it seems that this Linux port is more stable than the Windows version.

The developer also seems to be somewhat open source friendly by this statement to a question I asked on the forum:

We only support the closed source drivers for AMD and Nvidia, however we communicate with the open source team and have helped them debug issues with our Linux releases where possible in the past.

[stiiixy]

meh...
I would rather have Rome I or Medieval II
This and Rome II are the worst games in the series!...

What saddened me about Rome 2 was they had started yet another game after it, whilst releasing DLC, and Rome 2 was in an unplayable state.