Napoleon: Total War - Imperial Edition (PC DVD)

Having played Empire with and without the Darth mod I can honestly say the mod is a great improvement, so for Napoleon I went straight for their excellent mod [...]This enables the game to be played with or without the mod but I can't see why you wouldn't want loads more units, proper AI, great effects, truly huge pitched battles etc etc. I would recommend this game anyway, I love the TW series but the AI has always been a bit thick so if you like winning easily don't mod it if you like a tougher challenge go for the mod but buy it anyway it's a great game and an excellent series.

Why oh why do creative assembly feel the need to add 'Steam'? As I don't have unlimited broadband downloading the huge files required to play this game via 'Steam' is going to cost me extra money. This should be advertised in big print. I, like others started the installation process early in the day and it took hours and hours just to get the game running. I remember the good old days of Rome Total War where you could just pop your disc in the drive and it would install hassle free in 20mins tops. Those days seem to have gone my gamer friends.The game itself however is a real joy to play and I would recommend it to anyone.

If you have any reservations about buying this item based on a bad Empire Total War experience,don't,basically it works it has no bugs and does not crash.Essentially the developers I think have gone back to the origins of the Total War genre where the battles are fundamentally the heart of the game and the other elements such as diplomacy and research requirements are slightly simplified also the religious elements have been dropped completely making for a much more streamlined game.Graphically the game has many improvements units are more detailed and don't look cloned,some of them such as the heat haze around a cannon's muzzle or the cannon balls which now tear a smoking groove in the earth are admittedly small but they add to an overall sense of believability to the environment.Sound is also improved especially when down at unit level my favourite at the moment is a british soldier asking fearfully where his mates head has gone,brutal yes but also believable.As to whether the Imperial Edition is worth purchasing over the standard version it's a close call but it's a quality product and i'm very pleased with it.

If you have played Empire Total War - then Napoleon Total War is a very similar thing in its appearance.Napoleon's era is obviously interesting, but because of few differences between the period of the Seven Years War and the Napoleonic Wars, there is significant overlap (militarily) with Empire Total War and should have been done as an-add-on or something.Not really worth more than 10 quid, as my playing time of it on Steam is a mere 13 hours compared to 56 for Empire Total War (the latter figure is not very accurate though, I believe) illustrates it.

As a game it is very good in terms of graphics but I think it could be a great deal more authentic. For example if the French attack in AI why do they not attack in 'column' rather than in 'line'. Surely this was the classic method of french attack and was exploited to their detriment By Wellington who deployed a rapid firing 'line' defence which tore into the French from the sides as well as the front and defeated them.See Maitland's men defeating the imperial guard at waterloo. Am I asking too much?

I couldnt describe the terrible path finding problems , cavalry stuck against ridges, the usual nonsense. Medieval 1 was far the best.My advice - i was tempted by the reviews that said it was a big step on from empires. i never got empires but now im thinking, if this is a big step up in gameplay then... ???.AI is dreadful what ever setting its on - as expected.Endless stacks of crap armies attack ,then rout in all directions.Ive read reviews that describe the AI as fantastic, rubbish its no better than MTW", maybe worse.Finally the battle maps are tiny compared to MTW2 or RTW, so you string your army out from nearly one side of the map to the other. Theres no hills or mountains, the maps are too small for any terrain variation. However as usual the complexity of the crossable / non crossable bits of ground leaves the AI pathfinding struggling. In most of the battles i played the AI has to resort to putting its units in column as they head towards you. The maps are so boring that i lost intrset in them quickly.This of course for many, is the heart of these games ( battles ), so although there are quite a few strategy map improvements i would say the battle map tedium, makes this far less playable than RTW or MTW2.

The game has a historically accurate plot line and the graphics are stunning (howizter shell explosions leave craters and cannon round shots leave marks). Elite units are quite elite, one cannot have a full army of them. The technology ladder of empire total war has been replaced with a new one.However, the world map is a lot smaller than Empire total war and the number of playable factions (I was quite unhappy about that in empire total war, too) and cut scenes lesser.The game runs great on an i7 desktop with 6 gb 1333 DDR3 ram and a 1 gb graphic card. I do not regret buying the game at all.

Great game, I find it better when playing the battles to slow the game down as I don't have the ability to move all my troops at once as the AI (Artifial Ineligence) can, great Graphics and well done Amazon for getting the game to me one day after I ordered it in time for the release date, will definately order from Amazon again. Napoleon: Total War - Imperial Edition (PC DVD)