Because I like the series and really wanted a good playing experience without the possibility of finding the installation didn't work I decided to buy a legal copy of empire total war. Yes, I can hardly believe it myself but I did.

But now I find myself 24 hours later, still lacking any game time on the game and I am wondering what was the point. Firstly let me vent my discontent with Steam and the application itself.

During the installation phase with this game it kept freezing and crashing at "creating game file cache" on the steam menu, read online about it. Killed my AVG and other programs which 'might' interfere with it and kept attempting to install. Literally tried about 50 times before I gave up, someone mentioned trying at a different time of day and I happened to find myself awake at 4am this morning, so I decided to try again then and without a single problem it installed... with my antivirus and programs which might be blocking it running. Not even a slight lock up or freeze, <deleted> was that?

So that was all well and good but in attempting to get my empire total war started I was told to uninstall steam, great there goes all my other steam games. So now I find I have to download another 10++gig of games, plus did I mention I still can't play Empire Total War? Apparently it needs to be fully updated before I can have any fun... Thanks steam you unholy douches.

Anyway, just thought I'd share my experience with y'all and let everyone who is considering buying this game think about this, and the possible hel_l/headaches it causes... The sad part is I am still waiting and I really want to play it. Looks so good.

Bummer

I have never had a problem with the game, installed it about 5 months ago and both the game and Steam have run smoothly.

Same here, no problems whatsoever ~ !

Perhaps it was your internet connection?!

If you internet connection is slow and the game has many updates. Then Steam will update the game before you can play. I had the same problem a few years ago with Steam. One of the reason i bought a 360 as not having to constatntly update or patch my games.

It just seemed to get stuck over and over on the creating game caching page, then I tried it at 4am (yes I woke up especially for it as it was suggested to me) and boom straight away no problem. Awesome game btw, I think I still prefer rome total war though. I don't know what it is about rome, but something really gets me into it.

Happy to hear it worked out for you, in particular as it towers heads and shoulders above "Rome"

It's good, the naval battles were a long time coming. The AI is very good especially when it comes to the styles of warfare of various factions. However I still love rome, because you can watch rome on TV and it makes you want to play, this you cant watch empires and be inspired to play. Plus the cavalry seem more effective in Rome, and who doesn't like watching cavalry battles ?

I have this game myself, my machine is struggling with it a bit though and I'll have to wait until I get ram upgrade at least before trying again.

If you find yourself having problems again then you could try skipping steam altogether. If you look in the steam file in "program files" then you should find an exe. which starts the game independantly of steam, it should be in the "steam apps"/"common apps" subfolder.

Good game, but I think that there is simply no replacement for incendiary pigs and using your trebuchet against the enemy walls.