Control of troops?

[KnightFandragon]

To keep your units from moving on their own you select them 8 at a time..seeing how thats the max you can get at one time and set them to Hold Position. As for how I control a heap of guys, I dont haha. I get like 1 decked out squad that I focus on and the rest are my guinea pigs and I kinda let them do as they please or use them when I need to do a suicide run. Or else I get a single tank and DC it most the mission and let the Ai run the rest....this is only in SP though. I always have my guys on Hold Position though and move them as I see fit.

[Parkaboy]

It does change from mission to mission, but yeah there are quite a few where you have a raging battlefield dumped into your lap. In the large battles its easy for troops to run out of ammo so its important to keep that in mind.

Focus and support with your high cost units and keep the others in defensive positions.

The multiplayer you control tons of troops so the battlefield missions are quite important to get to grips with if you want to expand your gaming experience.

I'm loving RedTide at the moment which most of the missions you control no more than 10 men so is much more spec opps vs the world.

[kane1]

Before I started tweaking the game I used to slow the game speed. I also use to let the mission play through so that I could see what I was up against.

[Crni vuk]

you know in multiplayer it can be beneficial if you set most of your troops to return fire only when the enemy has spoted them and is shooting at them. At least that way I managed to keep more men allive even when I loose a control point for example as some might hide somewhere. And you can use them to eventualy attack the flank or rear from approaching units. With very expensive units like assault infantry and paratroopers this helps to not simply waste them all the time. Of course if I fight next to a team mate I set them to a quite agressive style so they support the other troops. So one has always to keep in mind what his target is. With defence it might be better to set some troops (not all of them), to a defensive role. And when you are attacking you should anyway do most of the things by your self.

[vonduus]

Thanks a lot. It seems I have not overlooked anything very important in the interface. So the basic problem is probably not the game, but the fact that I am a control freak.

And what you suggest is basically what I am doing: Using slow motion in the early stages of an SP game, refraining from having full control of more than a few units throughout, letting the rest of the guys get killed, hopefully taking a lot of enemies with them - and playing on for recon purposes, even after I have lost a game. The suggestion with return fire is also a good one, I didn't think of that, it may also be useful in SP, I'll have to experiment with this.

Conclusion: The name of this game is situational awareness.

Another thing: Does this game have a memory leak or something? In SP everything is smooth, but when I am the server in an MP game my computer seems to change to slideshow mode in the very big scenarios (most notable the one with the flares). If I quit and shut down the computer (all the way down to a cold restart) the stuttering goes away and the game plays (almost) as in SP. My computer was built to be well beyond the recommended specs for Empire Total War, so it is not because my hardware is obsolete or anything. Will it help to buy more RAM? Right now I have 4GB, should I put in another 4GB next time I can afford it?

To the designers of the game: A nice feature to implement in future games, if possible, would be either to allow players to organize the troops and give them orders while on pause, or making slow motion an option in MP. As it is now you have to unpause and repause all the time, this is ok in SP, but a pain in MP.

And yet another totally unrelated thing: I have read almost all I could find on the internet on this game, and one critique that seems to be consistent in almost all reviews, is people complaining over the voice acting. I must say that I disagree with this. The broken english in the game is imho very much to the point: The russian guy is speaking english with a very heavy russian accent, and that helps a lot with immersion. The best would be if he spoke his native language, but my russian is very rusty, so I think broken english is the best compromise. I would hate it if a russian company commander begins to speak with a yankee or a cockney or an Oxford accent.

[Crni vuk]

yes it seems that the game sometimes has a few issues with the visuals and load times. As sometimes a battle with 16 people would run more or less fine while other times it starts to become a slideshow. I think it has something to do as well with the configurations of the players. Even if you have a good PC if the other ones dont they will eventualy lag and you with them. Something like that. Programming stable networkcode is a pretty hard thing. And not many games achieve that.

Actualy games based on the unreal engine for example are very stable. Some mods managed to push the limitations from 30 people on a server to 50. And with a good computer and very strong server you can play it pretty nicely. But thats pushing the engine to its limits. Thing is even with quite high pings (over 200) you can still enjoy a mostly lag free and good game in Unreal and its modifications. Something which I cant say from many other games.

[Korsakov829]

For me, when I was starting I just slowed the game now. It just comes naturally.

[Nikitns]

Originally Posted by vonduus

Thanks a lot. It seems I have not overlooked anything very important in the interface. So the basic problem is probably not the game, but the fact that I am a control freak.

And what you suggest is basically what I am doing: Using slow motion in the early stages of an SP game, refraining from having full control of more than a few units throughout, letting the rest of the guys get killed, hopefully taking a lot of enemies with them - and playing on for recon purposes, even after I have lost a game. The suggestion with return fire is also a good one, I didn't think of that, it may also be useful in SP, I'll have to experiment with this.

Conclusion: The name of this game is situational awareness.

I usually put all my men at hold position, then micro with a few soldiers. This is when i am are attacking.

When u are defending it is much more fun, you gotta micro all over the place, and send reinforcements, move tanks etc.