Creative Assembly donne de nouvelles précisions concernant le prochain patch 1.4 pour Empire Total War. En plus de nombreuses corrections de bugs, vous aurez aussi droit à deux nouvelles batailles (Rossbach et Fontenoy). Au passage le studio en profite pour préciser que le patch sera disponible vers la fin du mois (il vient tout juste d’arriver chez les bêta-testeurs). Voyez ci-après pour une liste complète des modifications prévues.
Par ailleurs, dans un précédent communiqué il a aussi été précisé que la campagne multijoueur pour Empire Total War est toujours en cours d’élaboration et devrait être disponible avant la sortie de Napoleon Total War.
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I am pleased to confirm that update 1.4 will be out in late September.
First off, some new items that will be going into 1.4:
- 2 new historical battles: Battle of Rossbach and Battle of Fontenoy. Both available in single player and multi player.
- Missile cavalry can now fire and reload whilst on the move.
And previously announced, the update will contain the following fixes and balance changes.
Balance changes:
- Overhaul of naval balancing as talked about in 9th July Update.
- There is now a cap on how many of some units you can take in MP. Examples of such units are Ferguson Rifles, many of the Elite Units of the West, and other unique units such as Royal Ecossais etc.
- Dragoons are available from higher building levels and now have fire by rank to allow them to better fulfil the role of mobile infantry.
- Light Dragoons have gained longer range guns to allow them to skirmish better.
- Reworked cavalry costs to better reflect their value on the battlefield.
- Increase in cost to Windbusche Jaegers and Ferguson Rifles.
- Some improvements to projectile balancing.
- Balance improvements made to Road to Independence Episode 3.
Fixes and improvements:
- Significantly increase the rate of naval invasions. Including those across theatres.
- Increase AI aggression and improve use of armies.
- Increase the creation and retention of strong mixed higher level unit armies by the CAI.
- Fix for texture allocation in sprite cache that was causing a memory crash.
- « Backstabber » and « Dishonouring Treaties » diplomatic factors change so don’t apply when joining an ally in war.
- Fix for some towns in regions still giving bonuses to income when damaged for raiding.
- Improvements to siege AI in how it approaches and assaults walls.
- Units with fire by rank now fire correctly when behind walls.
- Bug with fort cannon targeting fixed, making them much more accurate.
- Many fixes to sound bugs improving overall sound across the game.
- Fixed issue with default battle preference not being saved.
- Fix to include protectorate owned regions in explicitly-specified victory condition regions.
- Various crash fixes.
- Fixes to various group formations to improve formations used by player/AI.
- Fix for routing unit cards losing faction colour.
- Fix for auto unlimbering causing the attack order to terminate prematurely resulting in an inability to stop the unit from firing.
- Fix for troops on fort walls not using fort gun range when judging when to fire on enemy troops.
- Fix for fort guns using wrong targeting formula.
- Fixes to fort pathfinding and use of ropes.
- Multiplayer soft lock fixes.
- Fix crash in quotes table.
- Cumulative updates to improve AI invasion behaviour.
- Bug fixes and improvements to AI counter offers.
- Improvements to AI diplomatic valuation of military access and alliances.
- Fix for wind sounds not working in naval battles
- Fixed ship wakes not always working.
- Fixed potential crash disembarking agents from navies.
- Fixed armies not being booted out of regions when losing military access gained by joining an ally in war.
- Improved AI diplomacy valuation of technologies.
- Fixed reinforcements from unreachable positions.
- Balance of power fix for attack of opportunity.
- Fixed bug that was causing issues with embarking an army containing multiple characters.
- Minor tweak to stop some ship sails endlessly play furling sound.
- Fixed path blocked bug (pathing into ZoC).
- Diplomacy counter-offer improvements.
- Fix for fast forward not working as intended on some PCs. Will always speed up if camera is still, if camera moves fast forward will be as fast as possible on each PC.
- Fixed issue where artillery would be told to stop firing but continue.
- Fixed issue with the virtual file system whereby on certain hard drives / raid configurations / partitions which were experiencing a crash with sound enabled.
- Fixed a boundary pathfinding crash.
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The MP Campaign for Empire has always been a beta product. However, despite it simply being a test of the technology we still want it to be fun and enjoyable, something that’s worth your time and our effort. So we’ve been working on it since release, building it to a state where its stable enough to beta test by you all and is indeed a great deal of fun to play. The MP Campaign Beta has not been forgotten, work is ongoing and it will be released before Napoleon allowing us time to absorb your comments and feedback (Which is ultimately the point of a public beta). To stress: Empire’s MPC Beta is still under development and will be coming shortly it has not been dropped or forgotten and will be available soon.