Empire VS Napoleon

[Grifos]

Which runs more smoothly, in your experience, in an old PC which barely meets the minimum requirements, Empire TW or Napoleon TW?

[onesarcher]

I've played both with 70 hours in Empire and 80 some hours in Napoleon. In that time I've learned that Empire runs more smoothly. Napoleon is more graphicly demanding when doing battles.

[KeggeR]

Empire was released incomplete, Napoleon runs much better since it was optimized, but empire is far better game in my opinion

[pgeerkens]

Originally posted by Grifos:

Which runs more smoothly, in your experience, in an old PC which barely meets the minimum requirements, Empire TW or Napoleon TW?

Four key specs before any answer can be made with confidence:

1) is your system 32-bit or 64-bit?

2) How much system RAM do you have?

3) Do you have an SSD drive as the system (ie C:\) drive?

4) What is your graphics card?

Then someone with similar specs can opine with their experience. All other responses will be suspect due to personal interpretation of "an old PC".

[Grifos]

Originally posted by pgeerkens:

Originally posted by Grifos:

Which runs more smoothly, in your experience, in an old PC which barely meets the minimum requirements, Empire TW or Napoleon TW?

Four key specs before any answer can be made with confidence:

1) is your system 32-bit or 64-bit?

2) How much system RAM do you have?

3) Do you have an SSD drive as the system (ie C:\) drive?

4) What is your graphics card?

Then someone with similar specs can opine with their experience. All other responses will be suspect due to personal interpretation of "an old PC".

1) 64-bit
2) 2 GB
3) No
4) NVIDIA GeForce 310M

[Insaniac]

Empire would, presumably, run better since it's older and has inferior graphics. That said, Napoleon isn't THAT much more taxing. Content-wise, I prefer Empire. Sure, Napoleon has a bit more historically accurate and prettier content, but Empire just dwarfs Napoleon in terms of size.

[1124105229]

Napoleon

[Johnny_L]

Empire, I believe.
A decade or so ago I could play Empire rather decently in an old PC, yet I had to get a new one when I got Napoleon.

[HistoryPlayer]

Both are great games but in my experience Empire requires an insane gaming pc to make it enjoyable in campaigns. I have a better computer and I always have lag in some circumstances such as sieges or in campaign map when lots of unit stacks are present. The only enjoyable campaign I played was with BEIC mod because only covers India.

I guess SSD hard drive with top high-end CPU gaming such as i9-9900K may solve these problems.

[Inardesco]

Originally posted by KeggeR:

Empire was released incomplete, Napoleon runs much better since it was optimized, but empire is far better game in my opinion

Actually no. Napoleon has many random crashes both in campaign and battle, on and offline that Empire simply doesn't has.

While Napoleon arguably runs better is also in part due to lack of the siege maps, which are dreadful in Empire.

[Inardesco]

Originally posted by HistoryPlayer:

Both are great games but in my experience Empire requires an insane gaming pc to make it enjoyable in campaigns. I have a better computer and I always have lag in some circumstances such as sieges or in campaign map when lots of unit stacks are present. The only enjoyable campaign I played was with BEIC mod because only covers India.

I guess SSD hard drive with top high-end CPU gaming such as i9-9900K may solve these problems.

Thats got nothing to do with high end pc or not and everything to do with lack of multi-core support.

Empire only used 1 cpu core and up to 2gb ram, which causes a lot of bottlenecks.

[Inardesco]

Originally posted by Grifos:

Originally posted by pgeerkens:

Four key specs before any answer can be made with confidence:

1) is your system 32-bit or 64-bit?

2) How much system RAM do you have?

3) Do you have an SSD drive as the system (ie C:\) drive?

4) What is your graphics card?

Then someone with similar specs can opine with their experience. All other responses will be suspect due to personal interpretation of "an old PC".

1) 64-bit
2) 2 GB
3) No
4) NVIDIA GeForce 310M

How can you have 64bit OS with only 2 gb of ram? Sounds like 32bit os to me.

Not that it matters for this game since its 32bit limited anyway.

Your core speed is more important to know. Anything lower than 2,3ghz simply wont play this well, even if you have 12 cores.

[Slyguy3129]

Napoleon is slightly more demanding at Ultra than Empire, but worlds better than Empire sadly.

Empire: France is a *single province*. One, the entirety of France falls when Paris is taken.

Napoleon: France has multiple provinces.

I mean, I *hate* France, but even I think that is an unforgivable blunder in building the map. In short, Empire's map looks larger, but it really isn't. All units tend to behave in the same way, plus the AI is a little less r-e-t-a-r-d-e-d in Napoleon, which makes it slightly better.

[Guybrush]

7 years ago I would have said TWE.. Now I say Napoleon runs way better as TWE has random crashes and cant even alt+tab without some stupid bug that prevents the game from switching back.

[pgeerkens]

Originally posted by Guybrush:

7 years ago I would have said TWE.. Now I say Napoleon runs way better as TWE has random crashes and cant even alt+tab without some stupid bug that prevents the game from switching back.

My experimentation suggests it's not random:

1) Only ALT-TAB from the Campaign Screen,not the Battle Screen.

2) Don't use any other application requiring the gaming graphics card while ALT-TABbed out. ETW can't recognize the need to refresh the graphics card memory (or some similar symptom) in that case.

3) there may be a time limit, so don't stay ALT-TABBED out longer than a couple of minutes.

When I avoid those three gotcha's i can usually ALT-TAB out and back with only a brief delay.

---

I'm going to go a bit further on (2), Don't go Full Screen while ALT-TABBED out either.

[Guybrush]

Ill check it out thanks. Any suggestions on the random CTDs?