Empire: Total War has been release on Linux today! The game, ported by Feral Interactive, had first been hinted at through teasers and appeared in the SteamDB page several months ago as was previously covered here. Feral have been responsible for the excellent XCOM: Enemy Unknown Linux port and have made available a launch trailer for us penguins and OSX friends that you can see just below:
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It's worth noting that it's 64bit only, and multiplayer is Linux vs Linux only. A Feral Interactive developer explained the Linux vs Linux multiplayer in our comments.
About The Game
The Total War franchise is a mix of real-time tactical combat with turn-based strategic movement of armies, technological research and development of cities and provinces against a historical backdrop. Empire: Total War is set in the 18th century, featuring major European powers as playable nations as well as bits of the New World and India to dispute and conquer in due course. This was a century of large wars including the War of the Quadruple Alliance, the Seven Years' War, and both the wars of Spanish Succession and Austrian Succession. Empire is also the first game in the franchise to have featured naval battles, pitting large wooden ships with dozens of guns against one another. The main part of the game, however, are the large land battles with hundreds of men, horses and guns on each side fighting for supremacy. Leaders can affect armies and their morale and various types of battles can occur including ambushes, sieges or even a classic open field pitched battle. Even though it is mainly a wargame diplomacy plays a role as does espionage and subterfuge; it helps add another layer to what is otherwise a game about conquest and battle.
Personally, even though this game is now several years old, I am looking forward to replaying and having a few hours of fun with this. User modifications are usually the lifeblood of Total War games and Empire fortunately features hundreds of such mods that make the game an unforgettable experience.
It seems inevitable that other games in the franchise will eventually come to Linux as hinted by images of Rome 2 featured in the announcement of steam machines. This is as good a place as any for Linux gamers to familiarize themselves with the franchise. Feral have had a good track record in bringing native ports and I can't wait to see what they'll bring us next.
You can get the game on steam here where it's currently 50% off, or grab it from the Feral Interactive store to support the porters directly.
Quoting: facelessQuoting: doctorxruns good.. but sound is stuttering every second though. Not getting that in any other games. suggestions?It seems that sound issues have been common in Total war games. Try different sound settings like raising the sound cache.
tried all the settings... oddly just the main menu into game and during game. Before that, no issue at all. I hope i can figure this out.
oldrocker99 Dec 10, 2014
BTW, for those who call this a strategy game, E:TW is not quite what you expect from the genre. The strategy is when you decide which province to want to conquer next, etc. The meat of the game is real-time tactical battles, which are pretty absorbing.
edddeduck_feral Dec 10, 2014
Quoting: ArthurOnly Linux to Linux multiplayer? That's a bit sad, as the only way I were going to get this would be if my Windows wielding friends wanted to play it. Now that's not even a distant possibility. :(
We always enable Linux vs Mac vs PC multiplayer when it is technically possible (like with XCOM) however sometimes it is not possible for various reasons. In the case of Empire it proved impossible, we have two explanations for you a simple one and a more technical one.
Simple answer first. Basically the multiplayer code has some platform dependant features meaning it acts very slightly differently on different OS’s causing sync issues that cannot be resolved without redesigning how the multiplayer code works on all platforms.
More technical answer is some games multiplayer libraries were not designed for cross platform when they were initially created, multiplayer networking is a complex process with many things that need to be kept in exact and perfect sync with other players, this is done by using complex mathematical processes. When a game engine is designed to support cross platform multiplayer care is taken to make sure all of the mathematical processes are done in such a way that they don’t use any platform specific features and the maths libraries and results will always match no matter the platform the engine is built on.
In the case of Empire the game engine uses the platforms maths libraries to calculate checksums and syncing between players, this means that due to very subtle differences in various platforms maths libraries (floating point calculations specifically) playing games between different platforms will slowly go out of sync due to the small differences ending up with the players dropping out due to sync issues getting too great.
We are investigating if Mac / Linux might be possible if we rewrite the maths library usage for both platforms, although it's unlikely that Windows will ever be multiplayer compatible with the Mac/Linux version.
An interesting take on the rankings of Total Wars - http://kotaku.com/lets-rank-the-total-war-games-from-best-to-worst-1535642069
Amazingly enough, it was the only Total War game that I did not own, so there!
I even have Rome 2, which I bought in the days where I did not understand the way porting companies were remunerated. Still, as I understand it, when I buy all the DLC for a game that was ported, does this go towarsds the porting company?
Before I forget, thank you Feral, thank you for porting these wonderful games over to Linux. The Total Wars series is particularly dear to my heart.
Now that Civ, Total War, Mount and Blades and pals have been ported over to Linux, I seriously can't think of any other games that I really miss on Linux, apart from the Elder Scrolls series.
Bought it earlier today....not even sure if I'll have time to play this. I enjoyed Medieval 2 back when I used to run Windows (BYE BYE!!), so if I do get around to it, it should be fun. Thanks Feral!!
supermonkey77 Dec 10, 2014
Plus you smell of beef and cheese... You don't smell like Santa
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Oh and the name doesn't mean anything but coincidentally could be pronounced as "Buttery" which suits me just fine.
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