Finally gotten around to putting together some quick impressions of the upcoming Medieval: Total War, the followup title from the Creative Assembly to their hit game, Shogun. Check out the preview over on AusGamers for a look at the game, which includes several of the official screenshots showing off some of the awesome battle scenes.

I think we've narrowed the bad performance of the game down to the sound card and drivers.

I have a SBLive Value and got really bad performance until I downloaded the latest drivers (dated July 2002). My mobo also has a soundchip on it made by C-Media, and when I use it (and take out the SBLive) i get bad performance with it's latest drivers. The solution at the moment is to reduce the audio quality to low in the options menu.

I'm hoping that the programmers fix this issue soon as I would guess a lot of people use the sound chip on their mobos, and I'm guessing a lot of them are the C-Media chip.

What sound card do you have trog?

SBLive - I haven't got the latest drivers - I'll try that and see how it goes. Thanks for posting so fast, because you reminded me that I hadn't put in a paragraph about how awesome the sound effects and music are :)

cool, glad you like it.

let me know if the new sblive driver fixes the performance.

I checked out a Gamespot Preview for this game about 6 weeks ago. Really looking forward to trying this game.

PS: I have sblive too.

It'd be better as an fps though, right?

well, that goes without saying

i bought shogun, and i'll prolly buy medi evil if it's half as good.

i still play shogun it rocked so hard.

the demo rocks.

trog, first solution is to turn off the sound acceleration, or even disable the sound card, see if it helps.

I loved the combat aspect of Shogun, very sun tsu inspired, but the campaign mode left a lot to be desired and felt like it was added on as an afterthought, or an excuse to get you into the battles. The problem is that most battle through the campaign were severely unbalanced, so the outcome was inevitable and you may as well skip it :/. Hopefully this one will make the complexity of the campaign mode fit the excellence of the combat mode.

Trog, did you try the new sblive drivers yet?

Nope, will be soon - I've updated the preview to indicate that it might have just been a sounddriver issue

How smart are the units when left unattended?

They're good at running away :) I found that usually when I left a group unattended, they were mercileslly targetted and destroyed by the enemy :(

did you have them set to "engage at will" and "fire at will" ?

does anyone know a release for aus or even anywhere else?

Well, I've got release candidate 4 here, so it can't be long now.

Nozehead - I kept having this thing pop up when I tried attacking a group of units, saying something like "this army has attacked a friendly army, and is now your enemy" or something like that. Whenever I selected an army and tried to attack, this message would pop up and the units I'd selected to attack would just walk away in a seemingly random direction, instead of rushing to attack as I'd hoped. Any ideas what I was doing wrong?

Perhaps you were trying to attack your allies? Sometimes it's hard to keep track of who is who. Were you playing a historical battle or campaign? If so, you have allies in some of those battles, and you shouldn't go attacking them :)

Or you've found a bug :P

Did you try the new sblive driver yet? I'm keen to know if that fixed the performance problem.

Perhaps you were trying to attack your allies? Sometimes it's hard to keep track of who is who. Were you playing a historical battle or campaign? If so, you have allies in some of those battles, and you shouldn't go attacking them :)

Nope, it was a campaign battle and there were definitely only two sides in it. It was really odd and really annoying; I had troops ready to go and slap down other forces but they just didn't attack.

Haven't had a chance to try SBLive drivers; hopefully give it a go tomorrow. I've got shocking sinus slaw at the moment so I'm trying to limit my time in front of the PC :(