Sofern die Testphase an diesem Wochenende ohne größere Probleme verläuft, wird der nächste Empire: Total War (ab 5,05€ bei kaufen)-Patch in der nächsten Woche veröffentlicht. Über 70 Bugs sollen mit dem Update aus der Welt geschafft werden, darunter Abstürze beim Speichern/Laden, Ladevorgang oder bei der Hafenauswahl. Zusätzlich werden Änderungen an der Einheiten-Balance vorgenommen und die Vermeidung von Kollisionen auf hoher See sollte künftig besser funktionieren. Auch das neue Seeschlachten-Gruppenkampf-Interface wird im Patch enthalten sein.

Some of the key game breakers that were fixed include: Fixing the crash caused by AI capturing a ship after naval combat. Loading battles from a savegame have been fixed. We've also corrected the bug whereby reinforcements entered the battlefield from the wrong direction. We've tweaked some of the unit balancing. Fixed the 'port selection' crash when selecting a port in North America as Great Britain, we fixed a crash on building capture notification, we fixed the 'stuttering loading bar' issue and the mid-battle crash related to audio. We fixed the garrison outisde playable area crash during land battles. We also fixed the crash caused by certain factions attempting to assasinate gentlemen inside a school. We also addressed the hang loading into battle problem.

The new naval group behaviour and collision avoidance logic is all in, and the new naval combat group UI is also up and running. The dreaded 'Indian pathfinding campaign save' corrupt bug was isolated and fixed, removing one of the big save game corruption issues. We've removed the zone of control for navies blockaded inside ports and also changed the shader model 2 fixes for shadows on the campaign map.

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I'd also like to take this opportunity to talk about Naval invasions if I may. The technology behind naval invasions is actually really rather heavy and is still causing some issues. The gameplay upgrade will make naval invasions possible but they will be rare. The AI now has a proper mechanism for the planning involved and can execute that mechanism when required, however increasing its frequency is a balance issue we haven't been able to get fixed in time for this upgrade. So in short, naval invasions are now possible and may occur, but they will not be frequent, which means we have to up that likelihood.

As a ray of hope to those concerned with this issue, I've seen the work we're doing on the AI for the next patch coming on leaps and bounds. There are a large amount of significant performance fixes that we're working on for the upcoming upgrade, this included. The primary purpose of the gameplay upgrade that will be released next week is to fix the AI aggression issues, remove the vast majority of game breaking crashes and tweak the unit behaviour whilst laying groundwork for naval invasions.