It seems that for all the people who complain about our coverage of Steam updates, there are still avid gamers who hang on our every word and rely on us for the latest and greatest in the world of digital distribution.

Take today for example. A (pretty tiny) update was released for Empire: Total War, which tweaks a couple of things that I'm sure are crucial to the gameplay. My eyes have been dazzled by all sorts of interesting bits and pieces, and the news of the update slipped past for a few hours. Once I paid attention to my inbox, I discovered it was full of news submissions, all begging us to remind people to restart their Steam Client and get the update!

...so, there you go - hop to it!

Read full article by Jessica Citizen

um... 2 things.. which are tweaks.. despite the many many many issues the game still has they tweak two things..

I was kinda hoping of "Stops the AI from going BlitzKreg on your ass with a +200 reputation and an alliance" and "Ally AIs hold up their end of an Alliance/Protectorate" as presently those two are annoying the hell out of me on the campaign map.

And on Battle Map "Make the AI Flank instead of clumping its forces into one big pile for my Arty to rape- they should ideally form lines instead." "Stop the AI from going Box Formation in front of Infantry" and "Fix Fort Sieges Completely" (I don't care what people say, Fort Sieges are by far the most buggiest part of this game) also "make unit cohesion much better" as several times I've had units ignore my orders (cavalry especially.. FALL BACK GOD DAMN IT!)

These little patch fixes are always things that should have been fixed when the game first was released not after. They should be concentrating on the game breakers at this stage- and not concentrating on the multiplayer mode because no one cares if it means single player has to suffer as a result. The daily updates are always featuring things like "today we played a few multiplayer matches".. like wtf guys?!

Surely part of the bonus of it being on Steam is that you get updates as they're done and they trickle through like this.

nope.. with all the distribution problems Empires had its actually been more of a burden- the fans hate it and I doubt Sega will ever use it again as a primary distribution system- the fact that you can only run it with steam is a serious mistake and provided enough evidence that steamworks isn't the best solution for using as a primary distribution system- that in fact the old CD-in-a-box method is in fact still as effective as ever. Steamworks was only chosen because at the time it was considered to be un-crackable but then that was eventually proven wrong- the advantages that steamworks had is no longer relevant because they don't actually do anything.

It was a massive mistake they made and all of the fans know it.

They mainly chose Steamworks for its multiplayer systems as this was going to be the first total war to feature multiplayer campaigns.. however these have been more buggier in their QA process than the actual game itself-- the game in fact was delayed a good 4 months because of that and we still don't have it.

A lot of patches that have come out for Empire most of the time either broke the game, downloaded incorrectly and outright failed to install at all- though they did fix those issues for 1.3 you would've thought they'd have all those bugs ironed out BEFORE they released the game. Its just bad QA practices.

So Steam was "only chosen" for multiple reasons? I don't know if you've been following the total war games but they're ALWAYS broken. It has nothing to do with the distribution system. Patches always fail. Sieges have been broken in the last three games I've played and the AI has been pretty bad in all of them as well. Everyone just waits for the community to patch out all the bugs. The only reason I've bought Empire so "early" is that it was half price on Steam. So far the only bugs I've come across have been AI/Siege bugs which I'm used to from Rome anyway.

I don't see how any of these problems are the fault of the distribution system and I'm sure that "all of the fans" know how buggy these games are every release. Stop talking out of your ass.