Really odd the different experiences of different systems - demonstrates I suppose why real world testing to find bugs and driver issues is necessary. My rig is 2nd gen i5, 8gb ram, Windows 7 64 bit and a GTX 660ti. Added to that is a 500gb Seagate hybrid drive (part SSD, part normal HDD) and I also notice that at the end of a turn the AI flags fly (for the most part) by, although I'm not anywhere near end game yet. HD speed (same as Empire and Shogun) I think makes a real differnece to how long the AI takes between your turns. I haven't had (at least past the first patch) any of the graphical or other glitches, and our systems should be simiar, or if anything yours should be faster. My hybrid HD might be a bit quicker, but I doubt your 560 is bottlenecking and processer and ram in your system should be faster.
Crossfire and SLI and windowed are causing them a real headache from what i've seen. Never used a dual card setup myself, but can you just use one (ie turn crossfire off for that game) until they fix it?
I'd agree with the second comment. Empire is still my favourite game (although falling in love with Rome II), but the AI wasn't great, although still better than most previous efforts. I didn't play Shogun a huge amount - loved the art style, but it never really grabbed me. Rome II at the moment is at least as good in AI terms. I haven't had stalled battles - the AI always tried to do something and in city fights it always tries to flank me. The only problem for the AI is most cities I've attacked have lower powered troops (mobs or slingers) and whilst the hoplites can go toe to toe with principes or triarii for a while, the others can't and if you can get cavalry loose around their formation you can kill the flanking force all too easily. That's not the AI's fault - that's just the fact that the troops are missile troops and can't handle cavalry. If anything, the AI seems hyper aggressive and responsive (think I'm playing my first campaign on hard, not a higher level) - about half way through dealing with Carthage and it's African allies about 30-35 turns in and they're raiding up and down the Italian/Corsican coast. If I attack somewhere, they respond and adapt and attack behind me. My legions are stronger individually, but I haven't got the number of forces to pin them, so they're being annoying. I will have dealt with them inside another 5 turns, but they seem brigher both on the strategic and tactical maps than in previous games.
I haven't had an engagement that big yet (still early doors in my first campaign and not enough time around work), but a tactic that's worked on smaller engagements is to put my spear units in groups of 2 or 3 and to move them as groups on the flanks, or 3 groups with one up the middle as well. Those ships lead and engage at range, hopefully pinning, or drawing into hand to hand combat/boarding actions. I then move my biggest ships independently - they're heavy and therefore best when ramming and try to get them coming in at an angle at the pinned enemy and ram them. If the other ship is engaged, particularly in hand to hand combat, it's almost impossible for them to move. If you catch them midships at 90 degrees or so, roughly 50% of the time you can sink them. Even if you don't they'll take massive losses. If you're ramming ships are coordinated, you might sink say 3 enemy ships almost simultaneously. Even if that's not enough to win immediately, it causes a huge morale shock and even if the enemy doesn't rout, you should have enough of an advantage to finish them relatively quickly. The lesson from that tactic is to be defensive when you're maneuvering - always try and approach the enemy head on - a head to head ram - even at a slight angle might cause casualties, but probably won't sink (unless there is a hugh disparity in size), so you need to maneuver so that the other side can't get in position to ram you. Plus when ramming time the "row hard" ability to get maximum speed.
I haven't got that far yet - only up to about turn 10 so far (and wasted several hours last night playing historical battles). I used to adopt that strategy in the original Rome though - I started off going into Gaul and northern europe, but then adapted slightly when I realised that Gaul was so poor in terms of resources in the early game that it made sense to charge down the Dalmatian coast and try and take some of the Greek territories and also to pile into Spain, just because of the economic benefits, and also with a few key armies, you could protect your northern flanks via bottlenecks through the mountain ranges. Naval battles in Rome 1 though were pointless and there was no point controlling the Med, provided that you could always move your ships transporting amies and disembark at the end of each turn to keep them safe. I assume with the naval system in Rome II that that approach won't work and I'll need to protect my sea lanes as I would playing as the Brits in Empire. There is still though probably a big upside to protecting your southern coast and concentrating on the northern territories before expanding into Africa, or too far east along the Med.
I had a very quick play last night - the Prologue appears to be broken (the first battle I'm not sure how to save Capua as the Samnites had stopped attacking and I'd wiped out about 50% of them and had troops in all 3 victory points with no Samnites near, but had constant "do something" messages, and then the Consul died, despite not being in combat and I failed). The graphics don't look right, but I can't tell whether that's because of my set-up (I'm mid way through a graphics card upgrade and waiting for a new power supply today) as even though everything's set to ultra (and smooth as anything) I'm not sure whether it's displaying lower quality. I'll persevere - the patch today may fix a lot of things. I'm not that bothered to be honest. I can't remember any game that doesn't go through a load of patches, whether it's been open alpha and beta tested or not. There are always bugs and patches no matter what the devs do. CA have a bad rep from some quarters, but nobody else makes a strategy game like TW so you can't compare like to like. In terms of AI, there are very few games out there that replicate this type of strategic campaign and tactical combat and there is very little out there that is anything like this detailed or complicated. Yes in the "good old days" games were less buggy and patched better/more quickly, or less often, but those games weren't 20gig in size. The fact is that games are so complicated now that you can't hope to pick everything up until it's released to the wild. I played Empire from day 1. It's undoubtedly a much better game now than it was then, but I loved it on day 1 and I love it even more now. Whilst Rome 1 is still probably my favourite TW game, that's for nostalgic reasons, not because it was better. Empire is the best TW game there has been, hopefully until this. People forget how bad/limited the AI was from Rome 1 either because of rose tinted specs, or because they've played with modded versions. In answer to the original question, buy it when you want to. It will get cheaper (pre-order it came down to £25) and there will be a few weeks of serious patches and rebalancing to do, but frankly with any TW game my first grand campaign is an experiment I learn from and it's only the 2nd or 3rd play through where you really get to grips with whatevers new and I imagine that the new traits, tech tree and the army traditions will be a decent learning curve in terms of experimenting with the right approach to suit your play style.
No it won't. Graphically they might be able to handle things, but in terms of the number of users and all the bandwidth and other issues the consoles simply couldn't deal with. They'd have to change their hardware to deal with more than 32 users, let alone the sort of scale involved in this. And yest they're massively underpowered in CPU terms - even if you could sort out the number of users problem, they wouldn't be able to process the data in a manageable real time way.
Different as I'm in the UK not US, but agree go for an upper level i5, either 3550, or 3570 - not worth spending more and an i7 isn't worth it on bang for buck. 8gb ram, or 16gb - you don't need 16gb, but the price is so low, for the increase, it's probably worth it for the headroom. Don't buy an SSD - buy a hybrid drive - Seagate do a hybrid drive (there's probably others as well) - 500gb or 750gb is reasonably priced - a bit more than SATA HD, but way cheaper than SSD and the performance is significantly faster than normal HD and only marginally slower than SSD. In real world applications you notice a massive speed increase, but won't miss the extra of an SSD for a fraction of the price. I bought the 500gb version about 6 months ago and can't believe the difference. Use that as main drive for OS and games and have a separate normal HD for non-intensive applications, music, photos etc (unless you're doing a lot of work with images, in which the faster drive will be a big benefit). On the graphics card, go mid range - 7950 will probably cut it or 660 - there's nothing out there that needs even that much power, let alone anything more due to consoles throttling graphics development. Go for the best bang for buck, but aim around the £140 - £180 (probably $150 - $225 - the exchange rates don't match the cost as everything is more expensive here than the US!).
It could still be a heat issue - there are diagnostics that you can download online (so I'm told) that can check. If it's a fast shutdown (as if you'd held the power button down) and it's happening randomly the most likely culprit is still heat as that's the sort of shutdown that's forced by the MB thinking it has to shutdown to stop something frying.
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