Oops it's crashed again !!!
It will take a long time (allow 3-4 hours) before war is even declared on the main campaign level and it can get very tedious, with no autosave until battles start this means that you have to be very careful to save regularly because unfortunately the main problem with the game is the regularity of crashes. Generally this happens more often during the battles. Whilst I have been playing I would say 1 in 3 battles end in a crash). I should have guessed when the manual makes excuses in advance. (That isn't a good start).
I looked forward to the release of Pacific Storm: Allies with interest having not played the original Pacific Storm but I've been left very disappointed. I have a higher end machine 3.2 Pentium 4 with Radeon 1950XT (512mb) and 1024mb RAM (can play Medieval 2 on highest settings no problem)and yet I have had to strip the details back for anything resembling a free flowing game during the action scenes, the alternative is to fight battles with just 10 ships and 20 aircraft (combining both sides, maximum being 50 ships and 100 planes). With a tutorial that can take 3-4 hours that is very heavy going it isn't the easiest game to get into. Despite all of this I have to admit the game can still at times look beautiful in some of the battle scenes and somewhere in there is a great game. My advice to the publishers is to look at an old game called Uncommon Valour (an old hexagon based wargame with very realistic strategy management and excellent AI) as I think they have tried to be over ambitious, instead of trying to please action fans and strategy fans causing the game to fail on both counts it would have made more sense to streamline the campaign side or alternatively gone turn based on the campaign side and allowed for a more even paced game.
Now when are the patches out!!