Free New Units Being Added to Empire: Total War

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While developer Creative Assembly continues to work on bug-fixing and post-release support for its strategy title Empire: Total War (PC), the studio has revealed plans to provide players with several new units, for free, as a "thank you."

The first unit to be revealed was the Russian Grenadiers, with the company noting that the soldiers are "great for assaults and their grenades pack a mighty punch."

While some may worry that the studio is devoting resources to new content instead of fixes, designed Jack Lusted allayed those fears, writing that "the work on the free units is not taking away time for fixes, the free units do not require any work from coders just work by artists and by a designer (me)."

"We will also be using [the new units] to introduce more balance variety between factions as well. Some are new, some are replacement for existing units in some factions roster," Lusted added. "The aim of the free units is to increase the graphical and unit variety of several factions rosters."

In all, there will be a total of 15 "newly accessible" units, the studio told VE3D, spread out among "one brand new unit, ten unique replacement units and four existing units 'unlocked; for other factions." One example, the company noted, is that "the Dutch and Swedish factions can now access the Hussars unit."

Chris Faylor was previously a games journalist creating content at Shacknews.

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From The Chatty
  • reply
    May 22, 2009 12:55 PM

    OMG theres so many bugs if we try to charge for this they'll never buy it!



    Also: "the work on the free units is not taking away time for fixes, the free units do not require any work from coders just work by artists and by a designer (me)"

    Read: We certainly didn't waste any time making sure this didn't disrupt the balance of the game. We like fixing bugs so much that now we get to work on a balance-patch next month!

    • reply
      May 22, 2009 1:05 PM

      I believe these are mostly re-skins so that Prussian line infantry isn't just British line infantry w/ black instead of red.

      This is a big deal for me as it broke the fiction for me when everything looked the same. The game needs some major content fixes (I didn't experience too many bugs in my 30 hours) but they are fixing it and they are doing stuff like this for free.

    • reply
      May 22, 2009 1:49 PM

      You just like to twist everyone's words into what you want it to say huh?

      • reply
        May 22, 2009 2:10 PM

        uh...

        the studio has revealed plans to provide players with several new units, for free, as a "thank you."


        You honestly think if the game wasn't bug-ridden, this wouldnt be part of a $$ DLC pack?

        • reply
          May 22, 2009 2:26 PM

          Has Creative Assembly even charged for something like this before? Just let them give us stuff for free.

        • reply
          May 22, 2009 3:59 PM

          I honestly don't think you can make stuff up for a studio. Like others said, take the freebie. Complain about the bugs, but not the free stuff.

        • reply
          May 22, 2009 8:18 PM

          Lusted did a lot of TW modding in his free time long before he was ever hired by CA.

          My guess is that he's still modding in his free time, but now CA gets to declare onwership of that, heh.

    • reply
      May 23, 2009 12:37 PM

      You're definitely right, especially with the small number of sales and low review scores.

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