I’ve downloaded it and played it through. And I thought it would be very funny to write a little article about my seabattle. I forgot to take screens during my first battle so I had to take new ones during a second battle. No harm done though as I managed to win the second one as well. Maybe not as good as the first one but still. Ok here we go. Lots of reading but I hope it’s somewhat interesting :)
1. You get 6 ships to start with and one of them is a mean bastard with 49 cannons on each side. The computer opponent will always try to circle around you so you can easily draw a strategy to counter that circling if you want but I was a bit occupied with taking nice screenies :p. In this first screenshot I’ve taken my ships so they form a line to pass through the first group of enemyships and the thought was that they were going to fire one by one as they sailed past but that didn’t happen. The one I got marked is the big mean ship.
2. Another view from the first confrontation. They’ve managed to take out 7 of my cannons on that side already which isn’t good. I however managed to take out at least twice that with this big bastard on the ships in the background. The enemy is about to group all my ships together to try and concentrate their fire.
3. Here you can see how neatly they managed to pack my ships together while I was searching for some nice screenshot views. What they don’t know is that my ships are apparently badass and will totally own them anyway somehow. My flagship is still at large and spewing out cannonballs in all directions. It’s rotating to make the most out of its cannons.
4. At this point the enemy ships has eaten too many cannonballs and there’s practically nothing left of them. They are still highly mobile though and try to circle around even more which is just sealing their own doom at this point. You can see one of their broken ships there. Yeah, suck it bitch!
5. The second after screenshot 4 I retaliate against that ship. They soon realise it’s no use and go into a “surrender” state as you can see in the next screenshot. The enemy ship to the right has already given up hope but it’s not visible in this particular screenshot. I was trying to board it when I saw the ship to the left gaining speed to try and piss on my flagship a little more. Well…
6. Duke Nukem once said eat shit and die and I think that very line applies to this screenshot. Just imagine if I had all my 49 cannons working. It would have been even more of a massacre than it was here. Soon after this the enemy ship sank and since the other two had surrendered it was a win for me.
7. The final scoreboard. It was a “Close Victory” this time, compared to my first win that was a decisive one. And I blame the screenshot taking :p Still, I didn’t loose any ships and I got some really nice screens. I preordered this game a while ago and after playing this demo I don’t regret it the least. Can’t wait for the final product.
The screens were originally 1920×1200 but I can’t upload anything bigger than 1024×768 without having to pay for it so that’s why they’re small. I’ll just upload one here in the original size so you can see the beauty of it.

Computers
Demo, Empire: Total war