I'm still pretty upset with them over the failure to properly betatest Empire. It has far too many showstopper bugs.
This, a thousand times this.
I actually broke my disk of that game (and recently discovered I still have it on steam :/ ) out of rage. Game was crashing every other turn, never finished the grand campaign I started because the game was so full of ****.
The best part, they released a patch which supposely fixed a crash that occured when you clicked on one of your fleets. I never suffered from that crash before the patch, after the patch though... yeah, now I can't use any of my fleets because lolcrash.
what a load of utterhorse ****, I still rage when I think back about it. Utterly inexcusable to release the game in that state. And instead of properly fixing it they just released that napoleon expansion for some more quick cash in.
Shogun II has me interested but I'll be damned before I ever buy a game from that company again
Multiplayer was fun as long as both sides agreed not to use the lolmortars. Nice balance testing there too, mortars had like pinpoint accuracy and did massive damage with their explosive shells even though they were the cheapest piece of arty around. All the other shell types didn't seem to do much of anything.