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[Mephansteras]

Played the Demo of this game years ago and liked it. Finally picked it up a little while ago for about $20. Anyone else ever played it?

It's basically what it says, a strategy game about building Trade empires during various ages in history. It starts you off in ancient China and goes from there. So far, I'm up to Ancient Greece. Very enjoyable, if a little heavy on the micromanagement sometimes.

[puke]

yeah, its pretty awesome.  Those Frog City guys really deliver, Imperialism 1 and 2 also rocked.

Trade Empires gets insanely hard at later levels, and there are some aspects that I dont particularly like.  For example, there is no existing merchant infrastructure when you start a scenario.  high population cities will be pre-placed with goods and demands and such, and they will immediatly begin emmegration or starvation or whatever because there arent any exisiting trade routes to and from them.

I also remember having a hard time figuring out how to correctly get merchants traveling off the map for the larger multi-map scenarios, but its been a long time since I played.

[Mephansteras]

I haven't gotten to the later stages yet, but I can see how that'd be an issue.

Right now, I'm just getting the hang of things. Mostly I'm trying to figure out all the little things that the manual doesn't tell you. Like, last night, I finally figured out how to transfer cargo between two merchants. It's straightforward, but they never actually tell you that it's possible. Getting that down finally made the riverboats useful, though.

I'm surprised more people on this forum haven't played it. I'd think it was right up Bay 12er's ally.

[puke]

It was sort of a sleeper, most people never heard of it.  same with the Imperialism games, best strategic / political / empire building games ever, that nobody ever played.

I think you can get them on abandonware sites now.

[Mephansteras]

Looks like.

I found this site that has all three games for download. People should try it out! And I need to try out Imperialism.

[Mephansteras]

Thread resurrection!

My old laptop was able to play the game just fine, but my new Windows 7 one seems to have issues. I've tried several compatibility settings, but still can't get the game to run properly.

Anyone here have it working on a Windows 7 box?

[gimlet]

I have it, the 1st couple missions were interesting then I liked it less and less for some reason and never got much past that point.  Some interesting ideas but something put me off - it's so long ago I don't remember exactly what.  There's definitely a group of people that swear by it though so maybe it's me - if you're loving it great!  I did play a LOT of Imperialism I&II, those rocked.

Ed: DOH didn't realize it was resurrected for win7 help - I presume you already aren't putting it in Program Files and all the usual stuff - that's all I know, I definitely never tried it on W7.

[puke]

If compatibility modes don't work, spin up an XP VM for it.  Computers have the cores and RAM to spare these days.

[BigD145]

If compatibility modes don't work, spin up an XP VM for it.  Computers have the cores and RAM to spare these days.

It's more likely a driver issue. Sometimes you have to roll way back to get one that works. I think Nvidia made some big changes around... 196? Not sure. Just figure out a date around the last patch of any game and use that driver. OS architecture is the next hurdle. You may indeed have to dual boot, which is not that big of a hassle. More of a HD space and partitioning hurdle.

[Comp112]

You dont need to dual boot with 7, just DL the XP VM. Its a free DL from Microsoft, they didn't want a lot of the complaints that Vista got them with compatibility issues, so they tossed that at us for stuff that doesn't work right.

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/virtual-pc/download.aspx

[Mephansteras]

Cool, I'll try that.

[BigD145]

You dont need to dual boot with 7, just DL the XP VM. Its a free DL from Microsoft, they didn't want a lot of the complaints that Vista got them with compatibility issues, so they tossed that at us for stuff that doesn't work right.

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/virtual-pc/download.aspx

Doesn't that only work properly on the middle and top tier versions of 7?

[Comp112]

I actually have no idea, I thought they decided against doing that?

Welp, could try anyway.

[puke]

Or you could just get a VMWare player... Or whatever they call the client version of hyper-v

[Servant Corps]

You can also download a Oracle VM VirtualBox, get a CD-ROM of Windows XP and then use this step-by-step tutorial.