Trailer on gamespot, not much info, though it's supposed to arrive Q1 2010.

http://gamescom.gamespot.com/video/6215634/

From the comments it sounds like a stand-alone game, not an expansion to empire: TW. dunno. I wasn't all that impressed with Empire, so we'll have to see how this turns out.

*edit*

blah, here's a preview and a lot more info. Teach me to read.
http://gamescom.gamespot.com/story/6215 ... mpressions

I'm not sure. Like you, I found Empire to be a bit lacking in the excitement department. RTW and Medieval 2 were both great games by any measure, but Empire just lacked that greatness. The more static combat won't have helped that.

After playing it a bit when it first came out I pretty much lost sight of Empire, which is a shame. I never had that with MTW2 and RTW.

Yea, the previous games I played for a long time, and then picked up again months later. Empire I don't have that desire. It just got boring to me.

On the other hand, a lot of the posts and stuff are basically saying that empire was a test of sorts to help polish up Napolean. Lots of pissed off people as a result. BTW, according to the article, installing Napolean will upgrade Empire's graphics engine. That's kinda cool. I just need a new pc that'll actually push those graphics.

This is the new development methodology I mentioned to you We saw it with ArmA II. Essentially the customers are now investors.

yea...you can blame market pressure. I work for a company in a very competitive space... if we don't push out new innovative software FAST, someone else will and will steal our customers. So we push out shit that could be more polished, and patch it later. Usually the next version will patch a bunch of stuff...then add new stuff (to stay competitive) that breaks other stuff... etc etc. With time it gets better overall, but can be pretty frustrating for everyone involved.