CA has said there will be more DLC (both paid and free) in the months ahead. The Emperor Edition (which is the free upgrade pushed out yesterday) also gives owners a new campaign DLC for free.
I updated my game yesterday and played some last night and this morning. I started my campaign over to take advantage of all the new building trees and other stuff, no great loss since I was only 40 or so turns into it anyway (I just started playing Rome 2 a couple of weeks ago).
The changes so far are great. I was pleased to see right from the start that I had different choices in building upgrades, and that many of them were difficult choices between good upgrades instead of the “lesser of two bad options” kind of thing I ran into so often pre-Emperor. Tier II buildings now have a wider range of positive effects, but come at the cost of a small amount of food deducted from your province, making farms and other food producing buildings significantly more important than they were previously (food is not just for growth anymore). The squalor hits have been dialed down a notch for higher tier buildings as well, which is nice.
The UI has some minor changes, with splashes of color where none were before and some cleaner design in some screens. Overall the effect is minimal, but pleasant. One thing I did notice right away was that pre-Emperor I used to only see the “running low on graphics memory” message when loading some battles, and now I am seeing it when loading the main UI screen. I have a 7770 Ghz Edition, but it does only have 1GB of DDR5 onboard. I ticked the checkbox in graphics settings to use system memory (I have 8GB) as overflow, but I have yet to see if that makes any noticeable difference (I run most settings on Very High).
Load times are reasonable, and AI turns, which were never an issue for me before, seem to be going by even a touch faster now. Thus far I have nothing to complain about in terms of AI turn time or battle/UI load times. I do not run the game off an SSD, just a normal 7.2K SATA drive.
Honestly, I would say anyone who likes the Total War franchise and was frustrated with Rome 2, but hasn’t played in months, owes it to themselves to come back and check out Emperor Edition. I think between then tweaks and changes Creative Assembly has been making over the past months with their minor patching, and now the larger-scale changes they have made with Emperor Edition, this game may finally be close to what fans of the franchise (and the original) were hoping for from the start. Anyone who had been putting off the purchase because of all the early issues and complaints with the game, now is the time to buy (well, maybe wait for a sale someplace obviously).
Props to CA for putting in a ton of time and effort to listen to player complaints and address them, and then give all that to the players for free instead of trying to pawn off an expansion or stand-alone that contains all the fixes.
