Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom

[Keith Heitmann]

With the release date of the new citybuilder Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom from Sierra due out sometime this month, the demo should be released sometime early this coming week after the Labor Day holiday tomorrow Monday.

The file will be made available for download from one of the following sites:

emperor.breakawaygames.com/

emperor.sierra.com/emperor/

www.sierra.com/

[Redbirdy]

With my dial-up connection I'll probably have to pass on the demo <sigh>. Not having a demo won't stop me from pre-ordering though

[Keith Heitmann]

Well, I don't know how large the demo will be but it will probably be sizeable. Just get yourself a utility that lets your resume downloads via the browser.

Eventually the demo will be on the Sierra FTP server if not right away so if you have Gozilla or Getright, etc. you should have no problems.

Too bad Sierra doesn't offer its demos through a site like Gigex. I've downloaded a couple of 100MB demos using it and it works very well and automatically. It places a small file on your system and will automatically resume the download or let your keep it paused until you are ready to proceed.

[Keith Heitmann]

The demo for Emperor is now available for download. Seems it wasn't to be announced until today, but the sharp eyes of some users caught its appearance on the server last night and it became active shortly thereafter.

The download is big at 127MB.

It took me 11 hours to download the file starting at 8pm last night and finishing around 7am this morning. I'm on a 56K dialup and the download was only averaging about 31.2Kb to 33.6Kb. I had two resumes, one due to a lost connection and one due to a manual pause. I used WS_FTP Pro to download the file.

The file can be found on the Sierra FTP server. The link is:

ftp.sierra.com/pub/demos/pc/si_emperor_demo.exe

The Sierra server only allows 3000 concurrent connection so grab it quick before the server becomes too busy.

[Redbirdy]

GAH, too big for me. I have Download Accelerator on the old machine which allows resuming of downloads but for some reason the longer the download takes, the slower things become (this happens with ALL my downloads no matter which machine I download from). They'll start at around 43Kb but gradually slow down during the first 15 minutes to 26Kb-21Kb. Add to that the fact that I have only one phone line in the house and it makes these large downloads prohibitive. Guess I'll have to rely on reviews (hint hint).

[Keith Heitmann]

Your modem wouldn't happen to be one those old one's with the problematic Rockwell chipset would it? I think Zoom modems had them. The problem was a slow spiral of death as downloads started out fine then just dwindled down to nothing as the it progressed.

I recommend that you try using the download site at GIGEX. I have used this site to download a few large demos in the past and have been greatly pleased with its performance.

Gigex downloads a small applet to your system for that download and from then on until it is finished it will proceed to download and retry until the download is done. I felt I got better download performance from Gigex than I did with many direct downloads.

You can download the demo from the Gigex site using this link:

www.gigex.com/gp/gp.ASP?PackageId=0049000005&source=00001&PID=&a=T

[Redbirdy]

Thanks for the info Keith, I may give Gigex a try. No, no old modems here...and the decreased performance rate has been the main issue with my last 3 modems/machines so it's not just this one modem that's been acting like that.

[Keith Heitmann]

Must be a "line noise" problem. You may want to complain to your phone company, or your ISP service provider to have them check out things on their end.

I let AOL have both barrels all the time whenever they screw up or peformance drops off. I used to be able to average around 4.8KB on downloads most of the time but now I'm lucky to get speeds in the mid-2.0KB range. Got lucky on the demo and got 33.1 to 33.6.