This game is unplayable now

Seriously? You removed DX8? Biggest dick move on part of the Empires dev team EVER! DX8 was the only way to keep a reliable framerate and not drop to 10 in infantry combat. DX8 was the only way to not crash randomly after 30 minutes. And no, this is not the fault of my hardware. I've even upgraded since I last played Empires extensively. I can run TF2 in DX9 for hours with no problems at all. Something is seriously wrong with one of the DX9 effects, and until you guys fix that, you have no business forcing everyone to use DX9.

From what I gather, it was supposedly removed for 'cheating' reasons, but I've also gathered that this was only a problem with DX7. Dick move.

 

I rather have DX8 myself (I don't crash every other game), but supposedly you need to do extra work for this to be possible. Maybe something they can work on during their free times (and not aircrafts, which will never be part of the game).

 

Whilst I don't necessarily agree with the removal of DX8 (actually, I still argue with MOOtant on removing it every other day), I do know that it's possible to get to pretty much the same settings as DX8 using console commands in DX9.

 

they also removed sse1 support. basiclly saying fuck you to the guys that had it (they cant even play anymore)

 

SSE1 support was removed. Then we tried to bring it back but after spending good few hours on it I just gave up. Few months later I heard that compiler we used emitted SSE2 code anyway whether we wanted it or not.

You're mixing things with respect to DirectX 9.0. This graphics API version was released in 2001. Today is 2011. I'm not going to spend my time developing shaders for a cunt that isn't paying a single cent just because he wants to use -dxlevel 80 option. If you don't like you can go fuck yourself. (which every other game dev will tell you, maybe using different words).