This is very bad news indeed, I have used steam to play Empire Total War and have bought Rise of Flight and have found numourous problems with this on line conection crap, on the following points.
1, You cannot revert the game to previous patches, once a game has been patched you always have to play with the latest updated version of the game. This can screw up your game, as it did for some people playing Empire. Go look on the steam forums and you will find people who could run the game with no problems on patch 1.4 but when patch 1.5 was released totally porked there game. The only saving grace is that you can play the game OFFLINE
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2, Rise of Flight, this is a very nice game if ur into flight sims lovely graphics nice flight model, but is porked by erratic game behavior, due to needing a permanant on line connection, joystick profile getting corrupted, a bug where there servers time you out mid mission and crashes the game, to name but a few issues that people have been having, I do believe that in there next patch that are doing away with the permanant online connection.
So I for one will be giving SH5 a Wide Birth
until they wake up and smell the coffee as they will be opening a real can of worms with this one, SO LONG UBI