Started playing Empire game (and this is not a rec') today, and saw more abuse of Flash software.

Am running an Asus netbook with two Atom processors--not a gaming computer, but more than adequate for most tasks. Yet, when I am playing Empire (via Chrome), cpu usage climbs to 80 to 90 percent and the Empire cursor crawls across the screen. Now, we're not talking about a real 3d sim, nor are we talking about photo-realistic graphics (they're adequate):

I submit to you, dear reader, that Empire is a novel use of Flash and it is amazing that Flash can run the front-end of this game, but it is painfully obvious there is a misfit here. Why does the Roller Coaster Tycoon game run an order of magnitude faster, and more smoothly, on older hardware?

My direct comparison is to Tribal Wars (although I cannot speak to the underlying gameplay engine just yet.) Empire is an interesting take on the front-end; things are a lot livelier and the little animations make things look a bit more realistic, but I guess my question is: why did I pay for these slight improvements with a trade-off for almost glacial response?

A review of the game; we both agree the user interface needs work.