Battle Lag Help

[stranganath]

my laptop specs are below

Toshiba Satellite Pro A100
Intel Duo core T2500 @ 2.00GHz
1 GB DDRII @533 MHz RAM
nvidia geforce go 7300
Windows XP Pro

I am having troubles with battles even on "Low" settings the movement is very sluggish.

Any suggestions??

[supadodo]

Is your dual core processor 2 gigs each? If it is then your laptop is better than mine (mines only dual core 1.7Ghz each) but I can run Med 2 on medium- low quite smoothly. Well you may want to consider removing shadows and bloom effects and water reflections as they help increase performance a lot. And what about your video card, how much Video memory does it have? At least 128 or 256 is needed. I currently use a Mobility Radeon X1400 with 512 memory. I dunno , hope this helps.

[stranganath]

my graphic card has 256 MB RAM.

Anymore suggestions??

[sapi]

Nope, i see no reason why that shouldn't be able to handle low settings smoothly...

[FactionHeir]

What battles do you have problems with? Siege or field? What unit sizes do you use? How many units are on the field? Morning/Evening/Night battle?

[stranganath]

Seige battle pretty early in the game. Infact I was playing as England and it was the seige of burges (turn 4) so the army was pretty small about half a stack.

My unit sizes is set to small

[Foz]

I'd recommend you have a look through the bug thread, you may be experiencing one of those problems. I seem to recall there's one that has something to do with ladders that can horribly bog the game down during a siege, and likewise some buildings in settlements apparently can cause massive slowdown (I don't know if anyone figured out exactly which they are, I've just noticed it is a sometimes-present thing). For that at least you can try conducting the sieges viewing from inside the city outward, it seems to alleviate the problem. Also I'm not sure if patch 1.1 resolved any of these, but if I did I haven't heard that it was the case.

For general performance, I've found disabling the shadows to have a huge impact, with minimal actual graphical impact: i.e. it gains a lot of performance with very little loss of eye candy. In fact I think it's a bit silly that shadows default on no matter what graphic level, as they put a very noticeable drain on things without nearly as much to show as bumping up some other graphical settings would. I've also heard it suggested that you can disable grass to pick up some more performance, but I haven't tried that particular one myself.

[FactionHeir]

Siege battle eh? Quite a few people have the same problem (including me)

From own experience, the gateway towers, normal towers (all stone that is), settlement buildings that use cobble tiles (city type) cause the slowdown.
For me, it happens in:
Any city type (minor, large, huge)
Southern and eastern castle (stone castle, fortress)
All citadels

Siege towers also tend to bog performance quite a bit for some reason. I'm guessing for all of the above, its the level of detail of the tiles which is causing the problems. CA should do something about letting the player choose what performance tiles should be used (for example low - no cobbles visible, plain walls; medium - some larger sized pieces; high - as is at the moment)

[rosscoliosis]

Yeah, I can vouch for that siege lag bug is DEFINITELY still being there. When it pops up for me, it makes the battle unplayable. It's pretty funny how if you pause the game when this happens, (of course it will take several seconds to pause it) it becomes SMOOTH AS CAN BE. So if you have SEVERAL HOURS to spare for one battle, you can pause the game to give your units orders, un-pause, wait several minutes, then re-issue orders as need be. I've wasted over an hour trying this a couple times, and gave up, even though that meant needing to reload and auto-resolve the battle.

For reference, I have:
Pentium 4 3.21GHz
1.50GB PC2700 RAM (Well, one is 3200 and the other 2700, I'm considering just getting another 1GB stick of 3200)
GeForce 6600 256MB (PCI-Express x16)
Windows XP Pro

I'm thinking this game may actually be more CPU-intensive than graphics-intensive, but unfortunately my motherboard only supports up to 3.6GHz, so I don't know if just upgrading that would be worthwhile. What do you guys think, bugs aside, which part needs the most upgrading to get things running smoothly on massive battles? (small to mid-scale battles running pretty smooth and look great, as long as the shadows are off, but when two full stacks come in, it gets a little choppy)

[PaulTa]

uh, just a head's up on the RAM. If you have two different kinds of RAM running at different speeds, the faster RAM will automatically underclock itself to meet the slower RAM's speed. So there isn't any point in buying fast RAM if you are keeping slow RAM in your computer.

[TevashSzat]

Make sure that you don't have any spyware or viruses that slow up your computer and get AVG anti virus and the Lavasoft spyware remover which is both free and can be found with a simple google search. Other than that, see what programs are running under the processes in the task manager and get rid of anything that uses alot of your comp and is not necessary. If it still doesnt work, post in the apothecary i guess

[stranganath]

I tried a custom non-seige battle on low settings and it went smoothly.
Once I am back from work I will try a seige battle and see how it goes.

I am thinking of upgrading my RAM to 1.5 or 2 G (depending on what sticks I have installed). May be that will ease the load lil bit.

[TevashSzat]

Stranganoth the thing is, you laptop should be able to run m2tw on at least medium settings perfectly, you don't need to upgrade anything. There must be something wrong though since it isn't running well

[rosscoliosis]

Yes, I know, I've been building my own computers since I was 14, (almost 23 now) haha. I bought faster RAM because my motherboard can support it, and I figured it wasn't very cost-effective to buy another stick of slower RAM, so that I won't have start all over the next time I splurge on hardware upgrades.
Also, I know all about keeping my computer clean of spyware and whatnot.
However, I haven't been staying in the loop as much as I used to on the actual performance increases from generation to generation of video cards and processors. Particularly I had been wondering about where the bottleneck seems to be with M2TW. Right now it sounds like a lot of it could be the programming, ha

[Tran]

I have problem with siege battle too, especially in high level settlements. The game (screen) barely moves at all, usually when facing the settlement. The lag somewhat reduced when not viewing the settlement. I don't think my PC 'lack proper requirements' because in some siege battle (low level settlements) and other battles, it runs very smooth.

[FactionHeir]

Its kind of interesting though how a lot of people regardless of their rig seem to be having this problem.

Maybe it would be useful to start a poll as to what graphics card people have, how much ram, what cpu etc to figure out the exact cause of this.

On a sidenote, this same thing is true for campaignmap lag

[Matty]

I have problem with siege battle too, especially in high level settlements. The game (screen) barely moves at all, usually when facing the settlement. The lag somewhat reduced when not viewing the settlement. I don't think my PC 'lack proper requirements' because in some siege battle (low level settlements) and other battles, it runs very smooth.

I had exactly the same problem - small settlements OK, but larger ones were a disaster in seiges. I had to fight them facing away from the castle. I upgraded the video card to a geforce 7300 and bought more RAM (now 2 GB) and everything is fantastic on just about the highest settings (small unit size).

[Bijo]

Actually, I do recall vaguely, when I turned off shadows and had most of the rest set to medium or high and unit size was set to normal or small (and there weren't too big armies on-screen) the siege battle lag was gone. I'm not sure about the cobble tiling thing and stuff, but the amount of men on-screen certainly has an overall effect, siege or no siege.

What rubs me the wrong way, is that when I lower the settings (even to the lowest of the lowest) and crank up the unit size let's say to large or huge the thing starts to lag so badly, you'd think an ol' grandma who's standing with one leg in her grave's even faster using a walking stick while her hand's shaking uncontrollably. That's exaggerated btw, but you get my point.

All these animations and stuff like that, etc., yadda, blah blah. I just want more soldiers on-screen :(

[GotGame36]

I turned off my battle map "shawdows"......seemed to help 100%