Huge Units

[Third spearman from the left]

At the moment I'm running a campaign with huge units, which is running well enough on my system. However every now and again when on the battle map facing full stacks from the enemy and my own my system begins to slow a bit until some of the troops are dead. I just wanted to know what spec people recommended when playing on huge.

This is my spec:

Intel P4 2.4
PNY Geforce 6600 (apg)
non-Sata hard drive

[HumphreysCraig00]

Are you having trouble winning the battles with the Pc running slowly or is it just the running slowly that is the problem?

[Nelson]

It is my contention that when it was released in 2004, Rome did not run perfectly on ANY machine with maximum detail graphics and the largest possible armies. By “perfectly” I mean satin smooth frame-rates at all times. It was just too demanding.

If the latest hardware can do this, I would like confirmation.

[professorspatula]

Turning down vegetation quality and especially grass will give you a big boost to framerates and turn off high quality shadows too. For larger battles when your PC is struggling a bit, there's no harm reducing graphic settings until things speed up again. Usually my PC can handle 6000 troops or so, although in some terrains, things get a little jerky at half the number. It's a pity your 6600 wasn't the GT version - it would handle a fair bit more I'd wager.

[HumphreysCraig00]

I regularily play with 1-2 FPS, I dont have a problem with it personally, gives me more time to think and rethink my actions

[Third spearman from the left]

Hi guys thanks for the feedback so far.

The system I have is not preventing me from playing on huge and the battles when the system has slowed has only done so for a brief time (until my slaughter is complete :skull: ) The main reason I ask is I wanted to see what systems offered top performance without costing the earth?

I'm thinking of doing a little upgrading and thought a small jump from a 2.4 to a 2.8 might do the trick.

Any views welcome

[professorspatula]

How much ram you got? You probably want about 1Gig for larger battles. I found 512MB was fine before, but with the newer patches, I'd run into problems during sieges. 1 Gig fixed that, but doesn't really make any other great difference.

By the way, if you set up a custom battle, how many soldiers can you have before the game warns about degraded performance? My AMD64 3000, 1GB Ram, 5900XT graphics card gives me 6400.

[Caius]

I feel RTW runs better in RTW 1.5 than 1.0

I run in huge, all highest except grass.

What is the antialising?

[professorspatula]

Anti-aliasing smooths the edges of polygons....... or simply, the graphics you see. This makes everything look nicer, but has slows down your frame rate if your graphics card isn't very good.

[HumphreysCraig00]

I have
2.8 Ghz
1 gig ram
256MB Radeon 9550 SE

And It gives me a warning about degredated performance around the 6000 mark but I actually get into the single figure fps's with anything over about 2000 (1 fullstack huge army will make it run 5 or so fps)

[Third spearman from the left]

Sorry I forgot to put the ram on my spec. but its 1.5 gig running 400mhz.

I'll check the custom battle numbers tonight to see what I get.

[Roman_Man#3]

I might be wrong, but 1.5 gigs of ram is alot. I dont see any reason how that could be a problem.

[TevashSzat]

The thing is, 1.5 gigs means that he probably has a 512 and a 1024 running togeather which is not the best configuration for Ram. Better to have either two 512s or two 1024s

[mightilyoats]

I find that turning unit detail down also helps. It reduces the number of verteces and faces. I turned mine down to the lowest setting. When looking at your army from far enough away (not that far) it still looks impressive. It's only when you zoom in close to the action that you realise they have crab feet and hands... (no offence meant to crabs)

I run a 3.2GHz P4 with 1 GB RAM (2 x 512) and a GeForce 7600 GT (256 MB)

Turning up the detail makes it look very nice and it is still playable. But I am aiming for a high frame rate. I can't stand fighting in a low frame rate (it is worse than fighting in a forrest.)

[Third spearman from the left]

Yes I do have a 1024 stick and a 512 stick of ram but would that really be the cause of the slight slow down?

In custom battle my troop numbers got to just over 7000, when I got the message about performance.

I'm thinking of turning down detail settings the next time I have slow down.

Once I finish this first campaign I might move to large of medium units to avoid this problem all together.

[professorspatula]

Yea basically don't stick everything on high and you'll be fine. As I said before, anti-aliasing on low should be enough, high quality shadows should definitely be off and turn grass either to the lowest or low, and you should be fine for most battles.

If you don't want to have a huge setting for your campaign though, you could go for 'Extra-Large'. Edit your preferences.txt file, it's in the Preferences folder that is in your main Rome Total War folder. There should be a section that says Unit_size and then a number. Edit it to 120. Units will now be 50% bigger than large, instead of 100%. A good compromise.

I also doubt the Ram is slowing you down to any noticeable degree on the battlefield. Changing my 512MB of Ram to 1GB of the fastest lowest latency Ram my PC could take had such a minor effect.

Also you could try downloading something like FRAPS (Fraps.com). Not only does it take screenshots and movies, but it can display your framerate during play. Anything above 15fps tends to be a playable experience, although less is ok too. So experiment with settings until you get a nice comfortable framerate.