Enemy reinforcements delayed?

[Derfasciti]

This is the title of a message that popped up right when a battle began. It said that I might need to upgrade my computer because It would only allow the initial enemy army to take the field. Recently I changed the unit scale to the highest number- would this be the reason for it? I'd like to keep it at the highest if at all possible.

[Empirate]

This is the same as in Rome: TW. The computer sets a maximum number of individual men it will draw at the same time, and whenever reinforcements would be in excess of this number, they are "delayed". This can actually be used to your advantage, allowing you to finish of massive enemy multi-stack armies (Mongols, Timurids spring to mind...) stack by stack instead of all at once. So if you changed your unit size to a larger setting recently, this would be the reason why you get this message. The computer always allows two full stacks to appear, but it may not allow anything more, depending on how much it can handle. I have a pretty high-end system, and it still does this from time to time, usually if reinforcements would bring the total number of units on the field to more than fifty (large unit size).

[sapi]

I believe changing 'unlimited_men_on_battlefield' in the config file to '1' will remove this.

[Derfasciti]

@Empirate- Would lowering down the details and all help my situation or is it strictly a number of troops issues.

@Sapi- If that's true, how do I go about doing it and are there any drawbacks?

[Derfasciti]

Hullo?

[Laconic]

No drawbacks, except you might take a performance hit if there's a lot of soldiers. I've had up to about four and a half full stacks all deployed at the same time in a campaign battle.

[sapi]

To do it, open your medieval2.preferences.config file (in the root m2tw directory) in notepad and make the changes.

[JCoyote]

Yeah I've had it give me this nonsense before... about how I need to upgrade my CPU or RAM... Not graphics card, that's really a somewhat different issue than numbers of troops and is counted thusly, if it's not strong enough they'll still field it'll just choke real slow when too many share the screen. Changing detail levels will not change the number of troops allowed either.

And as for not having enough RAM or CPU, I got an X2 4400 and 2 gigs of the good stuff... its not that hardware that's coming up short, it's the software having that setting in it.

[Foz]

Right, lowering details won't help at all because it's based on number of models on the battlefield. Changing unit sizes probably does let you have more units on the field at the same time though, as each would have less models (men) in it, thus reducing your overall model count and increasing the number of units it takes to reach the model cap. Can anyone confirm this?