The 2nd Core mystery

Ave, peditatus!

I suppose that besides the divine EB2 Modding Pantheon there are a lot of hardcore Medieval 2 Veterans around here. So for me it seems to be the best place to ask the following question:

A couple of years ago i read in a stainless steel thred thet there is a way to enable a second core for Med2. Now that i am playing DBM and the round times are so incredibly long, i searched for hours for a solution, but everywhere they tell me that this isn't possible. Does someone here know if it is, and how, or is this just a total war specific internet phenomenon?

Interesting question. I've heard the same thing, that only one core is used by M2TW. Google around though, and there's a few topics here and there which claim that dual core support of some sort was added with the v1.2 patch. Furthermore, you can actually test this yourself

Press the 'alt' 'ctrl' and 'delete' buttons simultaneously and click on the performance tab. The windows Task Manager will display 1 graph if you have a single processor, 2 for dual core, and 4 for quad core processors. Then start up M2TW and see what happens. I loaded up EB2 as a test, used different menus and opened various information windows and saw clear evidence of activity by CPU 1 & 3, so it certainly appears that the game is using two processors:
Attachment 12721

Next I hit the end turn button (not doing anything else on the computer other than keeping this browser open), and the activity levels changed. The main burden shifted to CPU 3, with a bit of a nosedive from CPU 1. On the other hand, CPU 2 suddenly began to display activity:
Attachment 12722

But once the turn was over, it shifted back to a mode of what appears to be even usage between CPU 1 and 3 (i.e. the first graphic above), with CPU 2 dropping back to zero. Why not run a similar test and post your results?

While I don't subscribe to the idea that M2 does NOT support dual core I am a firm believer that it is certainly not optimized as Kull's findings indicate.

A second thread will do little for your waiting time. If you need this type of thing to go faster, it's an SSD you need.

Surely you can at least get some efficiencies by ensuring the game is not on the same core as other activities?

also keep in mind, that the usual quadcore is just a dualcore which seperates its cappacies. that's what i have in mind, at least for the 2012ish intel'i5

I don't have the technical solution that you're looking for, but I will give you the advice that has been given over at the Hyrule Total War thread. For speeding up turn times (on a non-steam version) install the main game in a directory that has minimal characters in the address. So for example "C:\Program Files (x86)\MTW\mods\EB" (32 character) should load turns much faster than "C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Medieval II Total War\mods\EB" (70 characters). The way TW games load for things on the campaign map each character adds a byte to be processed, which adds up quickly during AI turns where a lot of things need to be loaded quickly. I think I also heard that M2TW will crash if the address exceeds a certain number of characters (byte processing limit?), so doing this may help your stability too.

127 bug