Unit size lag and sound problem

These are my PC specs

3.2 Ghz pentium 4
2 Gb RAM
128 Mb Graphics

Firstly, my sound is weird...when I loaded the game fitst it was fine, however, now on the battle intro, the General's voice is gobble-dee-gook and alot of the talking is muffled and the advisors can't be heard anymore. What should I do to fix this?

Secondly, after seeing that most people play on "Large" unit sizes, there must be something wrong with my setup. I can only play on "normal" size, and even when I have full battles with about 800 v 800 troops, it gets really slow. What should i do to speed it up?

Thanks.

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Originally Posted by Octavius Julius

These are my PC specs

3.2 Ghz pentium 4
2 Gb RAM
128 Mb Graphics

Firstly, my sound is weird...when I loaded the game fitst it was fine, however, now on the battle intro, the General's voice is gobble-dee-gook and alot of the talking is muffled and the advisors can't be heard anymore. What should I do to fix this?

Secondly, after seeing that most people play on "Large" unit sizes, there must be something wrong with my setup. I can only play on "normal" size, and even when I have full battles with about 800 v 800 troops, it gets really slow. What should i do to speed it up?

Thanks.

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I had similar sound problems and I have an Audigy 2 card. You must absolutely download the latest driver and not stick with the one that came with the card.

You can access the unit size by clicking on the advanced options in the Video submenu. There you can select the unit size as well as graphic settings.

What sort of sound and video card do you have (make/model)?

My guess is you have onboard sound. So firstly update the driver for your motherboard. If you want to find out if it is your sound card causing the problems then turn all sound options down to the bear minumum. On your setup I believe you should be able to handle 4000 men. Maybe you should try asking around what limit people have on there systems similar to yours with a 128 MB vid card as I have 256 MB video card 1.49 GHZ processor 512 MB of RAM. And I can get 5000 plus men on the battlefield.

Also on my PC I have I have hardware acceleration for sound turned down to the bare minumum. You can adjust this in the control panel not in the game. With MTW I had lag with max acceleration on sound. But when I turned it down to minumum acceleration the sound was actually better and I had no lag as my PC was'nt trying to do something it could'nt handle.

Heres how to get to hardware acceleration for windows XP, may vary slightly for other windows programs

Control panel
Sounds speeches and audio devices
sounds and audio devices
volume
advanced
performance

From there you can turn your hardware acceleration down to none. Game runs fine for me at this setting minus the 7 wonders when the sounds play but not worth complaining about for such a small feature.

If you have onboard sound I reccomend this as you are trying to ask your processor to do extra work that really needs a sound card to do and your performance will hopefully improve.

Edit: I also have the sound options in game turned to max. I do get a little extra performance when soumds are down but it's not worth it as even on huge settings I have to do a custom battle to break this barrier

I've had less trouble with CMedia onboard than most describe having with their Creative cards. It depends more on what type of onboard sound you have I suspect. I never have to turn down acceleration like some Creative folks seem to do for many games.

Check your system for spyware and trojans, you may have something executing in the background and bogging your system down. Have you downloaded any video codecs? They might be interfering with the sound in some fashion--usually the problem is only in the game videos. Use DXdiag to make sure your sound is configured properly for DirectX.