Mongols vs. the machine...

Just a warning for those folks like me playing on a rather marginal machine: when the Mongols appear, you may be doomed because of reasons beyond the obvious.

I was playing as the Turks on a machine where full stack vs. full stack battles might slow to only 1 or 2 frames per second, depending (I think) on the amount of missiles in flight. Marginal to downright poor, but I'm still usually having fun.

Then the Mongols appear... 4 stacks approach a city and 1 of them initiates a seige. I sally with some CAV to do what damage I can... and ALL FOUR full Mongol stacks march onto the battle field. Literally thousands of missile troops in motion and my machine is doomed. Literally several MINUTES between frames, and even a "Pause" command takes about a minute to be recognized. The only possible response is to ESC exit the battle (and lose).

Since I can't actually PLAY a battle with the horde, I have to "Autocalc", and lose... again and again :no:

It was the end of what could have been a fun campaign.

Be warned! :skull: :skull: :skull:

...skulking off to NEWEGG for mobo and videocard choices. :embarassed:

Are you playing at the lowest settings and a low resolution? What are your specs?

You may want to close any background programs that could be eating up a lot of your machine's resources. When I started playing, my battles were very slow at the lowest settings, then I closed Limewire and they run smoothly at mid- to high-end settings.

Before christmas, with my old processor a PIV Celeron I could only play with low settings, and city battles were REALLY slow. And turning of BG programs didn't help much. Not even killing explorer. But it is worth a try.

Well generally I would tell you, more important to your game than the processor or graphics chip, is the amount of RAM each has. TW games have tons of stuff running around the field. If you have the processing but not the memory it'll choke at particular points. In terms of spending, I'd opt for more memory... slow but steady is easier to tolerate than zips and hangs.

My graphics card is a 6600, not hugely impressive but it has 512 MB on it and it stays steady.

Also, have you tried cranking down the unit sizes as small as they'll go?

Actually jcoyote, in my experience m2tw is very cpu intensive.

I don't ever get above 50% ram usage (@2gb) but cpu is always high. In bearclaw's example closing limewire helped because it's a cpu intenisve program when leeching from multiple sources and writing to disc.

[offtopic]By the way, 512mb of ram on a 6600 is completely pointless, as the core can't take advantage of that much. I wouldnt' get anything above 128mb on that card[/offtopic]

i think the RAM of the graphics card is the decider. I have a 2gigs of RAM but only a 256ram graphics card (7800GT), and I cannot handle the 4 stacks of Mongol. I think it took 2 hrs or so, in which I just run at 3x speed and let the cannon towers do their job. Did sally a bit, lured all the 'family members' in and killed them.

When I ended the sally, it was STILL lagging though 88% of the invading force was gone. but since all family members will killed during the sally, the faction was destroyed and all the mongol forces are gone.

Hope the same does NOT happen when the timu guys come.

I don't know if my settings differ the ones from other players, but the only time where a battle was going to significantly exceed my computer capabilities (2 full stack against my full stack, large sizes), I received a message at the beginning of the battle mentioning that the enemy's reinforcements had been "delayed" because of my lacking CPU. Surely enough, after killing off almost all the enemy army, the second one appeared and whooped me.
Has this ever happened to anybody else?

Actually the 6600 handles 512 MB handily, it IS the same core as a 6800. Maybe an AGP version would choke on the bandwidth side, but I'm not using AGP. The main reason I got it though is for more graphics ram for graphic design... which worked out quite nicely compared to the 128 MB I ran before

Point being, I'm not getting any graphics slowdown on M2TW. Ever.

It does boost performance, even more when I run SLI (but for now my second is keeping a buddy's system running til he gets another ).

Guys, the vast majority of lag in m2tw is from your cpu, dealing with the individual units.

Since sprites are used past a certain distance, graphics have very little effect (once you get to a decent level of card).

The 7800gt 256mb has no problems (i'm using one ;) ) and if you look up the benchmark results, you'll see what i mean about the 6600gt 512 (and why you'd run two in sli when you could easily get a decent card is beyond me)

/rant

I have 512MB of RAM, and a good enough graphics card.

When I started, it was really slow, so I closed down everything except iTunes. Still, I find battle load times slow, occasionally the frame rate gets slow and the campaign map also has a poor frame rate after a battle is fought - in the early stages of the game when there are lots of factions it takes for ever for them to take their moves.

Multi stack battles, however, generally don't crash the machine. I play with huge unit size and high graphics, and when there are loads of reinforcements it says they are delayed. It doesn't really make a difference since they get to the battlefield eventually.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by sapi

Guys, the vast majority of lag in m2tw is from your cpu, dealing with the individual units.

Since sprites are used past a certain distance, graphics have very little effect (once you get to a decent level of card).

The 7800gt 256mb has no problems (i'm using one ;) ) and if you look up the benchmark results, you'll see what i mean about the 6600gt 512 (and why you'd run two in sli when you could easily get a decent card is beyond me)

/rant

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RAM is a big deal if you have a decent processor. To use a desk analogy, RAM is the top of the desk where you work, so more RAM means you can handle a bigger workload.

So with that in mind...

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RAM is a big deal if you have a decent processor. To use a desk analogy, RAM is the top of the desk where you work, so more RAM means you can handle a bigger workload.

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Guys, the vast majority of lag in m2tw is from your cpu, dealing with the individual units.

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...I'd assume 1.5 GB of RAM is enough? Sounds enough to me, but I also get some slowdown when there are many units on the screen. But it's not really in the sense of lag (moving slow as heck), but more like it keeps fast movement, yet in this movement frames seem to be taken out, giving a jerked out movement.
Damn, need a new processor badly. But with the CPU comes a new board, and with that a new PCI-E videocard, oh boy.

Yeah 1.5 GB has you covered on the RAM side, more than covered really, what RAM/GPU does your graphics card have? What's the main CPU?

And pointedly, I might not have noticed CPU issues because the system's I'm able to test on are AMD64 3000+ and X2 4400 (my main) respectively.

As for WHY a 6600 with 512, it's because my machine is a graphic design machine moreso than gaming. While the advantage in framerate of the graphics RAM isn't tremendous, it is there versus less RAM 6600's. And more importantly, a 7 series with 256 would be nowhere near as handy when I have to rasterize vector graphics at sign size, just FYI. Knocking 30 second display loads down to less than 1 is a good thing when you're working, especially with a client over your shoulder.

For some uber dumb reason, those guys really wanted to make the cities look realistic(like anyone cares how it looks...) and managed to make me auto calc half of the sieges...

That mongol/timur siege is unplayable without night attacker... But for some reason, bar that siege(mine was in Bagdad... what a surprise... guess eveyone experienced one of those somewhere:p), if you fight them in the open, it actually goes decent and doesn't stall(so prolly it's graphics, not processor). Fought 4 stacks in the open(3 of theirs, 1 reinforcement from egyptians) and it more or less went ok(not uber, but... playable). On the other hand, in a city... it's a disaster even if you face only 3 stacks. And 1gb of ram should be more then enough for a strategy game! I don't want to play unreal...

Personally I'm having a ton of troubles with sieges in generals(see 1st line). If I actually look at the city... everything gets so slow. And comanding armies while having view in the opposite direction is... very unappealing:p

Worst of all, setting everything to minimal(graphics wise) from what I had as recommended settings(which were somewhere on the average) produces 0 effects...

Mabye instead of complaining you could give use the info on your computer and we could tell you where your problem is

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Originally Posted by JCoyote

Yeah 1.5 GB has you covered on the RAM side, more than covered really, what RAM/GPU does your graphics card have? What's the main CPU?

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The graphics card: Radeon X1600Pro 512MB AGP8x. Here's a link: http://ati.amd.com/products/RadeonX1600/specs.html
Main CPU: AMD Athlon XP 1.822Ghz :wall:

And here's a link to my thread in the Apothecary:
https://forums.totalwar.org/vb/showthread.php?t=77456

Well, I'll probably go with sapi on this that it's the cpu. Most likely.

When you play a session are you making sure you don't have a bunch of background things running? It seems like your system should be able to hump it decently on lower settings.

Usually I shut down some programs in the bar below-right, but that's it. Shutting down processes in the Task Manager is another story, but I've almost given up on searching, 'cause it's been taking too long to actually REALLY start enjoying the game. By that I mean no lag.
I don't really care if I tune down settings, but then I expect an acceptable degree of speed, but what I get is good speed + bad choppiness. And if I tune them up, the game plays more stable than when tuned down, albeit slower (with sometimes pausing moments).

ARRRGH!!! I'll look for a new CPU then, but I doubt I'd find an AMD CPU good enough for this old board, unless I upgrade the whole shebang, which is something I can't do now.

Or maybe you got some good links to apps or something to quickly easily take care of background programs. :wall: