Quote Originally Posted by JeromeGrasdyke View Post
You will definitely see good benefits from triple / quad core CPU's, and also from SLI dual-GPU machines.

But as people have mentioned above this is a scaling problem... ETW does need to run as well as possible on the low-spec machines, and that means that the core game model - the part of the code that moves the men, picks animations, does collision, does the rules calculations, ai and so on - has to work within those limits. It's one main reason why we made the decision not to move the 10k man 'goal'.

The other big reason is that we wanted to do more with the men, and actually lay the groundwork for men as more complicated entities in the world. In RTW, the men were -in code terms- pretty dumb and unsophisticated objects. It was very efficient, but getting individual men to do complicated things such as dismounting, or handling interruptions while loading a catapult, was cumbersome and time-consuming for programmers. In ETW, men are more complex, more agent-like and so can display a much greater range of behaviours.

It was a choice we made, spending some more CPU power here to give us something we can work with and extend more easily in the long run, so we can give you not just more soldiers, but better and more realistic soldiers... I'm confident it was the right decision ;)
Good to know Jerome. Thanks!

I myself have an AMD dual-core (2.2 Ghz), so I'm guessing I probably won't be affected much either way?