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Thread: Flaming Arrows Slowing You Down?
Red Harvest 16:57 10-25-2004
Ok, ran into this problem big time fighting a nightmare army in Scythia. It was almost entirely archers and horse archers and dealt me a narrow loss. The problem was the flaming arrows. I had seen things slow to a crawl for a few seconds before with a few volleys of flaming arrows from single unit, but it tended to recover when they stopped. This time it got really, really bad and slowed to about 1 frame per second or maybe half that. It did not recover when the fire arrows stopped so the whole battle sucked big time.

Fire arrows should be disabled by CA until they fix this. I found the following info on how to do disable the fire, but have not yet tried it (I will before fighting any more archer heavy armies, since some AI clowns always have to break out the fire arrows.)

fix by commenting out the lines:

file:
descr_arrow_trail_effects_new.txt

lines:

effect_set 2 3 4 > fiery_arrow_set
{
lod 1000
{
; fiery_arrow_smoke
}
}

effect_set fiery_arrow_set
{
lod 1000
{
; fiery_arrow
}
}
----------


My understanding is that you don't have to comment out the smoke, just the "fiery_arrow" line, and that will cure it.

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Sleepy 17:28 10-25-2004
I solved that by holding down the esc key till the menu appears (automatically pauses the game). Then select video and change some settings to force a reload of the graphics. This takes practise with the lagging mouse patience and practise made me good at it.

Once the screen is refreshed then normal service should resumed. You can then undo the changes you just made to the video settings.

The battle should now run properly with flaming arrows and all.

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Oaty 22:17 10-25-2004
Good info SLEEPY.

RED HARVEST it seems that after so many arrows are fired there's a memory leak. I can have 5000 melee troops on the field and all is fine. But if I have 500 archers firing away it seems the lag quickly builds up. Another lag producer seems to be the A.I. trying to think.

I had 3000 men in an assault against 300 men. The comp had nothting to breach the walls and all is fine but as soon as I breached the gate the comp moves all of its units at once and the lag kicked in. So obviously the comp trying tomaneuver and pathing problems cause it to give orders to often lagging it up real bad

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Heinrich VI 00:09 10-26-2004
your own units can lag you too. i was assaulting a city with stone walls and after my troops captured the gatehouse ive send a unit of wardogs to attack the enemy inf behind the gate. but the dogs couldnt open the gate and moved all into one place directly in front of the gate while they kept running into it. it looked like one dog with hundreds of legs and lagged incredibly until ive send another inf unit to open the gate.

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textide 04:14 10-26-2004
Check your AGP aperture setting in your BIOS. I had mine set to 32 and was noticing extreme lag whenever flaming arrows were launched (like one frame every 5 seconds). Went in and upped the AGP aperture to 128 and now it's smooth as silk.

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Red Harvest 04:27 10-26-2004
It isn't just aperture. I've been running at 128 from day one of RTW. However, the game slows way down when the flaming arrows are fired. Usually it is temporary, but if you get enough units firing them (or enough total missiles--can't confirm on that since I've played for many hours without seeing it) then the vid slows to a horrendously slow crawl, and it appears that the game slows as well (not just vid.)

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Tyburn JIG 09:37 10-26-2004
I've got big time problems when using fire arrows.

As Red Harvest says its possible to tweak the game files.

Check this link.... Its a discussion on this very subject,where a couple of helpful chaps have posted mods with these files tweaked for those who may find messing with the files daunting.

http://www.twcenter.net/forums/index...howtopic=11530

They do help a bit...but its not the best solution.I really hope this gets sorted by the good folk at CA.

Like I've posted many times before....the battle engine works beautifully with high/highest detail and large units...accept when the fire arrows fly.Its got to the point where i refuse to use them...but the AI still insists....the JUDAS! :)

Just 1 unit using fire is enough to lag me to the moon and back.

Another thing...i cant remember having this trouble with the demo,can you`s?

@Sleepy

I've noticed that,but i didn't realise it until you just mentioned it.

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