Problems with lag

[eire1130]

I want to like this game. I have loved all the other editions, but there are things about it that just kill me.

First, I'd like to ask for a suggestion. I'm currently playing Greek Cities and am fighting on the western coast of the peninsula. The house of Julli has laid siege against one of my cities in Dalmatia which so happens also has another full stack army beside it. They have invaded with two full stacks and one partial stack. I have one full stack of mostly silver and gold stripes and one stack of new blood. The lag makes this scenario unplayable. I am not sure why I have such bad lag. I have a 1600+ amd processor, 1 gig of ram, 120 gig of memory, 128 megs of ram on the video card which is a 5600 fx+. I have all the newest drivers. The lag is so bad my mouse will move one tick approximately every ten seconds. I know I can defeat them easily playing manually. Auto-resolve I lose. Anyway, I lose 1.5 full stack armies doing the auto-resolve. I have one full stack army in reserve up in Byzantium. It will take 3 turns, I'm guessing, to march them there. Now, if they break through that line, they could potentially wreak some havoc in the grecian main land. All my cities have suitable size garrisons, but some of them are a little dated.

The other option is going one save spot back and confronting them head on with the reserve army which gets wiped out in the auto-resolve. This will work, but I am waisting a lot of RL time also.

Thoughts, comments, concerns?

This brings me to my complaint about this game. I personally feel that this game has brought a level of strategy to the RTS genre which we have not seen the likes of, well, since the last TW. But, I personally feel that with the new (and free) publicity that TW was getting they felt the need to pander to a larger audience and with it comes the pretty graphics. Don't get me wrong, I like pretty graphics. But, I like playing large epic sized battles also. Battles that take me an hour to play. Remember when you owned Lithuania and fending of the golden hoard in W:TW. Easily 10K of troops on each side. Now that was epic. Otherwise, I am just playing a glorified version of risk and that doesn't appeal to me as much. The above mentioned battle has around 5K-6K characters in it total. I know the graphics engine in R:TW needs to render not only all the models, but all the unique objects in the game (so possibly playing in the desert would be "faster" then playing in a forest). I also know your video card renders all video on the battle map, even troops in reserve. It's really a shame that the R:TW engine doesn't use the new rendering that they use in certain other MMORG's now, such as Wish, or any other game which doesn’t have "zoning".

Honestly, I don't have a solution. But, if any of you do have a solution I'd love to hear it. To me, it's a little frustrating to pay 50 dollars for a game which I can't fully enjoy.

[Oaty]

Your comp has slightly better specs than mine minus a 256 meg video card. Did you do have this battle shortly after a fresh restart. When the game first came out I found out the hard way that more than 3 hours of play requires you to have the game close it and reopen it otherwise the memory leak will eat you alive.

Also do you have any background programs running. Whenever you play a game it is best to make sure all unecessary background programs are shutdown.

I do'nt know if your videocard is limiting you or not but you can e-mail tech support and ask them if a 128 meg video card is limiting you with max unit size and max video settings.

Another way to find out is go to a custom battle where you slightly lag then turn down graphics to the minumum and if the lag does'nt change it's not your videocard.

As for me I turned graphics down to minumum settings when lag kicks in and there is no difference, so appearantly I'm not lagging in the video sector it's processing power where I'm lacking

[Shottie]

I have the problem that you do, try messing with your Video settings, I go with balanced detail, with terrian on high and buildings on low (who needs to see good looking buildiings during a seige?) and unit detail on medium...I am running what you are running except i have 512 memory, so that might fix it. But then again that is ALOT of units. What size units do you have, Large, Huge?

[Red Harvest]

I've only seen that kind of lag after about 6 hours or more. Usually it is precipitated by flaming arrows--actually, I can't think of a time where arrows weren't prominent in the problem. Last time it happened there was a lot of conventional archery in the battle where the lag got bad. However, I remember a small battle a few before that had the AI shooting those damned fire arrows at me from a single unit. It didn't lag much in the battle (other than a slow down for the flaming arrows) but it seemed a bit slower subsequently.

[Quillan]

I've never had a slowdown quite that bad, but when there's a ton of arrows flying it can get a bit choppy. Flaming arrows do produce a noticable slowdown, but only while the arrows are in the air. Regular arrows that miss stay on the ground for a bit, so if there's a lot of archers that might be contributing.

[Lord Dazed & Confused]

I get lag kicking in about every three hours of play Tech support suggest updating my bios & motherboard drivers which I have and still get lag so I just quick save before any large battle and if its so laggy I can't play it I quit the game and reload. I know its not my machine as I can run custom battles on huge army setting with over 40 units and not get any lag has to be a memory leak