Idea for CA

[cromwell]

With all the dual core CPU's now arriving, why not compile the game to take advantage of this extra horse power? Obviously not everyone can afford one, or has one yet, but in a years time it will be a reality. Maybe a patch for multiple CPU users. It could help with so many aspects to the Totalwar series.
AI, amount of men on the field......etc.

Just an Idea.

Cromwell

[Productivity]

I'm sure they would love to, but writing multi threaded code isn't exactly easy, and it's even mroe difficult when you are trying to retrofit earlier code, so I think the chances of this are low.

[Uesugi Kenshin]

I agree with dgb, it is unlikely that we will see a TW game made with multithreading in mind until at least the next full release.

[ShellShock]

I asked CA before the game came out about hyperthreading support, and this is what they said:

Q. Have the devs done any testing on multi-processor systems, or on Intel's hyperthreaded processors? And what kind of performance improvement have they seen?
A. Multi-processor and hyper-threading systems have both been tested and work, but the performance improvements are relatively small. We've seen around a 5-10% gain and this is mostly due to peripheral code being executed faster rather than the game core benefiting from multiple processors.

Speaking from experience, I think the difficultly of multithreaded code is insignificant compared to the complexity of a game like RTW, it is just another type of optimisation that can be applied to the code, and may be ruled out because of time constraints.