Serious battle-time issue

[Quillan]

Since you have a brand new PC, I assume you have a dual-core processor? Try this, it might help. When the game starts acting funny, pause it, and ALT-TAB out to the desktop. Right click on the clock in the lower right-hand corner of your task bar, and select Task Manager. Go to the Processes tab, find the RomeTotalWar.exe process, right click on it, and select Set Affinity. A window will pop up, with 32 checkboxes, labeled CPU 0 to CPU 31. Only CPU 0 and CPU 1 should be bright, the others should be grayed out. Uncheck one of the two, close task manager, and go back into the game.

Mine does strange things sometimes when I have both cores running. Usually that involves the units jerking around on the battlemap, almost mini-teleports as they go from point A to point B without covering the intervening distance. Disabling one core stops it for me.

[AMD4EVER]

Same thing happened to me on my new PC. It drove me nuts until I finally figured out it was the dual core processor causing the issue. So like the guy above me said, just set your processor affinity. You have to do this each time you start the game. If you don't want to have to do this each time then download a program called imagecfg. It will allow you to associate a particular program file with a particular CPU permanently. It works great with RomeTW.exe but I've had issues with it working with other programs.

[ShadowMagnet]

It is indeed a dual core Athlon. The fact it may have been the source of the problem did cross my mind, but I had no clue how to even bite this apple. You guys are gold, people like you make this forum THE place to be. I'll have a butcher's and let you know how I did. Many, many thanks!

[ShadowMagnet]

I said I'd let you know, so there... IT WORKS!!
Good and proper! Again - many thanks!

[HighLord z0b]

I've got a new PC running Intel Core 2 Duo E6400 - 2.13Ghz and playing R:TW and BI, I've never had any of these issues. Maybe it's only the older dual cores?

[Quillan]

No idea. I don't have these issues all the time. It happens every play session, but sometimes it takes 12+ battles before it starts, and other times it starts immediately. It may also be AMD related, as I've got a 4800+ CPU now.