Making EB Run Faster - A Guide

[TheGlobalizer]

FWIW, I had issues with slow cursor and screen movement on the campaign map -- turning off campaign map shadows improved performance dramatically.

No issues in the battle map. Woot!

[Monocause]

(firstpostmode) Hello everyone! (/firstpostmode)

I'm running EB on an old (very old!) Evo N1020v Compaq laptop, which due to a 32 mb graphics card shouldn't even be able to drag along vanilla RTW (not to mention the idiotic 224 mb RAM instead of 256), according to CA. It's probably apparent that I've done everything I can to squeeze all the performance I can get of this scrap metal ;>
It runs very poorly on my machine, but it's bearable, I just read a book while playing EB and waiting for a battle to load or a turn to end.
I can advise a couple more things not present in the first post which I found useful:

1. If you don't want to mess with your services by yourself (and you shouldn't if you have the feeling you don't know what you're doing) there's a free app - engelmann game tuner (google it) -
which does this (and a couple of other things, including setting the optimum page file size) for you, and makes a convenient backup file so that you can switch between gaming and casual configs at ease. I use it now, works good.

2. Quit explorer before starting EB. Seems obvious that you don't use it while playing; the sinister explorer insists however on eating up your RAM and CPU. To do this start task manager, select explorer and quit the process. Then select "run" from the file menu, and choose EB. Be sure to quit the task manager as soon as you click OK, otherwise you'll have it running in the background, possibly eating more resources than explorer.
When you finish playing you'll be presented with a pitch black screen. Simply open the task manager again, and in the run prompt type in "explorer".

3. Revert to old sea graphics with a thingie available from EB website, section downloads/misc
(weird that it hasn't been mentioned, the new sea nearly gagged my ol' PC.)

And a question to the modders - is it possible to replace the campaign map animations with static ones? Seeing as how the new sea graphic caused a considerable performance hit, I wonder if the EB developers could release a replacement for the animated sea, trees etc. replacing them with more static ones. For me at least it would be a minor thing - I don't care for eye candy - and it could improve performance, maybe even decrease loading times. I presume that more people would be interested in this sort of thing, and it shouldn't be very difficult.

[bovi]

The reason why the sea graphics aren't mentioned, is that they are of exactly the same size as the original ones. It causes no extra work for the computer and reverting to the old graphics is a purely aesthetical choice.

As for a real resource hog, the EB script sucks up a lot of your juice. We prefer to cram stuff into it, however there are a couple of variants concerning the client rulers that run faster than the default 1.1 script.

[Umnir]

About page memory, do I have to set it for other HD's too? I have one HD that is splitted to two parts (C and D) and only C has that paging setting.. Should I hassle with the D?

Thanks!

[bovi]

There should be no need to have paging files on more than one disk.

[iounas]

Hey guys I have an older pc too..
3ghz p4, 512mb ram, 9550ati

It is so much slower in every way..
-in campaign map in original I get 35-45 fps, in eb 15-25 (1600x1200)
-in my first roman battle 300 vs 300 I got 15-30 fps with all graphical settings to minimum while in original 1000 vs 1000 with medium to high setting I got 25-50 (1024x768)

Original used about 450mb of virtual memory and eb uses about 900mb.

I have 1.1 with minipack mods

Why is it that much slower?Is there a hope for me and EB?

[Foot]

We push the engine to its limits. Reducing your graphical setting to minimum will help some. Turning off campaign map shadows. Reducing the resolution.

But I would seriously consider getting more RAM. Its pretty cheap and getting to 1.5 or even 2 gigs would help loads.

Foot