Mongols vs. the machine...

[MulusMariae]

Just a warning for those folks like me playing on a rather marginal machine: when the Mongols appear, you may be doomed because of reasons beyond the obvious.

I was playing as the Turks on a machine where full stack vs. full stack battles might slow to only 1 or 2 frames per second, depending (I think) on the amount of missiles in flight. Marginal to downright poor, but I'm still usually having fun.

Then the Mongols appear... 4 stacks approach a city and 1 of them initiates a seige. I sally with some CAV to do what damage I can... and ALL FOUR full Mongol stacks march onto the battle field. Literally thousands of missile troops in motion and my machine is doomed. Literally several MINUTES between frames, and even a "Pause" command takes about a minute to be recognized. The only possible response is to ESC exit the battle (and lose).

Since I can't actually PLAY a battle with the horde, I have to "Autocalc", and lose... again and again

It was the end of what could have been a fun campaign.

Be warned!

...skulking off to NEWEGG for mobo and videocard choices.

[Shaun]

Are you playing at the lowest settings and a low resolution? What are your specs?

[Bearclaw]

You may want to close any background programs that could be eating up a lot of your machine's resources. When I started playing, my battles were very slow at the lowest settings, then I closed Limewire and they run smoothly at mid- to high-end settings.

[baron_Leo]

Before christmas, with my old processor a PIV Celeron I could only play with low settings, and city battles were REALLY slow. And turning of BG programs didn't help much. Not even killing explorer. But it is worth a try.

[JCoyote]

Well generally I would tell you, more important to your game than the processor or graphics chip, is the amount of RAM each has. TW games have tons of stuff running around the field. If you have the processing but not the memory it'll choke at particular points. In terms of spending, I'd opt for more memory... slow but steady is easier to tolerate than zips and hangs.

My graphics card is a 6600, not hugely impressive but it has 512 MB on it and it stays steady.

Also, have you tried cranking down the unit sizes as small as they'll go?

[sapi]

Actually jcoyote, in my experience m2tw is very cpu intensive.

I don't ever get above 50% ram usage (@2gb) but cpu is always high. In bearclaw's example closing limewire helped because it's a cpu intenisve program when leeching from multiple sources and writing to disc.

[offtopic]By the way, 512mb of ram on a 6600 is completely pointless, as the core can't take advantage of that much. I wouldnt' get anything above 128mb on that card[/offtopic]

[lobo76]

i think the RAM of the graphics card is the decider. I have a 2gigs of RAM but only a 256ram graphics card (7800GT), and I cannot handle the 4 stacks of Mongol. I think it took 2 hrs or so, in which I just run at 3x speed and let the cannon towers do their job. Did sally a bit, lured all the 'family members' in and killed them.

When I ended the sally, it was STILL lagging though 88% of the invading force was gone. but since all family members will killed during the sally, the faction was destroyed and all the mongol forces are gone.

Hope the same does NOT happen when the timu guys come.