Results 1 to 19 of 19

Thread: Battle Lag Help

  1. #1

    Default Battle Lag Help

    my laptop specs are below

    Toshiba Satellite Pro A100
    Intel Duo core T2500 @ 2.00GHz
    1 GB DDRII @533 MHz RAM
    nvidia geforce go 7300
    Windows XP Pro

    I am having troubles with battles even on "Low" settings the movement is very sluggish.

    Any suggestions??

  2. #2
    Grand Duke of Zilch Member supadodo's Avatar
    Join Date
    Oct 2006
    Location
    I'm Asian, pick a country in Asia. Most of us look alike anyway.
    Posts
    144

    Default Re: Battle Lag Help

    Is your dual core processor 2 gigs each? If it is then your laptop is better than mine (mines only dual core 1.7Ghz each) but I can run Med 2 on medium- low quite smoothly. Well you may want to consider removing shadows and bloom effects and water reflections as they help increase performance a lot. And what about your video card, how much Video memory does it have? At least 128 or 256 is needed. I currently use a Mobility Radeon X1400 with 512 memory. I dunno , hope this helps.
    Weird Facts I have contemplated

    -Thesaurus is not a species of dinosaur.
    -Potassium is not found in potatoes.
    -Its Naples, not Nipples.
    -All roads certainly do not lead to Rome. Does your state highway link you to it?
    - Dog is God spelled backwards but praying to dogs is a bit stupid.
    - Fart is Hydrogen Sulfide with methane and oxygen and is indeed flammable.
    - Igniting a fart is painful.

  3. #3

    Default Re: Battle Lag Help

    my graphic card has 256 MB RAM.

    Anymore suggestions??

  4. #4
    Cynic Senior Member sapi's Avatar
    Join Date
    Oct 2004
    Location
    Brisbane
    Posts
    4,970

    Default Re: Battle Lag Help

    Nope, i see no reason why that shouldn't be able to handle low settings smoothly...
    From wise men, O Lord, protect us -anon
    The death of one man is a tragedy; the death of millions, a statistic -Stalin
    We can categorically state that we have not released man-eating badgers into the area -UK military spokesman Major Mike Shearer

  5. #5
    Relentless Bughunter Senior Member FactionHeir's Avatar
    Join Date
    Dec 2006
    Location
    London, UK
    Posts
    8,115

    Default Re: Battle Lag Help

    What battles do you have problems with? Siege or field? What unit sizes do you use? How many units are on the field? Morning/Evening/Night battle?
    Want gunpowder, mongols, and timurids to appear when YOU do?
    Playing on a different timescale and never get to see the new world or just wanting to change your timescale?
    Click here to read the solution
    Annoyed at laggy battles? Check this thread out for your performance needs
    Got low fps during siege battles in particular? This tutorial is for you
    Want to play M2TW as a Vanilla experience minus many annoying bugs? Get VanillaMod Visit the forum Readme
    Need improved and faster 2H animations? Download this! (included in VanillaMod 0.93)

  6. #6

    Default Re: Battle Lag Help

    Seige battle pretty early in the game. Infact I was playing as England and it was the seige of burges (turn 4) so the army was pretty small about half a stack.

    My unit sizes is set to small

  7. #7
    Masticator of Oreos Member Foz's Avatar
    Join Date
    Dec 2006
    Posts
    968

    Default Re: Battle Lag Help

    I'd recommend you have a look through the bug thread, you may be experiencing one of those problems. I seem to recall there's one that has something to do with ladders that can horribly bog the game down during a siege, and likewise some buildings in settlements apparently can cause massive slowdown (I don't know if anyone figured out exactly which they are, I've just noticed it is a sometimes-present thing). For that at least you can try conducting the sieges viewing from inside the city outward, it seems to alleviate the problem. Also I'm not sure if patch 1.1 resolved any of these, but if I did I haven't heard that it was the case.

    For general performance, I've found disabling the shadows to have a huge impact, with minimal actual graphical impact: i.e. it gains a lot of performance with very little loss of eye candy. In fact I think it's a bit silly that shadows default on no matter what graphic level, as they put a very noticeable drain on things without nearly as much to show as bumping up some other graphical settings would. I've also heard it suggested that you can disable grass to pick up some more performance, but I haven't tried that particular one myself.


    See my Sig+ below! (Don't see it? Get info here)

  8. #8
    Relentless Bughunter Senior Member FactionHeir's Avatar
    Join Date
    Dec 2006
    Location
    London, UK
    Posts
    8,115

    Default Re: Battle Lag Help

    Siege battle eh? Quite a few people have the same problem (including me)

    From own experience, the gateway towers, normal towers (all stone that is), settlement buildings that use cobble tiles (city type) cause the slowdown.
    For me, it happens in:
    Any city type (minor, large, huge)
    Southern and eastern castle (stone castle, fortress)
    All citadels

    Siege towers also tend to bog performance quite a bit for some reason. I'm guessing for all of the above, its the level of detail of the tiles which is causing the problems. CA should do something about letting the player choose what performance tiles should be used (for example low - no cobbles visible, plain walls; medium - some larger sized pieces; high - as is at the moment)
    Want gunpowder, mongols, and timurids to appear when YOU do?
    Playing on a different timescale and never get to see the new world or just wanting to change your timescale?
    Click here to read the solution
    Annoyed at laggy battles? Check this thread out for your performance needs
    Got low fps during siege battles in particular? This tutorial is for you
    Want to play M2TW as a Vanilla experience minus many annoying bugs? Get VanillaMod Visit the forum Readme
    Need improved and faster 2H animations? Download this! (included in VanillaMod 0.93)

  9. #9

    Default Re: Battle Lag Help

    Yeah, I can vouch for that siege lag bug is DEFINITELY still being there. When it pops up for me, it makes the battle unplayable. It's pretty funny how if you pause the game when this happens, (of course it will take several seconds to pause it) it becomes SMOOTH AS CAN BE. So if you have SEVERAL HOURS to spare for one battle, you can pause the game to give your units orders, un-pause, wait several minutes, then re-issue orders as need be. I've wasted over an hour trying this a couple times, and gave up, even though that meant needing to reload and auto-resolve the battle.

    For reference, I have:
    Pentium 4 3.21GHz
    1.50GB PC2700 RAM (Well, one is 3200 and the other 2700, I'm considering just getting another 1GB stick of 3200)
    GeForce 6600 256MB (PCI-Express x16)
    Windows XP Pro

    I'm thinking this game may actually be more CPU-intensive than graphics-intensive, but unfortunately my motherboard only supports up to 3.6GHz, so I don't know if just upgrading that would be worthwhile. What do you guys think, bugs aside, which part needs the most upgrading to get things running smoothly on massive battles? (small to mid-scale battles running pretty smooth and look great, as long as the shadows are off, but when two full stacks come in, it gets a little choppy)

  10. #10

    Default Re: Battle Lag Help

    uh, just a head's up on the RAM. If you have two different kinds of RAM running at different speeds, the faster RAM will automatically underclock itself to meet the slower RAM's speed. So there isn't any point in buying fast RAM if you are keeping slow RAM in your computer.
    If I wanted to be [jerked] around and have my intelligence insulted, I'd go back to church.
    -Bill Maher

  11. #11
    Master Procrastinator Member TevashSzat's Avatar
    Join Date
    Nov 2006
    Location
    University of Pennsylvania
    Posts
    2,367

    Default Re: Battle Lag Help

    Make sure that you don't have any spyware or viruses that slow up your computer and get AVG anti virus and the Lavasoft spyware remover which is both free and can be found with a simple google search. Other than that, see what programs are running under the processes in the task manager and get rid of anything that uses alot of your comp and is not necessary. If it still doesnt work, post in the apothecary i guess
    "I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me." - Issac Newton

  12. #12

    Default Re: Battle Lag Help

    I tried a custom non-seige battle on low settings and it went smoothly.
    Once I am back from work I will try a seige battle and see how it goes.

    I am thinking of upgrading my RAM to 1.5 or 2 G (depending on what sticks I have installed). May be that will ease the load lil bit.

  13. #13
    Master Procrastinator Member TevashSzat's Avatar
    Join Date
    Nov 2006
    Location
    University of Pennsylvania
    Posts
    2,367

    Default Re: Battle Lag Help

    Stranganoth the thing is, you laptop should be able to run m2tw on at least medium settings perfectly, you don't need to upgrade anything. There must be something wrong though since it isn't running well
    "I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me." - Issac Newton

  14. #14

    Default Re: Battle Lag Help

    Yes, I know, I've been building my own computers since I was 14, (almost 23 now) haha. I bought faster RAM because my motherboard can support it, and I figured it wasn't very cost-effective to buy another stick of slower RAM, so that I won't have start all over the next time I splurge on hardware upgrades.
    Also, I know all about keeping my computer clean of spyware and whatnot.
    However, I haven't been staying in the loop as much as I used to on the actual performance increases from generation to generation of video cards and processors. Particularly I had been wondering about where the bottleneck seems to be with M2TW. Right now it sounds like a lot of it could be the programming, ha

  15. #15
    The Real Ad miN Member Tran's Avatar
    Join Date
    Dec 2006
    Location
    Orion Arm
    Posts
    1,048

    Post Re: Battle Lag Help

    I have problem with siege battle too, especially in high level settlements. The game (screen) barely moves at all, usually when facing the settlement. The lag somewhat reduced when not viewing the settlement. I don't think my PC 'lack proper requirements' because in some siege battle (low level settlements) and other battles, it runs very smooth.
    Medieval 2: Total War Guide to Traits and Retinue
    "Tenderness and kindness are not signs of weakness and despair but manifestations of strength and resolution." - Khalil Gibran

    World War 3 erupted in mid-1960's: NATO - Warsaw Pact Conflict multiplayer Interactive, choose one from several available countries

  16. #16
    Relentless Bughunter Senior Member FactionHeir's Avatar
    Join Date
    Dec 2006
    Location
    London, UK
    Posts
    8,115

    Default Re: Battle Lag Help

    Its kind of interesting though how a lot of people regardless of their rig seem to be having this problem.

    Maybe it would be useful to start a poll as to what graphics card people have, how much ram, what cpu etc to figure out the exact cause of this.

    On a sidenote, this same thing is true for campaignmap lag
    Want gunpowder, mongols, and timurids to appear when YOU do?
    Playing on a different timescale and never get to see the new world or just wanting to change your timescale?
    Click here to read the solution
    Annoyed at laggy battles? Check this thread out for your performance needs
    Got low fps during siege battles in particular? This tutorial is for you
    Want to play M2TW as a Vanilla experience minus many annoying bugs? Get VanillaMod Visit the forum Readme
    Need improved and faster 2H animations? Download this! (included in VanillaMod 0.93)

  17. #17
    Member Member Matty's Avatar
    Join Date
    May 2005
    Location
    Bulgaria
    Posts
    185

    Default Re: Battle Lag Help

    Quote Originally Posted by Tran
    I have problem with siege battle too, especially in high level settlements. The game (screen) barely moves at all, usually when facing the settlement. The lag somewhat reduced when not viewing the settlement. I don't think my PC 'lack proper requirements' because in some siege battle (low level settlements) and other battles, it runs very smooth.
    I had exactly the same problem - small settlements OK, but larger ones were a disaster in seiges. I had to fight them facing away from the castle. I upgraded the video card to a geforce 7300 and bought more RAM (now 2 GB) and everything is fantastic on just about the highest settings (small unit size).

  18. #18
    Στωικισμός Member Bijo's Avatar
    Join Date
    Dec 2006
    Location
    Η Γη / Κόλαση
    Posts
    1,844

    Default Re: Battle Lag Help

    Actually, I do recall vaguely, when I turned off shadows and had most of the rest set to medium or high and unit size was set to normal or small (and there weren't too big armies on-screen) the siege battle lag was gone. I'm not sure about the cobble tiling thing and stuff, but the amount of men on-screen certainly has an overall effect, siege or no siege.

    What rubs me the wrong way, is that when I lower the settings (even to the lowest of the lowest) and crank up the unit size let's say to large or huge the thing starts to lag so badly, you'd think an ol' grandma who's standing with one leg in her grave's even faster using a walking stick while her hand's shaking uncontrollably. That's exaggerated btw, but you get my point.

    All these animations and stuff like that, etc., yadda, blah blah. I just want more soldiers on-screen :(
    Emotion, passions, and desires are, thus peace is not.
    Emotion: you have it or it has you.

    ---

    Pay heed to my story named The Thief in the Mead Hall.
    No.

    ---

    Check out some of my music.

  19. #19

    Default Re: Battle Lag Help

    I turned off my battle map "shawdows"......seemed to help 100%

Bookmarks

Posting Permissions

  • You may not post new threads
  • You may not post replies
  • You may not post attachments
  • You may not edit your posts
  •  
Single Sign On provided by vBSSO