Massive FPS drop when fighting inside cities/fortresses

**FactionHeir** · 03-03-2007, 18:09

As a question of interest, does any of you guys who got the siege lag problem also got campaign map lag?
Trying to figure whether those two are actually related. I got both - on lowest settings.

**Forward Observer** · 03-03-2007, 19:21

I have no perceptible lag in the campaign map--only settlement battles.

I am using shader 2, no AA, Bilinear filtering, shadows on low, no bloom, textures and unit detail on medium, vegetation and grass on high, buildings on high. I have the battle screen resolution set to 1280 X 960. This is my LCD monitor's native resolution and I find that games seem to perform better at this setting than any other.

I have tried shader 1 with no shadows, and got no FPS gain in either field battles or sieges---I also still got lags in siege assaults.

I just played 2 siege assaults last night. One in a in a level 5 city with a full stack defending, and one at a level 4 castle with only 4 units defending.

On the city fight, I knocked two sections of wall down, did damage to two interior buildings resulting in fire and smoke. Oddly, I got no lags from start to finish.

On the castle fight I had a spy who got the gates open for me. I did shoot a few flaming shots with my catapult to drive the defenders from the walls, but stopped after they retreated to the inner ring. Then I was able to march right in without destroying much of anything else

By the time I got my whole army in and started for the inner gate, I began to experience lag. I use Fraps as a frame rate counter, and normally get an acceptable 30FPS or better in field battles. It only slows to about 20fps when I have these siege slow downs, but the problem is that it is a pulsating slow down. It wasn't bad enough to stop me from finishing the battle, but it was irritating of course.

The above related anecdotal evidence seems to disprove my theory that the lags may have some relationship to damage of the buildings during a siege, but it does seem to lend credence to the fact that it varies with the size and/or style of said settlement.

It is an often stated fact that in most slowdown problems with games, the bottleneck is related to the GPU and not the CPU. Since the game makes no use of the advantages of multiple core processors, this is probably not a factor.

Since I only have AGP capabilities for a GPU, I will have to pony up for a new rig with PCI-e slots in the mobo to do any better, but I would be interested to hear from anybody who has one of the newer NVidia G8XXX series cards.

Cheers

PS. I was composing this as AussieGiant was posting, and I see even he has problems. I would suggest taking shadows down to medium or low and textures to medium. Changes to these two items seem to have the greatest effect on my game perforance

**John_Imperator** · 03-08-2007, 03:11

Originally Posted by FactionHeir

As a question of interest, does any of you guys who got the siege lag problem also got campaign map lag?
Trying to figure whether those two are actually related. I got both - on lowest settings.

Originally Posted by John_Imperator

I have the same problem when I play in a massive siege battles;even on low setting with buildings.

My Rig Intel core dual 6600
ATI x1950 PRO 256 mb pci-E
1 GB heat spreader
Mother board Evga
Sony Q17 18x DVD dual

I think the game is not really compatible with Intel core dual processor;thats why its causing lag in battles;or jest the graphics card.

hmm any one know what is causing the problem?

Not me,at least.

**Whacker** · 03-08-2007, 05:33

As Foz pointed out earlier, Shadows tend to suck the life and frames per second out of a game.

This applies not just to M2TW but to the current crop of games in general, if you are having framerate issues on what should otherwise be a playable game, drop the shadows way down or turn them off, and you're almost guaranteed to make it fully playable.

Just say no to Shadows.

**Hollerbach** · 03-08-2007, 07:35

Apologies if this has been raised already, but it's a long thread....

I've noticed the slowdown in cities as well, but I was seriously whacked with lag the other day in a field battle. It was fought in some mountains in Wales, my Scots v some very lost Spanish. The main feature on the map was the this enormous mountain with a lot of shear impassable cliffs with some very steep paths through them. There wasn't a really high number of troops in the battle but I got some serious slow down. I play with all GFX setting at the very lowest and anything that can be off is turned off (not that my system is that bad, I'm just happy to compromise the candy for maximum performance) so I don't think this one is from shadows. I assume drawing all the details of the cliffs must have done it??

**sapi** · 03-08-2007, 08:00

Maybe it's a pathfinding issue then?

Now i think about it i recall getting lag on clifftop maps as well...

**Lusted** · 03-08-2007, 13:44

Yeah with really steep cliff maps it looks it's a pathfinding issue. i've mad battles where the game was lagging until i got within a certain range of the enemy as the ai wasn't doing the best job at pathfinding and changed path once i moved to a certain spot.