Problem in river battle

[Wolfstorm]

I had a fps problem with a battle in a river. Settings were in the usual, with high anti-aliasing, high terrain, etc, but even lowing those values to the minimum the problem persisted. The graphics dropped to 2fps in the minimum settings.
Heres a pic with the settings in the minimum, and a pic from the battle against the achaeans. My graphic card is a Radeon 1650.

[dvk901]

The problem is a bug in RTW concerning how it may handle all those men packed into one place. I had the same thing happen so ofen that I do not any longer block units on the bridge like that....instead, I set my army back a bit and allow them to come across. I found that it actually works better, because most of the men in that mass of animations aren't doing anything anyway.

[Brusilov]

Did you get the same drop in fps when you were close to the action as well as the zoomed out look?

I've found that in the zoomed out look it's possible for the frame rate to drop in a game.

This has nothing to do with you problem but have you tried using the minimal UI battle interface? It gets rid of the block at the bottom. The radar map moves to the top right hand side (and can be toggled on/off with the F5 key), the bottons (guard mode etc) moves to the top of the screen (and can be toggled on/off with the F6 key) and the unit cards are moved to a single line on the bottom of the screen (and can be toggled on/off with the F7 key).

The battlemap then looks like (apologies for the RTR VII TIC screen shot but it's one I had handy);


You need to edit the 'preferences.txt' file in the preferences folder (notepad will do for this).

MINIMAL_UI:FALSE to MINIMAL_UI:TRUE

You should also change the control settings on the battle map (in the options menu) to assign keys to the speed functions. I've assigned shift+P for pause, shift+N for normal, shift+D for double and shift+T for triple;

[Wolfstorm]

I did like dvk said, and its worked. Initially I put the units at the end of the bridge, where I got 4fps. Then I retreated to attack the other army coming from the small stretch of land to the left of the bridge. The second screen shows 9fps. The enemy AI got stucked at the bridge for some time. The third screen shows 10fps, and in the fourth (with one of my cavalry coming from the other side of the bridge) shows 25fps. In the fifth I unleash the spartans in the tired enemy phalanxes, and this one have 18fps. The sixth shows the results (I playing with Macedon, H/H settings). The graphics were on high settings this time.

[Fargham]

Its not just an FPS bug, the entire pathing algorithm for those units is hosed when they are bunching up like that, causing CPU time to go way up, and in turn performance suffers for the rest of your rig.