Hi, I signed up to ask for for some help, hope there is a kind and knowledgeable fellow around. I recently found myself afflicted with Empire Fever, which swiftly developed into a Steam purchase of the Total War Mega Pack. I have been thoroughly enjoying M2TW and the Kingdoms expansions, however one niggling problem has become very annoying.

The Niggling Problem.

I run my games on my laptop with no trouble usually. When the power lead is removed the brightness of my screen changes. No problem, I usually use Fn and the cursor keys to adjust brightness. However, when playing M2TW, this procedure immediately throws up the console command window, reduces the size of the game display to two thirds, reloads the last saved game AND mutes the sound. Needless to say I soon decided to stop removing the power lead.

The Annoying Problem.

Whilst playing a wonderfully enjoyable Brittania campaign at work, out of the blue, my boss decided to pay a visit to my office. With the speed and agility of a cat I hit Fn F6 to kill the display, however this cat is now sadly quite old. To be honest I hit Fn and quite a few other keys before I managed to get the display turned off.

After a brief moment of work I returned to Medieval England and discovered that all of my characters on the campaign map had gone silent. They will still respond to my every whim, but without a glorious refrain of "Sire", "Scum", "Resting here for now" and a hundred other little speech effects. All other sounds, music and effects work perfectly.

I have not only tried whipping them Sire, but also reloading a campaign, trying a new Brittania campaign, trying a new Jerusalem campaign, going back and reloading a plain old vanilla M2TW campaign. Alas the sound of their voiced eludes me.

I checked the preferences cfg and enable speech has a 1 next to it.

Any help you can offer will be appreciated, I am ten minutes away from finishing work and heading home to crush the Scots. The prospect of a strangely quiet England holds little appeal.