Long waiting period between turns

[windspast]

anyone else experiencing a long delay to wait between your turns? It's so frustrating to have to wait while the game cycles through EVERY country. My only motivation to exterminate countries completely is so I dont have to see their stupid flag anymore on the turn screen. They should fix that and make turns instaneous like Civ does. On some turns it takes longer to wait than the turn itself

[tforward]

If you have not already done so turning off "Follow AI Movement" Speeds things up alot.

[jacko56]

i get this too and i also go for the kill all other countries to get them off the list technique however, if you hold the spacebar down it speeds up any movement the camera follows if you want to leave the follow ai on.

[Syntax Error]

I find that some of my campaigns grind to a halt when it takes like 10-15 minutes to cycle through one faction in particular.

Not sure if it's the gameplay mods I am running (Imperial Splendour) or if it's the game, but ETW has a lot of campaign breaking bugs.

[YD23]

I get this also, 2+ minutes waiting time in between turns, not too long, but it is still quite annoying.

Medieval II Vanilla game was really fast in between turns, 15 seconds maybe, however, if you used a big mod for it, such as Stainless Steel the campaign turns would be considerably slow. 2 minutes or so. I've seen a lot of people mentioning this issue, but there was no fix for this really.

So, I would say that Empire is a pretty big game and it already takes a while to process the vanilla game. I can't image how long will it take to finish turns in a mod that completely overhauls the game, unless of course CA really does optimize the game even further or our fellow modders will find some sort of a fix.

I've also seen some people who say that their turns go by quite fast, 30 seconds or so, but they have the very latest of computer hardware. So I suppose that it is the combination of two factors that decide the turn speed. Your computer and the size/complexity of the game?

This is only a theory though.

[Syntax Error]

So, I would say that Empire is a pretty big game and it already takes a while to process the vanilla game. I can't image how long will it take to finish turns in a mod that completely overhauls the game, unless of course CA really does optimize the game even further or our fellow modders will find some sort of a fix.

I hope it is fixed in the near future, these turns take way too long. Something tells me it might be some sort of inefficient coding or a glitch of some sort, as the turn cycle isn't the only thing that's ridiculously laggy, but fleet selection (and CTDs), calculating move point distance in the campaign map, moving armies into fleets, etc all take a very long time too.

I've also seen some people who say that their turns go by quite fast, 30 seconds or so, but they have the very latest of computer hardware. So I suppose that it is the combination of two factors that decide the turn speed. Your computer and the size/complexity of the game?

This is only a theory though.

That could be; in the start of a campaign the turn cycles are fast enough, but as the game progresses it takes longer and longer. I don't have a terrible computer, but it's not the fastest in the market either (E7200, 8GB RAM, HD4850), so it may be the processor, but I don't think it may be the case as there are reports of those even with good computers and Core i7s that have the same lag issues with calculating move distance and such mentioned above.

[YD23]

Yea, I noticed that a lot of people have issues with the campaign map itself. It lags like crazy even with high-end computers.

Well, I've read that there is an upcoming patch that should do some optimizations.... I just hope that those are not 1fps gain but way more than that. The campaign map really needs it.

[windspast]

I have a 3 gighz computer with 2.25 gigs of ram. It's by no means a great computer but it does run the game well on Medium/High I am fortunate enough to not have any CTD problems but my only complaint is that the turns take SO LONG especially on some turns where I can't do anything else other than click end turn. So my turn would take 10 seconds and I'd wait for 3 minutes for the computers to cycle through

I really believe it's just an inefficient coding. It's the same along the lines of super long load times.

[cerebus23]

i been having this for awhile making the game unplayable or barely tolerable.

with one of the last 2 patches, suddenly on the AI turns russia was taking at first 30 minutes to get through it's turn. i switched "show ai moves off" to see if it made a difference nada. it grew to 45 minutes then to over an hour.

fell asleep one night while i decided to veg woke up 3 hours later and russia was still doing it's turn.

now someone posted on gamefaqs that they had the same bug and doing a few AI turns fixed it so this weekend i decided to give it a patient college try. i fired up the game saturday morning did a few battles, recruited some troops. did one AI turn while i did house stuff took about 2.5 hours first turn.

so i had fininsed most of my house work so i did another round of battles, moved armies quicksaved hit end turn, knew it would be awhile so i put in a movie fight club was first, thats about an hour and half movie, games still chewing on the ai turn, put in apocalypse now redux which is about a 3 hour movie, get thru that the game is still doing the russian turn.....then about 45 minutes after that the game ctds after about 5.5 hours.

i miss the days of the campaign map lag, cause of late i can't even play, i will take the bad frame rate, the port lag, the occasional ctd over this stuff.

[YD23]

Wow, now that's long....
What are your computer specs?

[cerebus23]

c2d e6600 @ 3.0 ghz
2 gig of ddr2 ram
8800gts
win xp
realtek audio

hardrives have been defragged lest twice since i installed etw, its definately a loop or leak in the campaign ai i think since it used to be fine.

and ai turns were fine before the recent patches. i was out of town so i kinda got the last 2 updates in one shot so i do not know which patch started the issue.

[YD23]

c2d e6600 @ 3.0 ghz
2 gig of ddr2 ram
8800gts
win xp
realtek audio

hardrives have been defragged lest twice since i installed etw, its definately a loop or leak in the campaign ai i think since it used to be fine.

and ai turns were fine before the recent patches. i was out of town so i kinda got the last 2 updates in one shot so i do not know which patch started the issue.

Hmm... Definitely not your hardware...

This is definitely something to do with the game itself, must be a way to speed this up. Hopefully the more people report this issue the better. Maybe CA will work on this.

[cerebus23]

ya me to i want to play but after the other day i give up till the next patch that i hope fixes it.

posted on the official forums to but we shall see.

[BadBlood]

I have a similar problem. The AI is taking progressively longer to play Great Britain's turn. I have reached 1782, but the GB turns are now over the 30 min mark and I have better things to do than stare at a frozen screen.

I have never played a game before where I have spent so much time staring at my computer in utter boredom. This is ridiculous, the game is no longer enjoyable!

[Syntax Error]

What I do to pass the time is to play the campaign in windowed mode with ShiftWindow so it looks like it's in "Full Screen" mode; I hit "End Turn" and then do other stuff (homework, surfing, chatting, etc) with ETW in the background.

[jmbuehler]

I don't want to rub the literal salt in your wounds boys, but I have now completed 2 campaigns with loading times never exceeding 40 seconds and AI truns definitely never scratching 60 seconds. After I emplyed madBoris' 3G Enabler I aslo didn't have any CTDs anymore... So generalising that it's poor coding cannot be right, although I agree that some combinations of hardware seem to cause a hella trouble, which should have been sorted during beta testing.
Not suprisingly I notcied that HDD and RAM speed as well as pure CPU MHz are very important to this game performing properly. I have 2 10,000rpm Raptors in RAID0, X3350 @ 3.6GHz and 4GiBs of 2000MHz RAM, and I noticed a definite increase in loading times and AI performance when reducing RAM speed to 1800MHz and CPU to 3.2GHz.

[Syntax Error]

I don't want to rub the literal salt in your wounds boys, but I have now completed 2 campaigns with loading times never exceeding 40 seconds and AI truns definitely never scratching 60 seconds. After I emplyed madBoris' 3G Enabler I aslo didn't have any CTDs anymore... So generalising that it's poor coding cannot be right, although I agree that some combinations of hardware seem to cause a hella trouble, which should have been sorted during beta testing.
Not suprisingly I notcied that HDD and RAM speed as well as pure CPU MHz are very important to this game performing properly. I have 2 10,000rpm Raptors in RAID0, X3350 @ 3.6GHz and 4GiBs of 2000MHz RAM, and I noticed a definite increase in loading times and AI performance when reducing RAM speed to 1800MHz and CPU to 3.2GHz.

It could still be inefficiencies in the code in how the AI calculates their turns for us that don't have monster rigs like yours. You may just have a computer powerful enough that the inefficiencies really don't matter anymore.

[CDRJohn]

BadBlood and syntax Error-- I agree, I am playing Great Britain. My rig is a i7 2.67 with 3Gigs of Ram on a brandy new ASUS Board, an Nvidia 9800 GT, 512 megs of Ram, 500Gig 7200 RPM Hard Drive, Windows XP SP3. When I send the computer into crunch mode, that is, into crunching the numbers in between turns I am waiting for the game to come back to play mode no less than 45 minutes. I have prioritized the processor to real time by pressing cntl-alt-delete while the game is running going into the processes part and upping all the number to the best I can get. When the flags are passing by the game pauses for no less than 45 minutes at Poland-Lithuania once I thought the game froze but I went back to a favorite TV program and later came back to find that it had finally come back to play mode, meaning I could move armies and recruit, that sort of stuff. I agree this has made the game unplayable for me, it is so frustrating. I have tuned up my computer and tuned down the game but still no luck. I have to go with there is something wrong with the game, I mean look at the posts here and you see many folks have different rigs and several are experiencing the same problem. I think there has to be a patch and that patch has got to get the AI to work the problem a lot more efficiently. This is my first game meaning when I finish as GB i will most likely try another faction so I have been playing for awhile, i am in the year 1868 so a lot of stuff has accumulated in the game I am sure but I built this computer with the idea in mind that it would be super fast and never have this problem. Thanks for your post, it at least helped me know others are experiencing similar issues. Best to you. CDRJohn

[YD23]

Syntax Error & cerebus23, have you guys tried reinstalling the game? Not really encouraging but you never know... It could start working faster ...Unless of course you have already tried that.

[ReallyTinyGuys]

• The higher the graphics settings, the longer you wait. Turning down texture graphics means the game does not need to load the ULRA/HIGH textures. Ie Water, Sky.
• Get a 15,000 RPM hard drive to increase loading speeds. Or get 2 in RAID (0). ie Raptors.
• Run Dual Core optimizer or alter the Quad Core CPU usage mentioned in these forums.
• As mentioned, turn off view enemy moves in options.
• Wait for next patch.

I have a fairly old system, the game runs ok with ultra settings, but loads much quicker when I turn these down. Currently, I wait about 2 minutes for battles to load. x2 4400 + 9800gtx+ + raptor 72.