Why does this game run faster/smoother than ETW?

With both games on their highest settings all around? Not just on campaign map, but battle map as well?

better optimized i would guess.

And since they have had an extra year to tinker with the code so it should be, perhaps if they had spent and extra year on empire and included napolean time frame into it but bumped the price up a little all would be well maybe ?

I've seen it on a friends computer, he has a pretty good machine and it runs very smooth. Unlike ETW, which ran around 25 fps average on his machine.

However: I quickly noticed how NTW achieves the good performance. CA finally implemented heavy duty LOD - level of detail. Grass, rocks, details, sharp textures, polygon-counts...each is getting worse when you move the camera back or zoom out.

You can see it yourself, just keep your eyes on horizon. I think it's a little bit too much though. My friend was setting grass to "ultimate" (or something like that) at it still disappears too close to the camera, where you can clearly see it vanish. It's the same for most details of the models, trees, landscape and so on.

But I guess that's the price we have to pay for good performance. And to be honest it's not that notable in the heat of the battle.


PS: By the way, what's more important is the stability. My friend had frequent crashes with ETW, sometimes in the middle of a huge and great battle. I had these too (and only with ETW by the way; no other game produced that much ctds in 2009). Well I guess everyone had / has them. But NTW runs smooth for hours. He hasn't had a single crash to desktop yet. THAT'S the real benefit of the optimized engine I guess. ^^

Compared to M2TW and NTW on my system, ETW is almost unplayable And all because I won't settle for anything less than High unit and terrain graphics

It's smoother but I also think the lod switching is worse than it ever was in Empire.

The biggest difference for me is campaign play - i guess i never had performance issues with ETW on battle. Turns now cycle extremely fast...and that's where my frustration was.

At first I thought it was just the smaller scenarios. It probably helps to get the map down to one continent (although europe is much bigger now), but even so....they fixed whatever it was that was bogging down the game.

I thought it was because Napoleon finally offers multi-core support