Hey.

I have a very large empire. The saves for the last few weeks (so maybe 6 or so end of day saves) are getting more "laggy" - I frequently get very stuttering graphics and sounds and a couple of times it has crashed - different times different battles.

I have 3 installs which I used the same save file with:
RS 1.5 with BI - usual game, very laggy
RS 1.6 with BI - very laggy
RS 1.5 with RTW only - plays OK.

This has been getting worse of late, now I have made some major changes to my system (such as a re-partition and shrink of the Vista partition) and new anti-virus, but the system is fully scanned, fully defragged, drivers up to date and I use Game Booster when playing. The AV is BitDefender which goes into game mode but the lagginess was beginning to occur before these changes so I don't think they actually relevant but just mentioning anyway.

The larger my empire has got, the worse the game has played.

I don't recall exactly but I'm pretty sure the 1.5 and 1.6 BI installs have the same base clean install (I keep a clean copy that has RTW and BI), and the 1.5 RTW is from a separate base with RS added, that is definitely the oldest install.

So I'm wondering, are there any known issues with saves of larger games (never seen it mentioned so I doubt it). As I used the same save file I'm wondering if there is something bad in a save file so switching to a different install makes no difference (though the vanilla RTW seems to be OK).

I just tried the BI 1.5 (usual exe I play) with an old Armenia campaign from last year and that plays well. My guess is there is something bad in the save.

So what do save files actually hold? Is there any way to debug them or clean them up? Again, I guess not, as I have actually won and I'm just mopping up, I may leave this now and just wait for 2.0 but I was curious really if there were any known problems with large empire saves.