Cause of Empire Total War Lag & Lagging units.

[GasMask]

So today i was playing russia on a grand campaign Hard/Hard, thing was i was attacking sweden and they had 5k troops + 2k reinforcements and i had 7k troops + 1k reisnforcements ..., when the battle started everything was fine but then suddenly everything moved at a snails pace but get this ...

My frame rate was still 60 fps and my computer was very cool no overheating or nothing so im wondering what the **** could this be ?.

So i try bumping down the settings and stuff and no avail, anyway after a few hours of leaving the battle on i finally won .

My question to everyone is why did the game slow down but my fps was solid 60 fps ?, units where lagging badly and there was absolutely tons of troops on the screen it took more than 3 hours to win the battle lol.

Total troops on screen around 15 thousand.

Could this be a memory bottleneck ?.

Here are my specifications.

HD 7870
I5 3570K
8GB 1333MHz
650W PSU
500GB HDD

Rep to anyone who helps need this sorting so i can play empire silky smooth im willing to buy parts to.

[♠ Thomas Cochrane ♠]

Not a hardware issue - ETW isn't optimised well, and no amount of money will run ETW to the extent that you're wanting it to. 15,000 troops on the field is not something that ETW can handle well. Sad, as that would make a fantastic battle, but alas, you have to go to NTW for better optimisation. Just imagine how bad it would have been if it were a siege! Mods won't help either.

I love ETW, and anyone who doesn't can va te faire encule. If NTW only had the map that ETW did, it would be my favourite TW game. Why CA thought that the Napoleonic wars were limited to Europe astounds me. I want to get shipwrecked on Cape Horn and support the Haitian Revolution against old Blownaparte !


-TC-

[GasMask]

Dam thats bad news.

I guess i will take your advice and install napoleon total war + darthmod .

+Rep mate its good that i know its not my rig thanks a lot.

Would you recommend any modifications for napoleon yourself ?, i love campaigns i spent 5 hours today playing empire with russia fighting the ottomans conquered Istanbul .

[♠ Thomas Cochrane ♠]

Mods?? Don't get me started!
I'd played all the mods for ETW and NTW from Darthmod to Imperial Splendour to The Rights of Man 2 to Napoleon Order of War (I was one of the co-founders of the off-shoot of that mod: Revolution: Order of War, which died unfortunately). We all know that the AI for Darthmod is the best, but the seeing Vader everywhere annoys the hell out of me, and the mod doesn't actually ADD anything to the game.

I've currently got La Montee de L'Empire installed, as this mod has great variation in the startposes, which enables you to play campaigns from different dates around the period. I always wanted to play the period from the Revolution up until the Coronation of Napoleon in 1804, and this mod does that well (bicornes instead of shakos!).

Keep in mind that NTW was never optimised for AMD cards, I believe, so there might be a difference in performance between respective Nvidia and AMD cards.

Cheers mate,
-TC-

[GasMask]

Mods?? Don't get me started!
I'd played all the mods for ETW and NTW from Darthmod to Imperial Splendour to The Rights of Man 2 to Napoleon Order of War (I was one of the co-founders of the off-shoot of that mod: Revolution: Order of War, which died unfortunately). We all know that the AI for Darthmod is the best, but the seeing Vader everywhere annoys the hell out of me, and the mod doesn't actually ADD anything to the game.

I've currently got La Montee de L'Empire installed, as this mod has great variation in the startposes, which enables you to play campaigns from different dates around the period. I always wanted to play the period from the Revolution up until the Coronation of Napoleon in 1804, and this mod does that well (bicornes instead of shakos!).

Keep in mind that NTW was never optimised for AMD cards, I believe, so there might be a difference in performance between respective Nvidia and AMD cards.

Cheers mate,
-TC-

Thanks mate .

[Totalheadache]

lag/fps drops are an issue with all total wars. nature of the beast.

optimisation issues (mostly when u have bottlenecks of soldiers or a lot of melee fighting and u zoom in).

[GasMask]

I heard lots of these problems are caused by AMD cards aswell.

Campaign map lag & stuttering when you press end turn AMD issues apparently.

Units jumping and slow downs have also been reported issues with AMD cards since 10.4 drivers and the issue still remains i guess maybe empire was built from the ground up on nvidia graphics card ?.

[♠ Thomas Cochrane ♠]

Yes, probably... but the surprising thing of note is that in the Rome 2 trailers, what GPU brand do you see?
Surely that means something for those cards performing in Rome 2

[GasMask]

Yes, probably... but the surprising thing of note is that in the Rome 2 trailers, what GPU brand do you see?
Surely that means something for those cards performing in Rome 2

Indeed my 7870 may be good enough for Rome 2 yet if theirs a lot of optimization on AMD's and CA's part .

[♠ Thomas Cochrane ♠]

"good enough" ? Yeah, it will certainly be good enough for Rome 2. Sure, it could be better, but not that much. ​italics.

[Crazyeyesreaper]

What i find funny is ive never had issues with the newer games and AMD GPUs

the only game that ever gave me substantial unit lag was medieval II, and it was caused by crossfire being enabled which didnt work in that title to begin with.

What I can say is that while did not experience any lag of sorts in Shogun 2 on the campaign map I can atest that my 5850 runs the campain map slightly better than the 7970 i had for a time. THis was related to the memory controller on the GPU and how the driver uses it.

[♠ Thomas Cochrane ♠]

Yeah it's pretty depressing in this day and age that applying "state of the art" hardware to a superceded game still results in below acceptable levels of performance.

We all know CA promised epic battles since RTW, so let's hope Rome 2 gives us the true potential. Based on everything that they've said regarding hardware optimisation for the game so far.... I think our(those with good computers (I'm - - just so proud to label myself one now)) chances aren't looking good.

Not sure how I feel about CAs ongoing claims to bring epic-sized battles to life, and yet not optimising their games for high end hardware to be able to actually take advantage of it!

[engleheart21]

I know it's an old post, but I'm having the same issues.... I don't think it's an optimization problem... I think it's a mod problem, because I played Imperial Destroyer and worked wonderfuly.... Darthmod is the one that has the issues

[Incendio]

I know it's an old post, but I'm having the same issues.... I don't think it's an optimization problem... I think it's a mod problem, because I played Imperial Destroyer and worked wonderfuly.... Darthmod is the one that has the issues

I experienced lag in units as well when a mod reduces the space between files and between each soldier (I think is called file_spacing and rank_spacing in DBEditor or something similar) and also when a mod adds more density to smoke. I thought that the recent graphic cards would solve this problem (can anyone confirm this?, for example: GTX 1070, RTX 2060, etc.). For this reason, I am avoiding mods such as European Wars 2, that doesn't work well in my system.

[z3n]

True, some cards might not handle the increased amount of particles (smoke, dust) from the mod. A similar issue arose back in M2TW when some mods made arrows stick in the ground longer or indefinitely.

[Love Mountain]

I think the issue is VRAM. More textures, more everything will require more VRAM as a rule. I used to get lag quite frequently when playing Darth Mod, but that was on an R9 390. I'm a 1070 now and I don't think I'll run into the same problem. Not really in a position to test it though. I don't have either installed on my PC at the moment.

[Gigantus]

True, some cards might not handle the increased amount of particles (smoke, dust) from the mod. A similar issue arose back in M2TW when some mods made arrows stick in the ground longer or indefinitely.

Some mods use unit models with a ridiculous number of vertices topped up with humongous textures. Always good for a slide show.

EBII ran into one of those issues with the wall of one of their settlements - it had little 'nobs' on it which were 3D. Totally killed the frame rate as those got multiplied ad absurdum. They removed them and did a bit of 2D wizardry and that had the same visual effect.

[Incendio]

I think the issue is VRAM. More textures, more everything will require more VRAM as a rule. I used to get lag quite frequently when playing Darth Mod, but that was on an R9 390. I'm a 1070 now and I don't think I'll run into the same problem. Not really in a position to test it though. I don't have either installed on my PC at the moment.

In that case I can't imagine how players could play Darthmod back then in 2013 when the best GPU cards had around 2 or 3 GB VRAM. It should have been a pain.

[engleheart21]

I experienced lag in units as well when a mod reduces the space between files and between each soldier (I think is called file_spacing and rank_spacing in DBEditor or something similar) and also when a mod adds more density to smoke. I thought that the recent graphic cards would solve this problem (can anyone confirm this?, for example: GTX 1070, RTX 2060, etc.). For this reason, I am avoiding mods such as European Wars 2, that doesn't work well in my system.

remember I said Imperial Destroyer worked fine??? forget it... it's full of crap as well... after 5 minutes into battle the little soldiers starts to lag... I recently played in a fort, as a defender.... the guys literally froze...the only thing working were the flags and building icons..and not only I deactivated all smoke particles effects and played in low settings... but I have a GTX 1050, not great,, but certainly more than freaking enough for a game this old...

so, to sum up, keep avoiding mods dude... is the best thing you could do

[Incendio]

remember I said Imperial Destroyer worked fine??? forget it... it's full of crap as well... after 5 minutes into battle the little soldiers starts to lag... I recently played in a fort, as a defender.... the guys literally froze...the only thing working were the flags and building icons..and not only I deactivated all smoke particles effects and played in low settings... but I have a GTX 1050, not great,, but certainly more than freaking enough for a game this old...

so, to sum up, keep avoiding mods dude... is the best thing you could do

That's the reason I only play with AUM mod and other unit packs with other sound mods but I usually avoid to play with bigger mods since most of them are not working well in my computer. Another mod that caused my computer consistently and dramatically fps drops is ACW, but usually happens when AI is moving its units and I think this could be because of the well-known path finding issue in Empire Total War.