Very poor performance half way through a siege as Macedon

**TTRouble** · September 16, 2013, 11:55 AM

Playing Macedon campaign (VH) with settings all on Medium to low and up till now performance during most battles was fairly reasonable, considering the age of my GFX card but what should have been a fairly simple siege battle against 2 large armies basically ground the game to a halt. After defeating the first land based army (constant 20-25fps) the game became unplayable - fps dropped to 1 or 2, every second in game was actually 7secs, unit selection was unusable, fast forwarding simply stopped working, changing all gfx and audio options to low or off and dropping the resolution made no difference. CPU usage - Corei7 was just 45% but two cores were showing 60-80% and memory usage by R2 was just 1.8GB. I ended up giving up as it was impossible to control even a single unit.

Now in this battle the AI landed 3 sets of ships on the coast - 2 sets were visible on the beach but the third of 2-3 ships was no where to be seen - the map was showing their position but there was nothing there and they were not out at sea. So how are you meant to defeat them without letting the clock run down as that wasnt an option - your looking at 5-6 hours being wasted.

**Hounf of Culan** · September 16, 2013, 02:33 PM

I've consistently had something like this happen to me. I've been playing as Carthage and I've actually had to defend Carthage itself from several sieges. My computer is better than yours and I run the game on extreme settings and actually get good fps on average. However, I've been keeping note and it seems that when my gates are burned down by the enemy and swing open my fps does exactly what you are describing with like 7 real seconds for each game second and it essentially becomes unplayable. Once it reaches this point it is seemingly unfixable as I've tried opening the options mid battle and putting everything down to the lowest possible settings and it still does this absurd FPS crawl. I've had to quit midbattle reload the autosave and then just auto resolve to win 5-7 times now and unfortunately I have to auto-resolve every siege battle, at least defending carthage, because I know it becomes unplayable.

**Dago Red** · September 16, 2013, 06:12 PM

Every battle involving a naval landing ends up this way. I'm on an alienware with a 660 GT, no reason for it. Submit to CA that naval gameplay is BROKEN>

**Slashas** · September 17, 2013, 02:57 AM

I have the problem to, I faced it yesterday when attacking a barbarian city as Rome. I got lag when 2/3ds in to the battle. Then suddenly it stoped. Don't know why but I'm thinking ai problems similiar to Empires wallbug

**FireElemental** · September 17, 2013, 03:01 AM

They are looking at it. I think its some sort of pathfinding bug.

**applelover** · September 17, 2013, 10:22 AM

Exactly the same issue. General performance isn't great especially the campaign map but seige battles which are on the coast are entrirely unplayable. They normally end in a freeze and 'total war not responding.' I have two 570 gtx, a i7 950, and 12 gig ram@1600mhz on a asus rampage 2 extreme. This system is no longer top of the line but I expect a lot more performance than i'm getting.

**metalguy24** · September 17, 2013, 08:16 PM

Same thing has happened to me, but the difference is is that it just started today. I've had no lag or anything in naval invasion maps. I load up to finish a battle in one of the port towns in Hispania and it works fine for a while and then when the enemy try to land a couple ships to take my town center the entire battle just lags to a crawl. I have no problems up until that point. I've tried reloading and fighting it again, I got a little further before it crapped out on me. The strange thing is is I've not experienced any lag up until today. All other games on my system work just fine. I guess I might try reinstalling and see if that helps.

**TTRouble** · September 18, 2013, 02:23 AM

Replayed that last siege again and as Metalguy states the problem hits as soon as the naval invasion starts. In this case the invading navy splits into three sets of ships, 2 groups of max 7 ships land close to the settlement while the 3rd sails to the far side. The only way not to loose the siege was to place my units at the key landing points and just let them deal with enemy units as they got of the ships - it was crawling at 1-2fps but the seconds were still just seconds. Once that was done, I was then able to move all units to meet the larger invasion army on the northern side .. your still looking at 1-2fps but at least I could select and control the units.

**Totalheadache** · September 19, 2013, 06:48 AM

this has happened to me with Carthage...naval invasion...very annoying.

i notified Jack in one thread but if others could let them know would be great. this is a game breaker...rest of the game seems fine (although low performance etc etc).

**metalguy24** · September 20, 2013, 05:38 AM

I did a complete reinstall of the game and it is running way better. No lag in land battles, I've been busy and tested last night. I will do a naval landing test and see if it has cleared up as well.

**Totalheadache** · September 20, 2013, 09:17 AM

Originally Posted by metalguy24

I did a complete reinstall of the game and it is running way better. No lag in land battles, I've been busy and tested last night. I will do a naval landing test and see if it has cleared up as well.

wouldnt have thought reinstall was necessary as I think it's a bug. gonna test out patch3 and see if the problem persists.

odd you were getting lag in land battles and now not. still good news it has done something!

**TTRouble** · September 20, 2013, 01:54 PM

Haven't been able to log back into Steam .. so no chance of testing again to see if this has been fixed. Will also try and replicate the same scenario in the custom battles with 2 large land armies and a naval invasion.