TATW+MOS borderline unplayable on Steam Version

[Darchseraph]

I picked up M2TW on Steam recently. I had originally played TATW as version 2.0 and then 3.0 on a M2TW installed with old optical media discs. But it was such a great game that a few bucks was more than justified to rebuy on Steam to not worry about disks (my computer has not had an internal optical drive for 3+ years).

This week I got an itch to play TATW again and installed it with MOS-Submod. It was a horrible experience. Loading times were quite long. The campaign map units lagged a ton when they moved. Some random CTDs here and there. But worst of all - really, really, REALLY long turn times. Like ~3 minutes long. In a game that I will play for 100-200+ turns, completely unacceptable. Reading around I realized that MOS has a lot of scripts and will extend turn times but it shouldn't be THIS bad.

My computer specs run Rome2 on high/ultra:

i5 2500k, GTX 970, 16GB RAM.

I decided to do a test and dug out my old disks and an external DVD player. Did a 2nd M2/TATW/MOS install on the same hard drive as my Steam install.

Game ran beautifully. No map lag, turn times down to a much more reasonable 20 seconds or so.

Now, I should report that both my Steam and my DVD install were done on "mass storage" WD Black mechanical hard drive in a "secondary steam library" folder instead of on my much faster (and smaller) SSD where I keep my most commonly played games. However I don't believe that Disk Read/Write speed has a huge deal to do with campaign times.

I can pretty conclusively report that there is something wrong with the Steam version of M2 vis-a-vis TATW, especially MOS. Has anyone figured out what it might be?

[Darchseraph]

Oh I should note:

Both the Steam install and the regular install run BATTLES with about equal performance. However the Campaign section on the Steam Install is totally borked for me.

[Boogie Knight]

I wasn't going to respond to this thread as I'm not as technical as some folk around here, but as no one else has come along yet I thought I may as well share just about the one thing I know on this subject. You probably already know it yourself, but M2TW only uses one core. So if you're sporting some manner of octocore monstrosity but each of those cores has a crappy clock speed individually, you've wasted your money. My dualcore laptop is an absolute paperweight by modern standards and a dusty one at that, and it goes without saying that it doesn't have dedicated graphics, but it was made back when they stuffed what little went into these things with as much power as possible, as opposed to the modern approach of lots of bits of pocket lint adding up to a powerful machine. M2TW was made during the era of the former.

Sorry I can't offer any solutions.

[Darchseraph]

I wasn't going to respond to this thread as I'm not as technical as some folk around here, but as no one else has come along yet I thought I may as well share just about the one thing I know on this subject. You probably already know it yourself, but M2TW only uses one core. So if you're sporting some manner of octocore monstrosity but each of those cores has a crappy clock speed individually, you've wasted your money. My dualcore laptop is an absolute paperweight by modern standards and a dusty one at that, and it goes without saying that it doesn't have dedicated graphics, but it was made back when they stuffed what little went into these things with as much power as possible, as opposed to the modern approach of lots of bits of pocket lint adding up to a powerful machine. M2TW was made during the era of the former.

Sorry I can't offer any solutions.

I gave my computer specs: The i5 2500k is a quad core, non-hyper threaded processor with quite good individual cores, as modern intel consumer processors generally are. You are thinking of the AMD FX series which is essentially - PILE MORE CORES. I am aware of M2TWs poor multi-core utilization and tried restricting core affinity to 1-2 cores without performance changes. Just because it's coded to only run on 1 core doesn't necessarily mean it runs poorly on multicore, just that you don't get the stacking benefits you should.

You had installed TATW 3.0 both parts + TATW 3.2 Patch + Latest MOS 1.7 + MOS 1.7 Bugfixes?

Your Steam installed M2TW version, is it perhaps installed in either Program Files or Program Files(x86) folder?

Yes I installed, TATW 3.0 both parts, the 3.2 patch, and MOS 1.7 + All-inclusive patch.

The installation was done on my STORAGE drive where a secondary Steam Library exists (So E:\SteamLibrary\steamapps\common\***). The other test install was done on the same drive. (E:\Games\M2TW\**) so there is no program files wizardry causing problems. I can only conclude that there is something different about the Steam install causing it to run poorly on my machine.

[ElvenKind]

I picked up M2TW on Steam recently. I had originally played TATW as version 2.0 and then 3.0 on a M2TW installed with old optical media discs. But it was such a great game that a few bucks was more than justified to rebuy on Steam to not worry about disks (my computer has not had an internal optical drive for 3+ years).

This week I got an itch to play TATW again and installed it with MOS-Submod. It was a horrible experience. Loading times were quite long. The campaign map units lagged a ton when they moved. Some random CTDs here and there. But worst of all - really, really, REALLY long turn times. Like ~3 minutes long. In a game that I will play for 100-200+ turns, completely unacceptable. Reading around I realized that MOS has a lot of scripts and will extend turn times but it shouldn't be THIS bad.

My computer specs run Rome2 on high/ultra:

i5 2500k, GTX 970, 16GB RAM.

I decided to do a test and dug out my old disks and an external DVD player. Did a 2nd M2/TATW/MOS install on the same hard drive as my Steam install.

Game ran beautifully. No map lag, turn times down to a much more reasonable 20 seconds or so.

Now, I should report that both my Steam and my DVD install were done on "mass storage" WD Black mechanical hard drive in a "secondary steam library" folder instead of on my much faster (and smaller) SSD where I keep my most commonly played games. However I don't believe that Disk Read/Write speed has a huge deal to do with campaign times.

I can pretty conclusively report that there is something wrong with the Steam version of M2 vis-a-vis TATW, especially MOS. Has anyone figured out what it might be?

You had installed TATW 3.0 both parts + TATW 3.2 Patch + Latest MOS 1.7 + MOS 1.7 Bugfixes?

Your Steam installed M2TW version, is it perhaps installed in either Program Files or Program Files(x86) folder?

[ElvenKind]

I would recommend defragmenting your HDD where your M2TW/Kingdoms + TATW + MOS is installed ( don't defragment your SSD). If you had installed them on your SSD, then there should be an improvement in turn times, but I don't think wasting that much of your SSD's space is worth the effort. M2TW + TATW + MOS is over 15-20 GB big, I have a Samsung 830, 256 GB SSD and I've installed M2TW there along with all mods which I play, and my M2TW folder is around 65-70 GB big. Sadly, MOS was not installed there so can't tell you for sure was there a difference in turn times.

[Darchseraph]

My disk is defragmented already. I'm not asking for advice on how to make it go faster in general, like I said, I have two separate installations of M2TW/TATW/MOS on the exact same hard drive. The difference is that the Steam version is very slow and laggy while the DVD-installed version runs just fine. I'm asking if anyone knows how to "fix" the Steam version or failing that, advising other users of the potential incompatibility with Steam Medieval2.

[ElvenKind]

I don't have Steam. I'm only giving you suggestions on potential fixes which other users reported as working solutions.

My next suggestion would be to take the Ownership of your whole main STEAM M2TW folder, and see will that bypass this Steam "slowness". You can also verify Steam game cache and test again.