Any way to not crash with huge army sizes?

[cen1]

Recently I wanted to recreate the LOTR prologue in The last alliance custom battle map with huge stack settings and the game crashed in 2 minutes. Is there really nothing that can be done to prevent this? Finally in 2016 I have a beefy computer that can take the game but the game itself gives up.

I suppose the crashes are linked to TATW somehow since the game should not be crashing in vanilla despite the army sizes. I remember fighting 3 full stacks in Jerusalem and Antioch years ago with no problems. I don't remember if they were huge stacks though.

Are some submods perhaps more stable in this regard or am I basically out of luck?

[IBSXYPNTS]

What do you mean huge stacks? Like Huge unit sizes? Or stacks with more than 20 units per stack?

[Joseignacio]

My computer is new, with w10, and I have those crashes too.

I guess it's precisely having multicore powerful hardware and new software what make them appear.

Anyway, have you checked whether you are carrying these special units? The users experiment crashes with them and many (and me) have observed it happens only (or much more) with new hardware and software, it didn't happen to me with my old computer.

http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showt...efore-replying

[Dutch-Balrog]

Windows 10 seems to be a major player in recent crashes with TATW lately.

[alreadyded]

I test 4v4 custom battles in my mod all the time (always huge stacks, never used anything else ever) and have never had a crash 2 mins in, or at all do to unit sizes. It gets very choppy sometimes, especially when troops cram through gates, but that is it. I built this pc like 6 years ago so it may be as Jose says, a compatibility problem with newer software/firmware/hardware. There are things that can be done to improve stability but they have nothing to do with this game's stability but making your pc run the game. This game is not very well optimized anyway even for the recommended software/firmware/hardware so even with newer PC's it was not designed for you will not get much better performance other than your video card, just more compatibility problems.

As for Win Vista/8+, they are terrible and would be the first thing I would blame for this. Even a new CPU shouldn't cause problems as long as each core is like 1.8ghz+ since this game only uses one core as with all programs made back then. A new video card could be a problem if the drivers are crap, try some different drivers maybe?


Edit; Just finished playing a 2v2v2v2 with over 17k troops and no crash.

[Sigur Rós]

How the can you play battles with over 17k units and don't have any lags? My rig is pretty good and yet I have terrible FPS drops in battles with one stack of mine and one of enemy (both not even full). Game settings are also not set at max, look...



I've always had this problem with Total War games, RTW as well. I thought it was due to the fact RTW maybe wasn't that good optimized, but what about M2TW (along with its mods)?

My hardware: CPU AMD FX 8320E, ATI R9 270X and 8 GB RAM DDR3), resolution is set on 1440x900, with this ridiculous resolution I should be able to play with highest settings, don't you think?

[♔atthias♔]

How the can you play battles with over 17k units and don't have any lags? My rig is pretty good and yet I have terrible FPS drops in battles with one stack of mine and one of enemy (both not even full). Game settings are also not set at max, look...



I've always had this problem with Total War games, RTW as well. I thought it was due to the fact RTW maybe wasn't that good optimized, but what about M2TW (along with its mods)?

My hardware: CPU AMD FX 8320E, ATI R9 270X and 8 GB RAM DDR3), resolution is set on 1440x900, with this ridiculous resolution I should be able to play with highest settings, don't you think?

are you using steam for rome 1?

[Ngugi]

I've always had this problem with Total War games, RTW as well. I thought it was due to the fact RTW maybe wasn't that good optimized, but what about M2TW (along with its mods)?

My hardware: CPU AMD FX 8320E, ATI R9 270X and 8 GB RAM DDR3), resolution is set on 1440x900, with this ridiculous resolution I should be able to play with highest settings, don't you think?

Hardware is even less my area than software, but I note that the R1 & M2-engine do not utilize more than one core, making solid processors perform far less well than they usually manage.

[alreadyded]

Hardware is even less my area than software, but I note that the R1 & M2-engine do not utilize more than one core, making solid processors perform far less well than they usually manage.

It does utilize all of the cores, but it really only uses one (2nd or 3rd I think) to do pretty much everything instead of spreading it out evenly. Or at least that is what I remember reading from some solid research with graphs and such for programs made back then. I mess around with Supreme Commander game engine a lot (and actually play that game unlike M2TW ) and that game works the same way too for the most part. For M2TW it seems to be the CPU keeping track of all the collisions that puts the most strain on it, not really unit number specific but more how many are smooshed together. Even in a 1v1 if a whole army is trying to cram through the gate at once it gets choppy. Just poor optimization it sounds to me, kinda like a memory leak. I can think of a couple things that might improve performance in this way, but they would probably require rebalancing a lot of unit stats as a result of changing radius, xyz crap, etc..

[Dutch-Balrog]

I get loads of lag on max settings with 10K battles and larger. But no crashes. Tho the lag may also be because i made arrows stay permanently, eventually that does tax your system a little bit (about 5 fps at the end).

[alreadyded]

RTW and M2TW use the same game engine. Obviously it is still a good one since I can fight 17k+ battles on max settings on a huge battle map. Had one army of drakes and one of spiders too, even saved the setup.

I use max settings and a custom enbseries, plus some really high quality grass this game was never designed to use. It is only choppy/laggy when I move the camera around with tons of units on the screen but other than that it works fine. I don't recall optimizing anything in battles so I should be able to do the same in vanilla. Unfortunately I spawned next to Orcs with 2 Balrog units that came straight for me... Spiders and dragons moved to the middle while everyone else was killing each other so they just mopped up what was left.


Edit; I just finished loading and fighting the exact same battle again and spawned next to the 2 Balrog units again... and this time I barely won.




Lots of Screenshots (with zoom function); https://drive.google.com/folderview?...1E&usp=sharing

[Sigur Rós]

@atthias No Steam, RTW and M2TW both retail version.

@alreadyded And you don't have any lags, even with the camera zoomed on the action?

PS: Your Google Drive doesn't work, maybe it's only temporary.

[alreadyded]

Eh, I am no good at sharing stuff online. No idea why it isn't sharing, I probably have to change the link a bit or something.

No, I don't get lag zoomed in, even when moving the camera. Zoomed out with lots of units showing and moving the camera feels like 300-400 ms ping in an online game, I get FPS drops and UI lag a bit.

[alreadyded]

Try this; https://drive.google.com/drive/folde...25WRkFidHpXU1E

[Joseignacio]

Try this; https://drive.google.com/drive/folde...25WRkFidHpXU1E

It works for me! Lots of pics

[Ngugi]

Thanks for the correction

(and actually play that game unlike M2TW )

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

The game they mod, unless for beta testing - with exception for Arachir Galu', but he's a half-breed Let's Player ^^

[Sigur Rós]

I found a solution googling around...

What you want to do is open the game, then go into task manager, click on details, find Rome, right click, go to set affinity and make sure it's only running on one cpu core.

https://www.reddit.com/r/totalwar/co...e_performance/

Imma try it later, the guy below suggests to make a shortcut because Task Manager tends to reset it.

So far it seems to me that this issue affects only "older" TW games (RTW, ETW and M2TW)? This makes me think with Attila and RTW2 there aren't such problems?

[Joseignacio]

I found a solution googling around...



https://www.reddit.com/r/totalwar/co...e_performance/

Imma try it later, the guy below suggests to make a shortcut because Task Manager tends to reset it.

So far it seems to me that this issue affects only "older" TW games (RTW, ETW and M2TW)? This makes me think with Attila and RTW2 there aren't such problems?

My wife and I are fans of old Heroes of Might and Magic IV, and we experienced frequent crashes when we updated hard & soft recently. She found out the same solution you are quoting for this game, it works like a charm!

Unfortunately it didn't help me with Ents and Spiders bug, but considering that the game is not too old I tried with 2 cores, maybe I need only one. Iknow it may be a different matter than what Cen1 is originally asking but then again it may not.

Cen1: Did you bring "huge" units in any of those armies?

I need to try what Vifarc suggests too...

[Sigur Rós]

Make Med2 64bit aware, it helped me.
There's a thread somewhere on this forum.

Can you post it over here?

My wife and I are fans of old Heroes of Might and Magic IV, and we experienced frequent crashes when we updated hard & soft recently. She found out the same solution you are quoting for this game, it works like a charm!

Unfortunately it didn't help me with Ents and Spiders bug, but considering that the game is not too old I tried with 2 cores, maybe I need only one. Iknow it may be a different matter than what Cen1 is originally asking but then again it may not.

Cen1: Did you bring "huge" units in any of those armies?

I need to try what Vifarc suggests too...

There was one unit of barlogs and one of trolls. Problem is that I can't do the trick, the game doesn't allow me to do Ctrl+Alt+Canc to recall task manager, to be more precise I press those keys but the usual screen where you can select the task manager doesn't appear. With other games I can do it, with M2TW not.

Yes, with huge stacks I meant huge unit size + huge armies in general. And I do indeed run win10 on an i5 skylake and r9 390.
So far the suggestions are:
-set affinity
-make it 64bit aware

This is the custom battle: http://www.mediafire.com/download/rb...Mt_DoomSP2.rar (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Irpg2Ri8eE). I will post the exact unit sites and types when I come home for the weekend. My game is maxed out and I set unit size to huge.

But I saw some lags anyway. Maybe if you play at normal speed you won't notice them, but setting game speed at 4x or 6x makes lagging like hell.

[Joseignacio]

There was one unit of barlogs and one of trolls. Problem is that I can't do the trick, the game doesn't allow me to do Ctrl+Alt+Canc to recall task manager, to be more precise I press those keys but the usual screen where you can select the task manager doesn't appear. With other games I can do it, with M2TW not.

Trolls are not problematic IIRW, anyway they are not in my case. Balrogs, Ents, Mumakils, Spiders, ..., are.

¿Could you make a test trying again, just leaving this unit out and see if the crash is still producing?

This way we'd see if it's the old "big units" crash that everyone is mad about or an issue related to the number of units. I cannot know it but I'd say it's not because of the number of units and the number of elements of each unit, because I use maximum unit size too, and have had several stack's battles as well, and the crash didn't happen.

As for the Ctrl+Alt+Del, it's usually a problem in some TW series' games but I think I was able to do it a couple of times, it wasn't easy and I cant recall how I did but it should be possible. Anyway it's better if it can be done the way they are advising you. Isn't it?