Stainless Steel 6.4 turn time too long. Any solutions?

[DominikHR]

Hello everyone. I'm new here. I've been a huge fan of Medieval II total war ever since so I decided to try out Stainless Steel 6.4. It's been really great with all the new factions, units, etc, but way too long turn time is a big downside. First 10 or 15 turns are somewhat acceptable, but later on it takes "forever" to make a new turn (at least 2-3 minutes if not even more). In fact, this is annoying to the point that I want to stop playing it and get back to Medieval II original version where turn time is usually less than 30 seconds on my computer.

And I know that the problem is not in my computer. In fact, I have a gaming laptop which runs GTA V on high to very high settings and Total War: Warhammer on high settings without any problems so the problem must lie within the game itself, otherwise it wouldn't make any sense. Are there any solutions to this? Any patch or something?

Thank you guys

[Losthief]

its a single core game. New laptops are built for multi-core and low power draws (i.e. longer battery life) which MTW2 can't make use of. So, usually the game runs worse on newer laptops sadly.

Also, if your laptop has intergrated graphics theres a bottleneck there too w/ the shared memory on the system. (mtw2 has a memory cap too sadly).

So...what can you do. (this will help, but not fix it, turn times are do to a longer scripts/more detail, its one or the other, longer turn times, or less stuff/detail).

1)make sure your set to a dedicated core (one not running windows w/ medeival and kingdoms.exe's set to highest priority, affinty is how u set the core).
2) If its a gaming laptop see if you can overclock the core you are setting to run mtw2. This will help a lot if you can do it. I do this on my desktop and have quick turn times. Laptops this is rare, cause of the power/heat issues with overclocking. More ghz you have the better.
3) check to make sure if you have a dedicated graphics card in the laptop that mtw2 is set to run using that (it defaults to integrated, this will not affect turn times much, makes a big difference on the battle maps though). Should be an option to set in your graphics software. Nvidia/geforce has this issue whenever i update my geforce experience blah blah software.
4) theres submods that reduce the amount of scripts running on ss. You lose some things but there in the submod section. (the extended scripts is what slows the turn times down). You have to decide if its worth it, you still get the new units iirc.

hope that helps.

[DominikHR]

Thank you for your reply and suggestions.

My laptop has 2 graphic cards, one being integrated graphics but other one is high performance NVIDIA graphics processor which is set on default. So whenever I run the game it automatically switches to NVIDIA graphics. I have a 3.6 GHz turbo boost processor and I don't want to overclock it as I've heard bad stories and my laptop is relatively new so I don't want to risk anything. Regarding the first point you suggested, I tried it out now and set Stainless steel launcher on highest processor priority. It really reduced turn time by some 30 seconds to a total of slightly less than 2 minutes so it's not too bad now. I've also tried some submods but it didn't help unfortunately.

[Losthief]

hmmm....3.6 gHz should be plenty (im at like 4.2), i wouldn't bother overclocking that. Did you set the affinity too, so its not on the same core as windows/background processes?

Also, you can turn off follow ai movement (if you haven't) that'll speed things up. Also if you leave that on, press the space bar at the beginning of the first ai move and it'll make the rest of the following moves quicker (like you right clicked each time).

Might be worth running (directx jun2010 redist) to make sure u have all the directx files for the game (aka old directx 9 files) since your computer is so new. At worst this will not hurt any.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/down...s.aspx?id=8109

outside of that its just how long Stainless Steel script is compared to vanilla. If you don't have windows borderless mode on (you can do it via medieval2.preferences file in ss6.3 folder) you can enable that, then alt-tab and surf the web/do something else why you wait and the turns will run in the background. If you need help with that setup just post here, its easy to do.