Is there any way to improve CAMPAIGN map performance, speed, and FPS?

[Roma_Victrix]

For me, the battle map performance speed is fine these days after I...researched...and came to...independent conclusions... ...on how to make things faster overall. However, lately, for no good goddamn reason that I can see, the campaign map has decided to do the equivalent of teenagers lighting a bag of dog on fire on my front porch.

Why, just...why? Why are you doing this to me, EBII team? ...Bunch of sadists.

Seriously, though, I am playing with huge units on the battle map but have since kicked campaign map units down to "small" just to remove ships at sea and other things that hog up your precious RAM. I have done everything I can to improve campaign map performance, including removing campaign map shadows, and yet the frame rate drop has become about as slow and bad as a combined autistic & downs syndrome kid trying to count my roll of quarters as a bank teller.

I've had it up to here, EBII team, with your damn choppiness. I want justice! I want the collective hours of my life back that were wasted minute after minute of watching the campaign map lag, causing me to sigh, roll my eyes, and clench my fists in rage with a firm temptation to punch my computer screen. Not that it would help, but it would make me feel better.

So, is there ANYTHING that I can do to improve campaign map speed and performance? Are there certain graphic effects that can be removed, like waves at sea? They certainly look aesthetically cool, but I don't need them, especially if they're part of the problem of slowed performance that's really starting to grate on my nerves. I'd rather remove them, but I don't see any submods for improving campaign map performance. I only see the one about the "clean campaign mini map" which is great and I use it from time to time, but that has nothing to do with performance, speed, and improving my game's frames per second.

[Septentrionalis]

I am running a fairly fast computer now (for the first time in life could afford one that wasn't hopelessly outdated from the get-go), and huge units on 4k battle map run without as much as a hiccup. However, if I select a unit on the campaign map and then try to move the map around, the whole thing becomes a slide show with a limp. In case you haven't done that yet, experiment with having a moving unit selected and then deselect.

I don't understand what is hurting the performance so much, because it doesn't even try to recalculate routes or anything if just move the camera around over the map.

[Rad]

It's time to get a new PC, Roma.

[QuintusSertorius]

The game only uses one core, regardless of how many you have, because it is old. You might get some mileage out of moving the processes onto an unused core.

[krste]

If I remember correctly the tree shadows had a huge impact on the campaign map fps, try turning them off.

[Floren d'Asteneuz]

In your graphic card parameters, you can turn off the antialiasing transparency.

This works very badly with old games and can make it very slow because transparency was used and abused and graphic card didn't follow.

As someone said, if you select a unit that has still a path to go (but zero move points) computer will slow down heavily, I don't know why.

Those are the two things I can think of.

Maybe somewhere if you can make the game not having aa to shadows, it could help. (Maybe in the graphic card parameters too) for the same reason than aa transparency.


Take care.

P.s. : try to check if this is processor related or GPU related. This could help your diagnostics.

[Razor]

There's a number of options to explore:

1) Reduce the size of textures used for the terrain on the campaign map (ebii/data/terrain/aerial_map/ground_types). EBII uses textures with size 512x512. Resize them to 256x256.
2) Reduce the size of textures used for models on the campaign map (ebii/data/models_strat/textures and ebii/data/models_strat/residences/textures).
3) Reduce the polygon count of models used on the campaign map. This requires modifying 3D models, so it's most likely not an option unless you know how to make models.

[Roma_Victrix]

Thanks, you guys! I'll try these out and see if they work or not.

[Spartan 666]

Also try not to make your characters plan long journeys. I mean, don't send an agent from Babylon to Makedon straight away, because if all "short" passages are blocked, the engine will recalculate a much longer way, slowing the game down.

To make things clearer take this as an example: I ordered an army going from Byzantion to the Thracian border. In the middle there's a river, and the passage was blocked by a rebel army, and so was the southern river by another rebel army. The engine recalculated the route all around Asia Minor, down to Assyria (because passages in Cappadocia and Pontus were also blocked), up to Armenia, to Iberia, north of the Caucasus, north of the Azov sea, then down to Thrace. I NEVER seen anything like this in 15 years of Total War, I didn't even think it was even possibile to have so many movement turns planned (and so many different colors for the route on the map). The game started going incredibly slow at the beginning of the turn, I casually selected that character, saw what happened, and as soon as I ordered him nearby, the game went smooth again.

[Razor]

Expanding on what Spartan 666 wrote on the game calculating long journeys, M2TW also slows down a lot when you've selected your navy and hover over sea area with your mouse that's on the other end of the map without clicking anything. It's like the game is precalculating the path for the navy you've selected. Deselect and the stutter is gone.

[Roma_Victrix]

There's a number of options to explore:

1) Reduce the size of textures used for the terrain on the campaign map (ebii/data/terrain/aerial_map/ground_types). EBII uses textures with size 512x512. Resize them to 256x256.
2) Reduce the size of textures used for models on the campaign map (ebii/data/models_strat/textures and ebii/data/models_strat/residences/textures).
3) Reduce the polygon count of models used on the campaign map. This requires modifying 3D models, so it's most likely not an option unless you know how to make models.

Hmm...I've reduced the sizes of the terrains as you suggested, but it didn't seem to make a huge difference. I'm willing to try number #2 on your list, but I'm not sure how to resize things in that folder. Do you have suggested parameters or limits for how small things should be made? It seems like there's a variety of different file types there as well, so I'm afraid about making things too small by accident.

Expanding on what Spartan 666 wrote on the game calculating long journeys, M2TW also slows down a lot when you've selected your navy and hover over sea area with your mouse that's on the other end of the map without clicking anything. It's like the game is precalculating the path for the navy you've selected. Deselect and the stutter is gone.

Great tips, you guys! I always figured this stuff was the case and I usually just move characters around for no more than one turn of planned movement ahead of them. I keep tabs on where my agents and armies are in the field, so it's not a bother to me to supervise and conduct them along long journeys across the campaign map.

[Razor]

Hmm...I've reduced the sizes of the terrains as you suggested, but it didn't seem to make a huge difference. I'm willing to try number #2 on your list, but I'm not sure how to resize things in that folder. Do you have suggested parameters or limits for how small things should be made? It seems like there's a variety of different file types there as well, so I'm afraid about making things too small by accident.

I believe that any of these values will work: 1x1, 2x2, 4x4, 8x8, 16x16, 32x32, 64x64, 128x128, 256x256, 512x512, 1024x1024 etc.

If I were you I'd try to reduce the dimensions of the textures by half and see if I get them all to maximum 256x256. Basically reducing the texture dimensions from 512x512 to 256x256 reduces the size of textures that needs to be loaded by 75%. You could try reducing them even further to 128x128, but I'm not sure if you could bear the loss of detail.

I'd keep smaller textures (like the faction banners) as they are now, as there's very little to no gain if you reduce their size even more.

Also, I must say that EBII has some very inefficient usage of space in some of its textures used for strat_map models. I even see textures for agents that are 1024x1024 big! Yikes!

[Roma_Victrix]

Cool! I'll try this out today. Thanks for the advice.