Siege Slowdown

[Balbor]

I've recently started getting slowdown during my siege battles whichs starts about half way through. Not too noticable at first but it ginds to an almost halt, with 1sec of game time taking about 10-30sec to fininsh. The battle will come to an end if I wait it out although i do get messages saying Unable to locate Direcrt 3d device (or something like that) which doesn't cause CTD or anything they just pop up all over the screen.

At first I thought it was becasue I was playing on Huge army sizes and was being attack by 2 armys during the siege but its started doing it on large setting with only one army sieging me. All settings are on low although I'm not sure about some of the shaders etc.

Athlon64 3200
GeForce 6600GT

[Juggernawt]

Have you updated your graphicsdrivers? Get them here

Are you using the latest directX from Microsoft? Get it here

You do not mention how much memory you have. You could be getting errors if you're running out of memory.

[Balbor]

not too sure about what drivers i'm using, i don't really think it is graphic related as I can pause the game and move around the screen fine without any problem. I'm sure if it was a FPS issue the timer would go down normally and and action would skip about.

I have 1GB RAM

It's only recently started doing it, not had any problem before then.

[Juggernawt]

Pausing the game doesn't stress your graphics-card much. Therefor, again, I recommend you update your drivers and directX - the fact that you're getting a directx-error speaks alot for the problem being with either driver, or (hopefully not) that there's something wrong with yer graphicscard.
Also, make sure that you have space on your drives incase it's running out of memory and needs to swap some out to your drives.

[Balbor]

I've figured out why its now started doing it and not before. Even though I was palying on the huge setting, the AI was using armies that contained over 50% artillary, but now thats not happening as I've changed from wining combo mod to BigMap and the AI doesn't do that anymore. So even though it was on a lower unit scale with everything turned down there are more men present during the battles.

I've just finished battle against 2 armies besieging me.

The main attacking force was made up of about 60% cavalry and no artillary so I set my Longbow unit up infront of the door and placed there stakes down. The problem was I left them there after at battle was under way and the towers destroyed the ram, the rest of the infantry piled in behind the siege tower and after about 10% of the time the battle had ground to halt and i had to restart.

In the second attemp I used the same tactic, but this time move my longbows back to the courtyard as soon as the battle started. The Enemy rammed down the doors and all there cavalry charge into the takes loosing all but a hand full of men (about 40% of the combind total of both armies dead). This time the pauses took a lot longer to kick in, they did get worse once the infantry and second army moved in (again loosing most of its cavalry on stake I'd set up around the main roads leading to my army) and after a while the pauses started to improve the more enemy units I wiped out or routed off the map. With about 80% of the enemy forces dead the pauses stopped.

Another siege battle I though would cause me a major problem happen after that when I was up against 3 full armies With limited artillary. Each army pounded my walls for a but with there catapults (although there trebs didn't get invloved) and despite having rams, towers and 2 bit holes in my walls none of the enemy generals moved in, and to my suprise there was very little no pausing (I just placed the speed on x3 and sat it out).

I think the probelm may be cpu related as thing only get messy when there's a lot of units moving about in the same location on a map. When I'm able to kill the off quickly or AI desides not to bother doing anything with them there isn't a problem.

In an open field battle I've played 3 full stacks and a 1/2 stack and everything's been fine. I use to get the reinforcements delayed - PC needs upgrading message on the Huge setting for anything like that but not seen it often this time.