Performance in detailed battle.

[Huncowboy]

Salute,

I am currently playing through this game the 2nd time. Patched to 1.10.10. First time I have played it from my laptop which is aging. It did not surprise me that the detailed battle performance was slow, and got progressively slower as the battle progressed. I have used the fast move option, but it still took a while to just even scroll the screen. It took me forever to play through the campaign out of hotel rooms but that was alright as it was supposed to kill time. It did. After some discussion on a different forum I just installed the game on my home machine to play as South this time.

I really did not expect slow performance at all on my home computer. I can play everything that is out there from HOI2 to GTAIV, Fallout 3, etc... I can't max them all but close to.

My system is (everything updated):

Win XP
AMD Opteron (Dual Core) 2.0 GHz
2GIG RAM
8800GTX 640MB

Surely not the best and I am ready for a major upgrade but am I wrong to think there is no reason for this game to run slow on this machine?

The game runs fine on the main map, but when I get into detailed combat it becomes more and more sluggish. Toward the end of my 2nd battle in this campaign (size of the battle was about 16k vs 12k) I was not able to use the mouse for scrolling. The only way I could scroll was with the arrows. The units crawl around and movement takes forever. It seems it gets worse as the gunpowder builds.

Any ideas?

Thanks in advance!

[ericbabe]

I've tested battles with many units on our 2 GHz Windows 2000 machine.  Battles do slow down when the smoke builds up, but I never had the impression that it was too slow to affect game play.  (I do turn on fast movement for very large battles on that system.)  For the patch we're working on, I can make it so that the no shadow mode also disables the smoke effects, or draws them with a simpler drawing mode; that might help performance on certain systems.

We run the game on a .5MB machine with full graphics (something you're not supposed to do), and on that machine detailed combat is so slow that it becomes hard to play.

[Huncowboy]

Thank you for the reply!

Interesting. To give an example, when I put the cursor to the frame, it takes several second before it starts to scroll. However, if I scroll with the arrows it scrolls faster. Frankly, I don't remember this happening even on the laptop and that was a good machine in 2003. I am starting to think that it is on my end but, like I have said, I am playing all kinds of games with high settings.

I have another questions which is not related to this topic but I don't want to start a new one. It is about the order of movement. What is the logic behind it? Why can we not select the divisions and move them in the order we wish? Why do wee have to go in a predetermined order? I think the communication problems of that century is already well simulated as is by misunderstanding orders and getting out of command. I don't see how this adds additional layer of strategy to the game. Sometimes I would like to move a unit out of a spot and replace them with a different one, but I can only do this at a penalty. In addition I keep forgetting which unit has what rifle and I only see this info (unless I am missing something) when it is that unit's turn.