Medieval Ii: Total War

BTW usapatriot, what graphics settings do you run at? And is everything completely smooth or are there moments where things slow down?

 

I run at 1024 x 768 but it is playable at 1280 x 800.

I run 2xAF AND 2xAA with High texture settings, medium building and vegetation (including grass) and lowest shadows possible with shader 2.0 and No Bloom. Reflections enabled.

Cheers

 

I have a roughly similar system (GF6800GT but only 1GB RAM), and I run with most settings on high, at 1280.

Enabled Bloom, but disabled AA and AF though. (At least I think so. I'm on my laptop now, so can't check the exact settings)

But that runs smoothly too. Except whewn you fast forward in a big fight. That can bring any computer to its knees...

 

Thanks, I've found out what causes my lag when there are alot of trees in the battle map: shadows. Setting it to medium smoothed out gameplay alot! Everything else is at high/highest with 2x AA/AF.

 

well i bought it today...two quick questions. What resolution should I run it at? the auto detect was way down with 1200something x etc...I know I can bump it up, but is higher always better? as in...should I put it at 1680 or should I try 1920? Also...I downloaded the patch, but I'm not sure if I am installing it in the right place, couldn't find any info on what to do so I am assuming I am missing something obvious. I tried installing it a few times but when i go under options it still says version 1.0....any help would be much appreciated

 

First, resolution: Two factors here, performance (higher resolution is more demanding on the gpu, and may run like crap), and personal preference. If you don't think everything gets too small and fiddly at 1920, use that. Otherwise go with something lower. But if it suggests 1200, that may be the highest you can get with decent performance.

Second, the patch is a bit quirky. I think when you first "install" it, basically just unzips the actual patch. Wherever you installed it to, there should be a new .exe (setup.exe, I think), and when you run that, it installs the actual patch. Of course, the installer doesn't say anything about that...

 

There is a new patch coming out very soon to fix most of the major bugs and issues.

 

well I found the setup...ran it, it was a pain as well...had to do all kinds of strange things to allow it to find the unpacker. It finally finished and said my version had been updated...but of course when I run the game it still says the original version. Do I have to delete the old files or something? Remember the days before the internet when you bought a game and played it?

 

nevermind... it might be working it might not, I just noticed the patch was for version 1.01...thought it was 1.1. the only way i can tell to see what version is running is on the options screen where it says version 1.0....so maybe its 1.01, or 1.00 who knows.

 

I though the current patch is 1.1?

 

Yeah, there's only one patch so far (from 1.0 to 1.1 or 1.01), and it probably has been applied despite what the options screen says.

 

Got some big battles screens for ya:









Not the greatest, I know. I'll try harder next time.

 

Wow, very bloomy! Or HDR'ey.

 

Nice Screens!

I'm waiting for the 1.2 patch release which is supposed to fix a
lot of things. It was supposed to be released April 5th but was delayed due to a bug in the installer. The patch was leaked though but only works over a clean install of MII:TW. Hopefully the fixed patch will be released sometime next week.


And guys, im still have trouble in battles! I just suck at them.

 

lol, I just fought an amazing battle. The pope sent 1000 men against my castle in Innsbruck where I had roughly 300 (mostly crossbowmen, with 80 or so heavy infantry, and 60 spearmen, plus my general)

They brought no siege weapons, so I figured if I could get my bombard to take out their rams early on, I might get an easy win, so first thing I did was order it out the gates, along with my general. Well, they both got swarmed. Sent my spearmen out to help, while the general ran off to be able to charge properly. After 20 seconds, the spearman was left alone outside the gates, surrounded completely, so ordered them into that circle formation thing, while my general charged in to help 2 or 3 times. In the meantime, all the enemy heavy infantry was charging at the gates where I only had my 80 infantry to hold the line (all the crossbowmen were at the walls). Managed to hold them off there for a good while, while my spearmen just tried to survive, and the general charged straight into every group of enemies he could find again and again. And of course, with all 20 crossbowmen firing down from the walls. When the spearmen finally got killed, I ordered most of the crossbowmen down to help hold the gate, except one unit left to fight off the religious fanatics raising ladders at the wall. My general joined the fight at the gate, hitting the attackers from behind.... After a while a few of my men routed, and the enemy got dangerously close to taking the gate, especially because around the same time, my general finally got killed. Sent my remaining crossbowmen down to to help in the melee at the gate, and actually managed to take out the last attackers. By then, of course, there were a few more squads scaling the walls with a siege tower, so I retreated and organized my crossbowmen (all I had left) to fire towards the gate. When the attackers had left the wall and regrouped at the entrance, they charged at my remaining men, and panicked literally the moment they got within melee range. As they fled, the next two units (crusader sergeants) approached, and managed to get up close without panicking. Luckily, by then, I had more men left than them, so my exhausted crossbowmen were able to fight them off and finally retake the gates.

Close one, I definitely had the odds against me.

Got a few great screenshots (although mostly I was too busy to think about that), will upload them later.

 

Wow, thats great!

Well, today I had a small story to tell as well.

I'm playing as England and I had pushed the scots back to the little island to the left of England. They kept defeating me until I got pist and sent a massive force to get them and I finally got the city, meanwhile France thought, hey! Now that they took the scots we will probably be their next target! So they invaded one of my european cities. Needless to say I was a little pissed because I wanted to get some things done before I attacked another faction. I already had a volley of troops and the top four cities around the north of france. France was able to take one of the cities but then I sent most of my troops into france and capped two of their cities in one turn. Now they only have two regions left, I offered them a ceasfire and they accepted. But what they dont know is, is that im getting a massive attack ready to finished them off and the milanese empire. Why? Because the milanese did one of those accept or we will attack treatys and I of course didnt accept. They didnt declare war on me but just for trying to scare me their next on my list to invade.

 

sounds like an awesome game im considering buying it

 

I always wanted to play these Medieval games, and when I finally got a xps, I decided to buy it. Man was I not disappointed. This game is crazy with that you really have to keep track of your cities every turn. It also is not for patient people since you have to build your cities up before you really start to attack other factions.

I'm playing with everything on high, anisotropic x4, and AAx2 with my xps below. Although, when I have AA on, the game runs a little slower, not to mention I get more lag when I'm sieging a castle wall. Anybody else get similar results?

 

I'm playing at 1280 x 800 with no AA and 4xAF.

Runs great.

The 1.2 patch which has been delayed is going to make the game a hell of a lot better with most/all bugs fixed and improved AI and such.

 

I decimated France and forced them into giving me the region they captured.

Haha, they have no idea whats in store for them.

But if I take all of France I will be face to face with the moors.

I got excommunicated as well, how do you get UNexcommunicated?

 

Make the Pope love you. Do that by building more churches, pwning up on some Islamic factions, giving the Papal states territories that border nations you don't want to go to war with yet, and flat out bribing them by giving gifts of money.

 

waiting for the pope (or your faction leader) to die works too. The excommunication is basically a personal thing between the pope and your leader. If either of them dies, it is cancelled. (And yes, I've had to get my faction leader killed just to get an excommunication lifted quickly. Was getting battered by everyone, and needed a few turns of peace )

 

The pope sent them after you? And may I ask why?

Good job. Would like to see some screenshots.

 

Because I kept attacking other christian nations... Got me excommunicated after a while... And then the bastard declared war on me, and sneakily attacked the city I was planning to give him to make peace. So obviously I had to take it back, and then he besieged it again...

You can't trust popes...

 

Well at least your not attacking the current pope... doesn't he look a tad like... count dracula?

You attack him and you might get bitten :-X

So anyways, do you suggest this or city life?

 

Oh man, this post makes me want to play Medieval again!

 

Wait till you guys try the 1.2 patch when its officially released!

It makes you want to start playing all over again!

 

Humm, never heard of city life, so hard to offer much advice there...
Still, MTW2 is a damn fun game, no doubt about that. It still has some nagging bugs (mostly AI-related), but it can still get challenging. (And the upcoming patch is supposed to fix a lot of things)
Definitely worth buying.

And no, I'm not attacking the pope. I'm busy fighting off the French, English, Russians, Germans, Poland as well as the papal states and all the rebels... (I'm probably forgetting one or two)

 

Definitely its great.

I'm beta testing the 1.2 patch and it fixes most issues and improves areas of the game, namely the diplomacy system and battle AI.

 

Ahh, I'm having some performance issues other than the upgrade your cpu message that pops up when I use more than 4000 soldiers. I have everything on high, with bloom and all that good stuff, 4x anisotropic, and no AA on, yet I get a good amount of lag when I fight around a castle wall. Should I be getting better results with the m1710 in my sig?

 

I would think so. Are you on a clean Windows XP install with the latest drivers? MTW II also has some performance issues in itself that I think will be worked out in 1.2.

 

Ah just had to register to post in this thread.
Awesome game if you anyone hasn't realised by now.
Two questions, what does becoming a client kingdom involve?

And what is everyones prefered faction and why?

 

Not lag. Lag is network latency. I really really doubt there's much networking involved when you play against the AI.

Anyway, I think it sounds reasonable that the game gets choppy with 4k soldiers in city sieges. That's probably mostly a CPU bottleneck, rather than GPU.

 

Lag has become a general term in the everyday lexicon of computer users to describe any sort of slowdown in their computing experience, not just those specifically dealing with networking issues. It's pretty much an accepted use of terminology and your strict interpretation of semantics seems unnecessary.

I actually wanted to say that to practice some vocabulary . But yea, there's no reason to correct the usage of lag here, it gets the meaning across.

At 4k soldiers, it might be the CPU, but a Core 2 Duo should be able to handle 4k fine. I just think his graphics card isn't properly configured with good drivers. He might be on a default Dell install.

 

This is because Medieval is not multi-threaded, meaning Windows has no way of allocating work to the other core on your dual core machine. If you go to task manager, you'll probably see 50% CPU usage during these battles, with one core running at full throttle and the other relatively idle maintaining system critical processes and other programs you may be running. Another game called Supreme Commander on the other hand allows comparatively more AI to be in the field of play using a dedicated worker thread for just the units' pathfinding and response algorithms.

 

If the application is not specifically multi-threaded then Windows thread balancing system will usually pick it up and run the threads in both cores, regardless of whether the application actually supports multiple cores. That's why various older games had to be patched when dual-cores became prevalent. Unfortunately, even if a game has multi-threaded support, Windows still attempts to manage thread utilization amongst cores. CS:S, for instance, will use one core to 100% while leaving the other core relatively untouched, but my system still lags as Windows tries to use the first core to execute tasks before using the second. That being said, MTW II should exhibit more normal behaviour of its work being spread out amongst the two cores and shouldn't see any one core being used at full. Of course this is hard to check, mid-battle, and at almost midnight, I might have gotten some stuff about Windows XP mixed up. Take what I'm saying right now with a grain of salt

And IMHO, I think Supreme Commander sucked both as a game and graphically. For such high requirements, where was the eye candy? I might as well have been playing Rise of Legends but laggier with less prettiness.

 

It has to be something. I just started a battle with around about 4000 troops(2000 a side), and the framerate dropped to below 1 fps, I kidd you not. I'm about frustrated with this game since I can play other demanding games fine.

Edit:I just put all the settings to low during the game and the framerate stays the same. I have no clue what to do next.

 

Well have you maxed all graphics settings, like high quality units, etc etc? This could be the reason, the 7900GTX go can't handle this game on all maxed settings. Lower you settings. It's still a very demanding game. But 1fps sounds ridiculous. I can play this game on my 7800GTX go really well and this at a resolution of 1920x1200.

But castle sieges and with 4000 units involved is very demanding.

 

Patch 1.2 finally released!!!

http://shoguntotalwar.yuku.com/topic/14831/t/UPDATE-2-RELEASED-.html

 

Accepted by some, yes. Accepted by clueless people who don't *know* the difference. And by people who don't realize that it's impossible to help you with your performance problem if you can't even state *what* your problem is.
That doesn't change the fact that it's misleading, and makes it *a lot* harder to troubleshoot when people have technical problems with a game.
If you want to ask why your game is running like crap, then a good first step is to be *accurate* in explaining the problem. Which means making it clear whether you're talking about network latency, choppy framerates or something entirely different.

Nope, it can't do that. It might alternate between the cores, but one thread can only run on one core at a time. Simple fact of life (and computing).

Not quite.
They had to be patched because they used the hardware timer directly, (which has been discouraged for years), and the problem with that is that it may not be synced between multiple cores. So because the game doesn't keep running on the same core (each time it's resumed by Windows, Windows picks a core for it to run on, which may not be the same as it ran on a millisecond ago), it sometimes would get invalid timing information (the current frame is being drawn 100 microseconds *before* the one before, and stuff like that)

Yep, been playing it a couple of hours now... So far, I love it. Not sure, but performance seems to have improved. AI feels a lot more robust, a ton of new traits are showing up, my cavalry moves the way they're supposed to, and charges when they're supposed to. Oh, and you get mid-battle reports now, telling you when you're doing good or when you're losing, or when one side has lost half its forces.

Of course, on the downside, the installer is really crappy. It can't seem to handle if you install on top of v1.1. I had to uninstall, reinstall v1.0 and then patch directly to v1.2...

Still, the game feels so much more polished now.

 

Good call, I was wondering when this patch would come out.

 

I am reinstalling and going to patch soon.

 

Niiiceee. I'm downloading the patch now. I love the game and all, but sometimes the units are just sooo dumb on the battle map that it makes me want to punch my hand through the monitor.

Hopefully this'll go a long way to dealing with that.

 

And another little update. I'm not sure if I'm just paying more attention now, or if it's because the game runs (a bit) smoother, or because they actually enabled this in the patch, but I'm noticing tons of different kill animations during the battles. So far, I've seen people kick each others in the crotch, spearmen knock down their opponent, then walk over and stab him from above while he's crawling, trying to get back up...

Not as awesome as the kill animations in DoW, but still pretty neat

Edit:
Ok, seems small battles run smoother (unless I'm imagining things), but large battles get *really* choppy on my system..

 

I think you're seeing more animations because they fixed some weapons, like pikes.

They said shields would now work, anybody notice them working?

 

What sort of system are you running Jalf?

 

That might be it, yeah... (Although the ones I mentioned were on simple spearman militia and catapult crew soldiers)

Athlon 64 3200+, Geforce 6800GT, 1GB RAM.

 

a bit of a revive happening here. however, i just finished a short campaign on a new install, but it didn't unlock all the factions???? i first unlocked it like this, is something wrong.

 

I got bitten by that too. You have to play one turn *past* the end of the campaign, apparently...

Well, either that, or edit the appropriate .txt file to unlock all the factions yourself... (That's what I did.)

Really simple, there's a .txt file which goes something like this:

So just move everyone from the latter list to the first one, and presto, all factions unlocked...

 

ah, that will explain it. lets try that one when i get home. i really want to go back to playing hungry.....hmmm......assasins