AGEOD Forums

I am a big fan of Ageod (ACW, RUS, and WW1 in particularly) and don't normally complain about their games, but the turn execution time is absolutely ridicious. I have a top of the line i7 pc, all current drivers, and raptor hdd's and this game has gotten progressively slower and slower. I am about 1/3 into the game and these 7+ minute turn executions are unacceptable for me. I spend more time waiting than playing the game!

Turbo823 wrote:I am a big fan of Ageod (ACW, RUS, and WW1 in particularly) and don't normally complain about their games, but the turn execution time is absolutely ridicious. I have a top of the line i7 pc, all current drivers, and raptor hdd's and this game has gotten progressively slower and slower. I am about 1/3 into the game and these 7+ minute turn executions are unacceptable for me. I spend more time waiting than playing the game!

Interesting. I have a desktop purchased in December and turns take about 90-120 seconds. I wonder why the difference? I have Give AI more time checked as well.

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My turns average between 4 and 5 minutes per. The bad is that seems alot longer when your staring at the comp screen. ( something about a watched pot never boils) The good is, I actually get some of my honey do's done inbetween turns on the weekend.

Turbo823 wrote:I am a big fan of Ageod (ACW, RUS, and WW1 in particularly) and don't normally complain about their games, but the turn execution time is absolutely ridicious. I have a top of the line i7 pc, all current drivers, and raptor hdd's and this game has gotten progressively slower and slower. I am about 1/3 into the game and these 7+ minute turn executions are unacceptable for me. I spend more time waiting than playing the game!

I have no hyperthreading processor so cannot test the following. Please try it and comment if you notice any difference.

Create a PON.bat file in your "Games\Pride of Nations" folder or where your game is installed.

Edit PON.bat file adding the following text

start /affinity 55 PON.exe

Save the file and run the game clicking on the file PON.bat

This will force the game to use only the real cores.

Easy way, here is the file compressed, extract in the game folder where pon.exe is

Turbo823 wrote:I am a big fan of Ageod (ACW, RUS, and WW1 in particularly) and don't normally complain about their games, but the turn execution time is absolutely ridicious. I have a top of the line i7 pc, all current drivers, and raptor hdd's and this game has gotten progressively slower and slower. I am about 1/3 into the game and these 7+ minute turn executions are unacceptable for me. I spend more time waiting than playing the game!

Maybe this doesn't work for you... but I have noticed that if I left the option "Focus on Move" on something different than "No Focus", the game takes longer because I keep moving around the map like crazy, specially later on the game.
Try it and let me know... thanks.

Are there any plans to simplify the AI during turns? I literally have the best CPU on the market (I5 2500k @ 4.4ghz) and it's taking 2-3 min. turns on the lowest AI settings. I spend more time watching TV than i do playing the game i want to play. I wouldn't mind any sacrificing in the game personally, Turn speed would be more important to me.

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For me it seems like the majority of waiting I do while playing the game is just the initial startup of PON. Seems like the startup takes forever, but once i get going in the game it's fine, the turns and the like.

Generalisimo wrote:Maybe this doesn't work for you... but I have noticed that if I left the option "Focus on Move" on something different than "No Focus", the game takes longer because I keep moving around the map like crazy, specially later on the game.
Try it and let me know... thanks.

So should we click on 'focus on move' or click on something else?

I've been playing with no AI extra time, no move focus. I've even tried running the game in higher priorties - that did help a bit. Defrag, diskcleanup, antispyware, full virus scan, were done. The hyperthreading thing didn't seem to make much of a difference. I have an i7, GTX580, 16 gig ram, a raptor 10k hdd, win64 and i've freed up as much free memory as possible (turning off virus, unnecessary services, and so on), and turning off the internet. I've even been rebooting the PC periodically.

The reason why some of you may not be experiencing the slowdowns some of us are experiencing depends on how much AI activity is going on. Early on, the turns went fast maybe 1 minute on average. As the game has gone on, the game has gotten progressively slower as the AI is fighting wars. Right now there are mulitple wars, I am in 3 minor wars myself, going on in my game and I am even seeing a lot of AI planning moves for minor factions (pretty cool).

I've played several turns. The best turn was 5 minutes, the worse turn was over 7 minutes, 4 minutes of which were supply calculation. In my opinion that is where optimization is desparately need - supply calculation.

Gray_Lensman wrote:You can simplify it a little already by unchecking the "AI more time" button in the options. As for the rest, this is a WEGO design meaning that once the AI has plotted the moves for all the AI factions, it takes the human player pre-plotted moves and "syncs" them day by day for all 15 days of the turn processing, resolving conflicts as they occur. I don't think that process could benefit much by "parallel" processing, though the pre-plotted AI moves phase could benefit slightly by occuring during the human's plotting time. Once the sync/resolution part of the turn processsing takes over, the processing is by necessity a "series" process since latter move processing depends on earlier move/conflict resolution of all the other AI factions.

Shouldn't it be possible for AI turn planning to be multithreaded? When French AI is planning turns, it does not need to know what British AI is planning.

I'll admit to a computer idiot but there are a few factors I've noticed:
1. It doesn't seem to matter much about the quality of the computer.
I'm well into the 1860s and still average 1 1/2 minuter per turn.
I've "only" got an i5 laptop with 8 GB of memory.
2. One thing that the devs have stated is that wars take up a large amount of processing. Turning off AI wars (Setting Forge Casus Belli to 21) seems to help dramatically although I admit I've not played with it on much so cannot compare well.

I'm not smart enough to explain why many people are so slow but many people are not so slow so it isn't necessarily the engine, but rather how it interacts with various combination of components, settings, and software.

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Gray_Lensman wrote:Try re-reading my post in regards to the "pre-plotted" moves.
.

Ah, I thought you referred to AI plotting moves at the same time as player is making his (like in WWI: La Grande Guerre). I disabled that option since looking through nation while AI is thinking can be hard since game will not be smooth when AI is thinking hard.

What I meant is that after player presses "end turn", different nations are assigned to different cores and, once thinking is done for all nations, combined together and turn continues as usual.

From my point of view as more nations become active they require more time for the game to plot their moves. Heck, the last time I played Scotland, yes that Scotland , took a solid 45 seconds for the game to plot its move.

So, if you get a time like that, more or less, by every nation in the game it is only going to get slower as time goes on.

The last time I played the amount of time for the game to finish a turn was 10 minutes 33 seconds. And 7 minutes 43 seconds of that was for the game to plot the AI moves.

As an FYI, Scotland was released in the peace treaty between the UK and Russia.

Stryder

If you have a multi core, a core optimizer might be worth looking into. I used one with Supreme Commander when I had a dual core. Worked well.

The speed doesn't bother me. It helps to have a TV in the room.

Besides, compared to PBEM, this is a fast game.

If you can play in windows mode, we can do another thing during the end turn.

but windows mode bug.

You must wait

I didn't thank the various posters on here for their helpful suggestions on how to better optimize the game's performance.

I am wondering if steam is a culprit of my poor performance. I do seem to be able to run the game w/o steam so I'll try that and use some of the suggestions posted here.

Thanks to everyone for your help!

Le Ricain wrote:So should we click on 'focus on move' or click on something else?

Click until it says "No focus"... the left most option.

Turbo823 wrote:I didn't thank the various posters on here for their helpful suggestions on how to better optimize the game's performance.

I am wondering if steam is a culprit of my poor performance. I do seem to be able to run the game w/o steam so I'll try that and use some of the suggestions posted here.

Thanks to everyone for your help!

In my experience, running PON with Steam makes it a bit slower... so, to avoid that, you have to click on the PON.exe without using the Steam link.

pesec wrote:Ah, I thought you referred to AI plotting moves at the same time as player is making his (like in WWI: La Grande Guerre). I disabled that option since looking through nation while AI is thinking can be hard since game will not be smooth when AI is thinking hard.

What I meant is that after player presses "end turn", different nations are assigned to different cores and, once thinking is done for all nations, combined together and turn continues as usual.

I will not repeat this on every thread... but guys, do you think if it was that easy to implement, wouldn't have been already done?...
No, IT IS NOT that easy...
Blame whoever you want for that... but the AGE engine has been in the works since 2005 (and even before that)... so, this wasn't planned in the design, it is NOT simple to implement.

Anyway, like I said all around the forum, we will be looking again at this issue soon...

Generalisimo wrote:Click until it says "No focus"... the left most option.

Thanks, I will try it.

I was successfully able to significant increase the execution speed of my pc by tweaking some bios settings and overclocking. I'll share with everyone some of the things I did:

- I updated the intel chipset driver - the MB used an older driver surprisingly. Intel has a auto detect on their website that makes this painless. That alone improved the execution speed by about 10 seconds (surprising me). Not much but helpful.
- BIOS: Enabled Intel Turbo Tech, Disabled EIST, C-State. Clocked about 3-4 seconds improvement.
- Tried different priority settings for the game. Realtime priority is the fastest but make sure that the anti-virus + antispyware is disabled.
- I tried different combinations of ram by scavenging some from another Win64 pc. Interestingly, 8 gigs of ram seems optimal. Speed was moderately better than 6 gigs and significantly better over 4. Beyond 8 gigs there is however no real performance boost.
- Overclocking: I selected an option that my x58 MSI Pro-E had to overclock the FSB to 166. BOOM, significant performance boost! I went from 5+ min turns to 1.5-2.0 turns.

Regarding OC, I don't have watercooling since a previous bad experience with it so I am using an aircooled case. I am paranoid about overheating and have 6 fans rocking along with the stock cpu fan and a well designed air cooled case. I wouldn't suggest this option unless you have a wind tunnel going through your pc like I do and you do considerable research on the net.

Turbo823 wrote:
have 6 fans rocking along with the stock cpu fan and a well designed air cooled case

Great noise, ah?

and now we have posts on hardware specs optimization we find in forums devoted to GTA IV

Athens wrote:and now we have posts on hardware specs optimization we find in forums devoted to GTA IV

Delete please

deoved wrote:Great noise, ah?

Actually not too bad. Starting the PC is fairly loud though.