Game balance with >40 battle size?

[Vachir]

It seems balance totally shifts when you mod M&B to include more soldiers per side. Archers are still pure evil, but mass infantry seem to be a lot more effective against cavalry when their numbers reach a certain point. How high do you have your battle size set? I'm finding I enjoy M&B a whole lot more at 100+ than I did at 40. The only problem is lag, and occasionally getting a "out of vertex shader memory" (or something) error and crashing to desktop. After trying this I'd kind of like to see how the game would play if it were optimized for larger battles, or maybe I just need to upgrade.

 

[Sergius64]

The out of vertex shader memory as far as I heard is connected to the number of bodies on the battlefield. So if you find a way to disable the bodies( not sure how to ) you shouldn't crash anymore. Other then that I'm surprised you're able to play with that many units on the battlefield.

I've tried a battle with like 88 units and my fps went down to like 15. And I have a pretty crazy system.( 3.4Gtz Pentium 4, Pci Express Radeon x850 Pro, 2 Giga's of Ram, Sound Blaster x-Fi xTreme Music ).

 

[Vachir]

I have it set at 100, I'm not sure I've ever had that many actually show up in a battle though (I have seen reinforcements messages so I probably had close to that at some point). The FPS does drop a lot if you face directly at the center of the battle, so I tend to ride around and pick off archers and stray horsemen.

I really wanted to see how balance would pan out with more units on the battlefield, and so far it's great. I'll see if I can find a way to reduce the bodies lying around, but maybe something can be done in a future version to allow more units in general? I'm having a lot of fun with the bigger battles since I can actually balance my army with infantry and missile units and have it work rather than always going for knights.

 

[Kelpo]

I wouldn't think it'd be too hard to reserve a little more memory for a few more corpses to lie around. Hopefully armagan gets around to it someday.

 

[Roach]

I'm pretty sure there's an option in-game to turn off corpses, never tried it myself.

Oh, and I have battle-size turned down to 20. Not because I'm a wuss (although I am) but because it's the only way to get my fps above 10 without nerfing the graphics.

 

[Archonsod]

I tend to leave mine at 40.

Although I can get up to 60 without any FPS drop, unless its 60 archers...

 

[mfberg]

You can turn off corpses in the options section (along with disabling shot difficulty and damage listing, blood, and a anything else that might tax a video card). Set all of those to disabled and you should be able to get a couple more fps out of any video set-up, and thus get a decent battle at size 100 or more.

mfberg

 

[Terracide99]

from my experience, you'll get much better fps if you simply disable shadows. when i solo against a 5k river pirate army i created @ 102 battle size, my fps never went below 25 (during the beginning of the battle when my field of view can see all the enemies) and averages around 35~40 (when i don't see all the enemies on screen). besides shadows, all the other graphic options are on and texture @ 100 using the system below

cpu: 3GHz Northwood @ 3.25GHz
ram: 1Gig @ 2.5-3-3-7
gfx: ATi 9800pro w/ 256Mb DDR @ 400:365

 

[Roach]

Aye, I have shadows off and everything else on (I'm not giving up sprays of blood, and without the lighting everyone's bright pastel shades - too easy to see during the battle, if you see what I mean.)

It only chugs badly when there's lots of horsemen running around on screen. I suppose I'll just have to kill em quicker.

 

[dirtbag]

500

 

[InferiorBeing]

I thought 414 was max...

 

[Benjamin]

How you can put it so high? My minimum is 14 and my maximum is 40! And you are talking about 100 and 500! LOL!

 

[dirtbag]

How you can put it so high? My minimum is 14 and my maximum is 40! And you are talking about 100 and 500! LOL!

You have missed the real thing...

Someone give him a link to Battle Size Changer!!!


And about 50 hundred: Mine goes to 2000

 

[Vachir]

http://forums.taleworlds.com/viewtopic.php?t=3700

 

[Terracide99]

5000?!?!?

even if that is possible, you'll need one hell of a machine to run it even with all effects disable and very low texture detail; something in terms of 2x 7800GTX in SLI and the latest AMD FX cpu (or the dual core model if M&B supports multithread)

 

[Archonsod]

I'm not so sure.

I haven't went higher than around 110 or so, and my FPS is still around 130 (as opposed to the 150 usual). I don't think the graphics card matters too much, assuming it can handle M&B fine anyway.
What I have noticed is the more men in the battle, the longer it takes to load. I suspect larger battles are more dependent on RAM and CPU power than the graphics card. When using the Arena Expansion Mod I can take the largest battles fine with no FPS hit, but a load time of around a minute longer than usual. It looks more like a lot of information is being transferred to RAM memory, rather than being sent to the graphics card.

 

[Terracide99]

I'll have to disagree with you on that one archonsod for a few reasons.

1.: when I set the battle size to anything larger than 220, i always run into the out of vertex memory error, which i concluded is related to the amount of memory on my graphic card since i still had over 50% of system memory left when i fight in large battles (according to task manager)

2.: when i look at the cpu usage histograph after a battle, it fluctuate quite a bit but never reach 90-100% usage, usually between 50-75%. interestingly, there's more usage on the simulated second processor than the primary .

by the way, what is your system's spec archonsod??

 

[Merentha]

Also, i KNOW my FPS drops when there are more people on the battlefield, especially horsemen. One reason I feared Khergit hordes (Mag7) is that their shaman have some odd power called LAAAAAG

 

[jrawlings]

I wouldn't think it'd be too hard to reserve a little more memory for a few more corpses to lie around. Hopefully armagan gets around to it someday.

Or he could code it so that corpses take up far less polys than their live counterparts.

 

[Keyos]

What this game needs is dynamic LOD's, that is, at 30 yards a man will have far less polygons than at 10 yards, and at 100 yards will be little more than a texured box .