I miss this game!

[Mostly Buzzed]

I would have taken a reskin of this game anyday

[KampfTomate007]

I mean i used to be a graphics ♥♥♥♥♥ a long time ago, but honestly sometimes not running games that make your PC get hot and super loud and stutter with few FPS is a neat thing every once in a while, atleast imho.

Sure, the game still has performance issues, but atleast not because of your GPU being insufficient.

I really wish they didn't discontinue all the forums for it, since apparently there have been super useful tipps for things like getting decent performance with over a thousand townies, which sounds insane to me, since i already get huge lag when i have 96 townies with more than half of them idling, so idk how over 10 times as many idlers would grind gears...

Yeti mentioned that the old forum pages are still viewable via the internet archive.org or whatever it was called, but i'm too stupid to figure out how to use it, maybe there's a tutorial for it on youtube?

[YetiChow]

You're not the only one experiencing worse performance KampfTomate007 -- changes to the way that Windows operates, as well as CPU architecture and RAM usage expectations, have actually made Towns run poorly on most modern PCs that are built to be "gaming rigs." In fact this is common across the whole subgenre of sandbox citybuilding games where the terrain is dynamic (and hence there's a high load for pathfinding, task-checking and so on -- in other words, any kind of game where the simulation of the map/environment has to be detailed and can't be abstracted away.)

10 years ago I could load a Towns map (regardless of how built-up/busy it was) in seconds, now it takes me close to a minute to load a new map with nothing going on in it. I haven't pushed a classic "how many population until the game starts crying?" stress-test on my current computer, but I would guess that I'd start having unplayable issues around 100 townies as well. On my previous computer (so, more like 5 years ago), I stopped building new houses at 150 immigrants not because I was having issues running all of them, but because I simply had no use for any more and couldn't be bothered feeding more than that.

My current computer, like basically every computer I've ever had, is optimised towards processing power (CPU specifically, but also RAM clock rate and HDD read/write speed -- at every opportunity I've gone for speed over size), and it's kept up easily with modern games' processing requirements even when it misses the minimum processor spec. I'm finally starting to run up against new releases that I can't play on this machine, and that's purely because my graphics card doesn't support the latest and greatest triangle-crunching technology...

That has been, and I'm afraid will continue to be, a major downfall of this subgenre of games -- so many players just don't realise that their PCs are not actually "powerful" in the way they need to be in order to run these games well at high settings and large populations with lots going on in a map. It's not just Towns; the same thing happens with Stonehearth and Banished and Kindred and... well, actually of all the games I've played within this subgenre, issues of performance and "bugginess" (with no specific bug being labelled) have been not only commonplace but omnipresent.

I like to use an analogy based around cars: modern PCs are F1 racers, and games like Towns are a rally circuit. Put my old jeep of a PC up against a modern gaming rig on a "drag strip" type of game (i.e. one with huge graphics requirements and very little CPU processing to do) and yeah I'm going to clearly lag behind... but those aren't the games I care to play; and when it comes to the games I do like, my PC does great. But sadly, the choices that drive modern PC manufacturing (e.g. pushing as much as possible over to the GPU, relying on multi-core and virtual core processing, focussing more on thread width than single-calculation processing speed, and etc.) are starting to limit how effective that approach is even when I go out of my way to build a "rally car" PC with plenty of thought put into how to improve the processing throughput rather than the graphical throughput.

When it comes to that 1k+ population town, I remember the guy explaining that he was running it on a "tractor" of a PC built out of an old server unit; I certainly wouldn't call a population that large a "reasonable" size hahah! The devs were blown away that the game didn't collapse just under the weight of its own memory allocation system for all the data associated with that many townies. I remember two key takeaways from the discussion regarding performance in large towns:

1) when it comes to computer hardware well-suited for this genre of game, speed > everything else. A fast CPU is better that one with more cores, faster cycling ram beats having lots of slow ram, and a fast HDD/SSD makes a major improvement.

2) the key to improving performance is to shift the decision-making so that the computer doesn't have to "decide" too much -- use the tools at your disposal to make those decisions obvious (e.g. putting storage containers in workshops so that townies have somewhere to drop newly-crafted products straight away; locking townies into job groups or specific jobs so that the computer doesn't have to pick who to send for the next job, things like that) and that leaves the computer free to do the grunt work which is the one thing it's much better at doing than a human is.