Loading Times

[Dark Sun Gwyndolin]

So, I own all of the modern Total Wars, Shogun 2 through Three Kingdoms, except for this and Attila. My current PC is obsolete and lacks a large SDD, and I'm waiting for the 30XX or Zen 3 GPU's before upgrading. I can run Shogun 2 and Rome 2 just fine, but Warhammer 1/2 and Three Kingdoms have annoyingly long loading times (upwards of 5 minutes, vs. sub-15 seconds for Shogun / Rome). How does Britannia's loading times compare? Can I run it acceptably on an HDD, or will I need an SSD?

[Protagoras]

It sounds like your ssd/hdd is going bad. It should not take that long.

The loading times are fine with thrones, rather fast tbh.

[Dark Sun Gwyndolin]

Originally posted by SGT_pawn:

It sounds like your sdd/hdd is going bad. It should not take that long.

The loading times are fine with thrones, rather fast tbh.

Maybe it's the CPU or RAM then. i5-4760, 8GB RAM. I don't know what the main governor is for loading times. Again, Shogun 2 and Rome 2 load lightning-fast.

That said, my PC is definitely obsolete. I'm going to get Britannia on the Summer Sale regardless, since the new GPU's are rumored for late summer and I'm unlikely to get a better deal between the Summer and Christmas sales. I'm just wondering whether to bother installing it. Thanks anyway.

[Protagoras]

Originally posted by Yoshino Himekawa:

Originally posted by SGT_pawn:

It sounds like your sdd/hdd is going bad. It should not take that long.

The loading times are fine with thrones, rather fast tbh.

Maybe it's the CPU or RAM then. i5-4760, 8GB RAM. I don't know what the main governor is for loading times. Again, Shogun 2 and Rome 2 load lightning-fast.

That said, my PC is definitely obsolete. I'm going to get Britannia on the Summer Sale regardless, since the new GPU's are rumored for late summer and I'm unlikely to get a better deal between the Summer and Christmas sales. I'm just wondering whether to bother installing it. Thanks anyway.

Get a cheaper HDD and test the games that load slower, by installing them on the new drive.

It could be ram, I guess, but I'd assume the other games would also load slower. I doubt it's your CPU that is causing problems with... load times. Especially if nothing else is a problem on your computer.

[Adam Beckett]

I run TW games on low-speed HDDs, on SSDs and on RAMDisk. (Single-Player)

Shogun 2 was the slowest of all the TW games, before the 'big patch'. Attila seemed to have been the most 'taxing', but not worse when it comes to loading times.

Shogun 2 would take up and even above 30 seconds straight (continuous multiplayer seeking turned off, of course). These days, on a shingled (slow) HDD it never exceeds 10-15 seconds max. Of course, it always FEELS SLOWER.

I am talking about the loading times it takes for battles. Not start-up loading, nor time between two turns.

The more recent TW war games (past Rome 2) - despite being huge - seem to run with even more optimized code block trickery = they are loading fairly fast, across the board.

TW Britannia never was a 'heavy weight'. The map and battle maps and the assets (models, terrain, sound etc) are all on the lighter side, so the loading times are also not dramatic.

I just played TWBritannia earlier today, comparing the loading time between slow HDD (Western Digital Blue = 5400rpm) vs running the game completely from RAM (1/10th of SSD speed) and while, yes, RAM is still faster, the HDD did it's job sub-10 seconds.

SSD

Battles: <10 seconds (Large Armies)
Savegames <5 seconds (50+ Turns)

HDD (slow)

add 3-5 seconds to above results

Anything that is not a online/multiplayer game taking up more than 60 seconds, should be investigated and would point to

a) hardware is below recommended specs, or
b) driver issues (incl. OS: Win7?)

The last game that took longer than 1 minute to load in Single Player on PC was ANNO 2070, according to game testing websites. Was a while ago.

[Mile pro Libertate]

The load times in ToB are much faster for me than they are in Attila or Shogun 2.

[easytarget]

Same here.