I recently bought MoM as I loved MOO 1/2 and hadn't had the chance to play this. The out of the box install went fine, but the game has a several second delay between turns


I'm running it on a toaster laptop with Vista (!) and integrated graphics, but when I play MOO2, clicking turn is instantaneous (in fact, there's a setting in that game that auto turns if nothing important is happening, and it cycles at 10 turns/sec).

How can MoM be so much slower? I tried changing overlay to other options in the display dropdown, changing cycles from max to 10k up to 50k, disabling music, windowing, changing scaler, as others have suggested. However, there is still a 5 - 10 second delay between turns in the early game. This is just completely crushing the gameplay and makes the game unplayable. God knows what the delay would be like later.

Any other suggestions would be much appreciated.

I can't answer your question as I've never had the problem you describe, and I've never had a problem with long turns even very late in the game.

My only suggestion is, don't give up. This game's been around a long time, and someone can probably help you. If you don't find an answer here, check over on the MoM forum at RealmsBeyond:

http://www.realmsbeyond.net/forums/forumdisplay.php?fid=15

If you figure it out, tell us how you did it. Then the next person who has the same problem will have a solution to find.

Good luck!

In DOSbox, use core=dynamic and cycles=max. This gives the best performance.

I don't know why you are getting such a delay between turns. Nobody else does, until the late game when the computer players have hundreds of units.

Thanks for the advice but I have tried this. I'm using an old laptop, but as I said it runs MOO2 flawlessly.

Also, 'nobody else does' is not true. I've seen several posts online, including GoG, talking about multi-second delays between turns even at the early game that make it unplayable. It's a known issue, not some fringe case.

Did you install the extra updates with Windows update? Those solved a lot of performance and such issues with old games for me. You will need to run Windows update manually to get a list of them.

Please explain. I'm using Vista. Pretty sure it's fully updated and in fact no longer supported.

Not all MS updates are installed automatically. I think the others were called optional in English. Among those were several that made programs work better but they were not considered critical. Vista will recieve security updates for another six months. After that you might want to either take that computer offline or install Linux. You can dual boot too and use Linux for online and Vista for old Windows games :-) but that was a bit off-topic, sorry.

Thanks for the quick response. How do I install these optional updates? Is it not just an issue with my integrated graphics chip (i.e. this will never work without me upgrading).

I have decent desktop PC but I travel a huge amount so the laptop is ideal (I don't want to buy and travel with a new laptop either)

I cannot remember where things were in Vista but find the Windows or Microsoft Updater and do a search for updates and then change to the tab (I think it was in the form of a tab) with optional updates and select all but those you are very certain you do not need/want.

I cannot promise you this will fix your problems but that should be sound advice for Windows XP, Vista and 7.

I am away from home a lot myself so know how it is.

This is more-or-less correct for Windows 7. You could miss the optional updates if you didn't look for them.

Like Themken, I don't know whether or not this will fix your problem here, but it's worth a shot.

I also agree that Linux is a good option for an old laptop if you ever get sick of Vista.

For some reason I can't download updates for Vista now. I guess MS has finally stopped supporting this version. Am I sh!t out of luck?

I'm not a Vista user so I can't say for sure, but a cursory search of Microsoft's product support lifecycles doesn't reveal anything about abandoning updates.

Maybe you've got some other, underlying problem.

Despite being an old thread it seems unresolved to me.

In old DOS It was an extremely disc heavy game that would benefit a lot from SmartDrive and even more from running the game on a RAMDISK where it ran completely fluentlly - been there, did that, it was pretty awesome.

Laptops, especially the olders ones like something installed with Vista would have its performance severely hampered by a slow budget HDD, especially with this game. I've never used Vista, but in a Windows version short of DOS and SmartDrv it runs a lot better from a SSD than a HDD disc. Short of that I guess running DOSBOX and the game from a RAMDISK would definitely speed up your game tremendously - just don't forget to save the contents of the RAMDISK to a physical location, before shutting it down, in case you want to continue where you left of another time.

There are lots of different kinds of RAMDISK available both free and commercial ones supporting Windows all the way back to 95/98,