Any chance mid-to-late game performance will improve?

There is some strange FPS drops here and there. Big city battles seem to clog the system a lot, while there are no issues with "medium" battles. It's probably a memory issue or something? I think they said they are upgrading the system later for more memory? (32-bit to 64-bit)

Sorry, should have been clear, I meant performance on the world map, not the battle maps. Like, when you see more than two built up cities at once.

Would be great if there was an upgrade in the works.

Agreed. Does slow does a little on my machine too....but not horribily so. Just enough to notice that a slow down is occuring. But usually happens when I see 20+ cities on the map and I haven't done my dillagence in clearing out the monster spawns...

I run a dual core 3gig/3gig, winXP-32bit system with 3.25gigs of active RAM and a 512meg videocard. Nothing but the best for parts. Put it together in 2008 myself and the worst that has happened to it to date? My fan blew about a month ago.

Ah, restart once in a while if you do long games. I play huge games with tons of cities and don't have your issue, but the system clogs sometimes and I get some FPS drop, but then I just restart the game and it's fine again. 

I most recently started a game on a huge map with 25 Factions (excluding me) also on the map.

After a few turns which calculated much longer than usual (obviously caused by 25 enemy calculations) the game itself became hardly scrollable and was responding slower than normal. Hitting "turn" would often result in crashes..

My PC spec can handle Skyrim fully modded. So its most likely happening on your pcs too if you would try to play on a huge map with 25 opponents.

I have played Children of Storm without the NoVanillaSovs, so I had all the vanilla sovs plus the Children of Storm sovs.  I think there were 22 opponents, so 23 players including me.  As time passes it becomes slower, but it doesn't crash for a while and you can avoid crashes and eliminate slowdown by restarting the game about every half an hour or so.

I have 64-bit Windows 7, N1ghthavvk do you have 64-bit?  Currently in LH 64-bit allows a certain amount of extra memory to run the game.

Hmm, not quite the problems I'm having, but thanks for the replies.

The game isn't unstable- it doesn't crash, or behave in any weird way, and strictly speaking it's not un-playable. I'm just wondering why frames per second on the world map drop from 60 at the start of the game, to mid-20s by the time more than two cities and various creeps are being displayed. It's jerky as anything. I COULD just use the cloth map, but I feel I'd be missing a big part of the game. Scrolling to a less dense area of the map does, of course, make the framerate shoot back up, but it just makes the transition between areas more immersion breaking.

For the record, this is on an [email protected],a 560ti, and 8 gigs of RAM. I'm measuring frames per second with FRAPS. Restarting the game doesn't help, either. Nothing abnormal is running in the background. 

Cheers!

The big reason is as you "see" more of the map there are more draw codes.

the short answer to your question is yes, perfect should get better in future updates.  the biggest perf hit is the number of draw calls to, believe it not, trees. So there are a number of things we can do to address that.

Is it possible to set up a 'low quality trees' setting that would significantly or meaningfully reduce the strain on the draw codes?

Not for modders but that will likely be one of the solutions.

Just wanted to echo the workaround for the graphics memory usage/slowdown thing.  I've found that when the game starts lagging, a save, quit and restart fixes the problem for a bit, and performance improves quite a bit from how it was when you saved.  As I remember, a simple save then reload works too, but I've been in playtesting mode for a bit so I haven't done many late games lately, under 1.2...

Aha! Trees are the culprit! Thanks Frogboy for the reply. Here's hoping for some optimisations, or some new graphics options to help reduce the strain on the engine. 

tjashen, we may be experiencing different optimisation thingos here, but thanks for the tip.

Cheers!

To answer the question I was asked..

Yes I do have 64-bit

Another thing: Restarting every 30mins should not be the solution because once I closed the game I do not want to open it as much as before if you know what I mean.

Also Thank you Frog for answering this thread.

Well, I was playing a LH1.2 Children of Storm 23 player game with about half the map uncovered.  I played for a few hours at a reasonable speed and about 10 or so seconds each end of turn.  So I guess it is those trees slowing things down. <grin>

I made a mod that improves performance by reducing tile details.  You can get it here.  

http://fallenenchantress.nexusmods.com/mods/1866/

Unfortunately it doesn't work with existing save games since the save games seem to store the tiles in them, but it will work for new games.  This should help.

I'm happy to say that the mid to late game issues, while still there and annoying, don't happen as early as they used to. What is annoying though is some bugs that were previously fixed are cropping up again in 1.2, such as attacking a city and my sovereign is already dead and not even in the battle. VERY ANNOYING! I often play on the cloth map only and later in the game it keeps wanting to switch back to the other view instead of cloth map only. Many other things too, such as my sovereign automatically dies if I cast Curgens Volcano, this has been a bug forever why isn't it fixed? Gotta say though, despite the many small things that I'm disappointed haven't been addressed or fixed, LH is a great game and a huge improvement, thanks! I hope you keep working on it!