New player problems

[Zerosan]

Hi to everyone.

I recently purchased GI via download here at Ageod. I was very impressed by AACW, and therefore I decided to buy GI as Dark Ages history is such a fascinating subject for me.

However, I have some basic problems. First let me start by saying that the concept and scope of the game are excellent. I have not seen this period covered by any worthwhile computer game previously, and I can see that a tremendous amount of research work must have gone into this project.

It is therefore a little disappointing that the manual and general interface intructions are pretty poor IMHO. I understand that intuitive game interfaces are a subjective matter, but there is little in the way of "this key does that" type of instuction for the game. I cannot see how logistic points are allocated, how buildings are constructed (or even what those building are supposed to be in some cases) or how to keep my armies supplied.

That however is not the biggest problem. The game on my computer is virtually unplayable in practically all but the smallest scenarios. The game stutters and freezes sometimes for 30 seconds or longer, the cursor speed magnifing this problem by scrolling the map wildly once the game does respond, only to freeze and stutter again seconds later. The music stutters as well, making the whole game a painful experience. The response to the command keys is therefore delayed or frozen which only contributes to the problem.

My computer is at least twice the recommended requirements (Windows XP Home latest service pack, 2.6ghz processor, 1024DDRAM, 128RAM Nvidia graphics card, Soundblaster Live), so it cannot be a performance issue. I have tried uninstalling and reinstalling the game twice but this makes no difference. Additionally, the pop up message windows appear grayed out so that the writing cannot be seen against the map background and any choices cannot be made or confirmed. When this happens, the only thing that can be done is to exit the game, and then this can only be done via Control/alt/del to the task manager. I do not want to try changing drivers since every other program on the computer works fine.

I am not a computer expert, but this sounds like an initialisation or installation problem to me. I understand that there is a patch, but I would have thought that a purchased made within the last few days would have been patched up to the latest requirements?

I don't wish to sound negative because these problems are probably easily remedied - and the games looks like a corker if only I could play it!

Anyone have any ideas or suggestions?

[Zerosan]

Thanks for all your help.

I guess I'll just have to uninstall it and file it away.

[PhilThib]

Sorry for having missed your post (our forum was down due to hacker's attack half of the week and we failed to see all communication during this time).

We'll have to ask the dev for the performance issues and suggestion. Have you though to de-activate (when playing) firewalls and antiviruses softwares...these are known to cause the main freezes... let us know if it works.

Logistic points and building can only be purchased by Kingdoms and Empires, not Barbarians. Building are constructed in economic mode and there is a tooltip on each one in order to give you indication about their use and requirements, as well as their benefits.
Logistic points are required to move your armies, and are purchased via the nation's management window.

[calvinus]

My apoligises for having missed your post too.

An immediate suggestion I can give you, as Philippe did, is to deactivate all firewalls / antivirus programs. Some people reported problems very similars to yours, despite having a good PC.

Try also playing in windowed mode (use the Setup program you will find in the game folder). So, when playing in windowed mode, you can execute the task manager in order to check if there is a resident program that is "stealing" CPU...

If you indentify that program, you know the cause of GI loss of performance. Some firewalls/antivirus program, indeed, slow down the I/O and RAM access operations performed by the game.

[gwgardner]

Go to the Great Invasions folder and there you will find setup.exe. click on that, and you can set various parameters. Fiddle with those.