Medieval 2 Discussion

[dusematic]

This game is pretty rad but Jesus, second hard reboot and I have a glorious comp.

[stray]

Seems fine here.

[Big Gulp]

Not one crash yet.  AMD processor, ATI GPU, Turtle Beach soundcard.  I'd start looking to my components being the problem.

[grebo]

Too much hot?

I have noticed that this game is a hellofa lot piggier than rome ever could be.

[stray]

Too much heat you mean??

Anyways, the game is big (two DVD's), but I think that's more to do with the campaign length.

[Trippy]

This game is pretty rad but Jesus, second hard reboot and I have a glorious comp.

Turn off Automatic restart on system failure if you haven't already so you can see if there's a particular program or DLL that's causing a BSoD.

[dusematic]

Dude I'm not getting BSoD's.  My entire computer just powers down.  I think it may be overheating.  I don't know why.


nvidia 7800
amd x2 4200
2 GB Ram


I mean, I feel like I should be handling this game and making it my bitch.  I don't even have the settings turned all the way up.  I hate my life.

[dusematic]

Someone tell me how to check the temperature of my cpu before I kill myself.  And tell me what my danger zone is if you know off hand. 

[Trippy]

Dude I'm not getting BSoD's.  My entire computer just powers down.  I think it may be overheating.  I don't know why.


nvidia 7800
amd x2 4200
2 GB Ram


I mean, I feel like I should be handling this game and making it my bitch.  I don't even have the settings turned all the way up.  I hate my life.

Oh, you said reboot, not power down. If it's shutting off then it's likely to be a power supply issue or a problem with your heat sink/fan on your CPU.

[Trippy]

Someone tell me how to check the temperature of my cpu before I kill myself.  And tell me what my danger zone is if you know off hand. 

What's your motherboard? Many come with utilities for monitoring that sort of thing. Or you can try something like SpeedFan.

Edit: for your CPU 65C is the upper end of the safe operating range. When it's idling it should be around ~40C (depending on ambient temperature, quality of heat sink/fan, etc.). 70C+ is like DANGER DANGER SHUT OFF COMPUTER NOW.

[Strazos]

Just for reference, your hardware probably is owning the game specs...before something overheats on you.

Are you fans spinning? Are they clogged with dust? Is you cpu HSF mounted correctly (can sometimes be hard to tell if it's not seated right)? Do you have all kinds of cables and shit messing with airflow in your case? Do you keep the case in a very closed-in area?

[Big Gulp]

What's your motherboard? Many come with utilities for monitoring that sort of thing. Or you can try something like SpeedFan.

Yep, there's usually a temperature monitor in your BIOS, or you could download a copy of SiSoft Sandra.

[dusematic]

I don't think it's a PSU problem because I have an Antec SLK3800B case which includes a 400 watt PSU.  From what I've read, that's overkill for a rig like mine. 

My mobo is Abit KN8-Ultra. 


PS. sorry for the gaffe, I'm getting system shutdowns, not reboots or BSoD's.



edit: Sounds like I'm overheating from what you gents are saying.

[Big Gulp]

edit: Sounds like I'm overheating from what you gents are saying.

It may be your video card.  I've had computers just reboot out of the blue from dying GPU's in the past, but it's hard to say.  Could also be your power supply.  If you have spare parts laying around I'd start switching stuff around one by one to rule out specific components as the problem.

[Trippy]

You should have the ASUS Probe software which will show you and graph your CPU and MB (typically the primary chipset) temps. If it isn't the power supply then it's possible your heat sink isn't attached properly or the fan has stopped spinning or is spinning too slowly. When an AMD 64 gets too hot it'll shut itself down to prevent permanent damage to itself.

[dusematic]

Dude I think I figured it out.  Opened up my case and one of the wires had gotten sucked into the mobo fan, I tugged it out and it started spinning again.  CRAZY.  I'm guessing that was the problem.  Now I'm looking for something to tie back this cable with.  I got my software dev friend to build this baby for me and we drank a bottle of rum while I watched him work on it.  I think by the end he probably didn't give a shit about the cabling.



edit: christ i hope i didnt ruin my gear, who knows how long my crap has been running without  a fan on the cpu.

[Strazos]

As it has been said, the newer CPUs will shut themselves down to avoid damage. If you haven't been gaming much, and this is the first time it's started to happen, you're probably fine. I have a similar situation with my video card at the moment, except the fan is simply dead instead of being stuck.

Luckily, the heatsinks on the card work well enough to passively cool the card enough to do anything that doesn't involve heavy 3D work, such as web browsing or watching videos. The only game I have that I can play with no problems is Baldur's Gate. Even Planescape has too much going on, and will shut my card down.

[stray]

I'd like to just say that this is probably the most stabile "new game" I've played in awhile.

[Big Gulp]

Now I'm looking for something to tie back this cable with. 

Twist ties.  Easier to remove than zip cords.

[dusematic]

Right on man, that's exactly what I ended up doing.  Thanks to everyone who responded.  I definitely would have freaked out and called a tech guy to come down and he would have been here 5 seconds, opened my box up, removed the offending cable, and then charged me 75 dollars.   WORD.


By the way, after I tied back the cable, I gamed blissfully for four straight hours with not hiccups.

[stray]

I'm finding myself playing the TB map game more often than before. The only battles I've opted to play were against a few rebel cities and a crusade (zerged Antioch with a bunch of crazy pilgrims heh).

[dusematic]

I think crusades are way overpowered.  It's so easy to get awesome cheap guys that are unlimited, you have double movement speed, and you are sacking orthodox/muslim cities for like 10-40,000 florins a pop with no fear of reprisal.  Game over.

[stray]

The Middle East starts getting hard and expensive to maintain afterwards though.

Hey! It's just like Iraq.

[dusematic]

Nah, I just sack them and move on to the next like a horde of locusts.  They have no defense for this hge 20 unit army of crusading badasses.  Nobody can compete with it.  When you're hiring mercs on the go that are better than anything else out there and far cheaper there is nothing they can do.


Maybe its different on very hard difficulty.

[stray]

Ah, see, I stopped short of Jerusalem and Antioch..,,Then tried to maintain them, send priests out into the land to convert people, and tried to build up Jerusalem's garrison well enough so I could access the Templars.

I just ended up getting assassinated for it though.

Not sure how the Templar works actually. After I took Jerusalem, it said I had them, but since the city was torn to shit, I had nothing to work with.

[Big Gulp]

Nah, I just sack them and move on to the next like a horde of locusts. 

Exactly.  I just assumed it was still the same as Rome where actually having population leads to nothing but headaches, so I sack every city and then tax the holy piss out of 'em to keep them unhappy and not breeding.

[dusematic]

It's not that bad.  That actually doesn't work because one of the main concerns for a town is public order.  Buildings boost this and things like taxes and paganism and population lower it.  If your public order dips, it can spiral out of control especially with enemy priests/imams preaching against your or stirring up heretics.  They usually sned assassins too.  So you have to keep them happy, and you won't make any money if you don't have any people  The reason is, you need a certain amount of people to uprade the city walls (village-->town, town-->small city, etc.) which gives you acces to better shit.  So population is a necessity, although less so for castle settlements,


Stray, next time you go on a crusade,  stay on the defensive in your main base, then hire crusader seargeants and crusader knights on the way to the Holy Land.  You should be able to get 20 by the time you get there.  Then just go from town to town sacking them and moving on.  You can usually start with Constantinople, just watch out for desertion.  If you start getting desertion, book it to the Holy Land and get Byzantium on the way back.


I think I found a bug, in that I sacked every middle easternl city on hard difficulty with ease, then brought my army back 100 years later and I still wasn't paying upkeep on it because it was a crusade army, but the crusade was long over.  Good way to make money to build up infrastructure of your core empire though, and as an added benefit, you basically leave all the factions in your wake in tatters, and rebels basically slice up the remainders.



At any rate, IMO it is definitely not worth it to try and hold your gains unless you're trying to play how you think a real army would, or if you're playing a long campaign with England or someone who needs a Holy Land province for victory.

[stray]

I eventually held on to Jerusalem, and ended up doing the hit 'n' run thing this time now. Looks like everything from Gaza to Antioch is under control. Problem now is, the homeland (France) is being shit upon by Milan, Spain, and Germany. I'm just spread too thin and/or don't have the right alliances.

[dusematic]

Well, being spread thin shouldn't be a problem if you're sacking every city and moving on.  Crusade armies don't count towards your army upkeep costs so it's all free money minus the chump change it costs to hire some replacement mercs now and again. 


Essentially what I'm saying is, a crusade army should be self sufficient, it should at least be paying for itself.  Now if you get bogged down with trying to build up the infrastructure of all these middle eastern cities and econ them, that would hurt you.  Pretend like it's the fourth crusade and start by sneak sacking constantinople.  Be dirty about it and you funnel the money to your home provinces.  Apply the same principle to the New World when that opens up. 


It's kind of cheap almost, I'm gonna try playing on the hnardest campaign difficulty and see if it changes.  Reminds me of being Spain in Colonization where you just made a colony by the Aztecs and one by the Incas and then raped their asses for like 15-20K a pop.  Only this is worse.

[dusematic]

Word on the street is a new patch is coming very soon which should adress this and some small concerns about battlefield AI.  It's a sweet game though, to be fair, it's only incremental over Rome, but I'm a slut for this series since the original Medieval War 1. 


Another thing I like about this game is that the campaign AI is pretty ruthless. I mean, if you're the Moors, and you have all the pretenses of a sweet relationship with Spain and Portugal, don't be fooled.  They will strike at you as soon as they perceive an opening.  All the while they are undermining you with assassinations and religous unrest.   They will put your merchants out of business and spy incessantly on you.  It can get pretty hardcore and it can be difficult to keep an empire together when you start having rebellions and then your neighbor gets ballsy because they just allied with your other neighbor and decides to attack. 

[Big Gulp]

They will strike at you as soon as they perceive an opening.  All the while they are undermining you with assassinations and religous unrest.

True dat.  I'm playing as the Holy Roman Empire, and had a pretty sweet arrangement set up; marital alliances with France and Poland to secure my two big borders (I'd already removed Milan from the game after they attacked me), and a non-marital alliance with Byzantium since hey, a two emperors league sounded cool.  I figured since I had my main problem borders on Europe taken care of I could concentrate on taking the war to the infidel Moors down in N. Africa.  Wrong.  Byzantium shows their true colors and besieges Zagreb.

But they're paying, my friends, they're paying.  They only have 3 provinces left and I've allied with the Turks just to further twist the knife in.

[dusematic]

You go girl.  But if I can be serious for a moment, what difficulty are you playing on?

[Big Gulp]

But if I can be serious for a moment, what difficulty are you playing on?

Medium for the campaign, hard for the battles.

[stray]

Hilarious. One of my cities got swarmed by a big German army....I have barely any troops in the city (something like 400 of mine vs 1500 of them). The moment they started laying seige, I decided to preemptively attack (before they could build siege equipment).

It first started off with my archers picking their archers off at a distance. I then ran out of ammo, and couldn't think of what to do.

Figured since the archers were useless, I decided to open the gate and lure their army closer so my castle's built in artillery could start picking them off. It became this cat and mouse thing for awhile, my archers finally sacrificed to the full....So I then decided to kite with my spearmen. For some reason, that brought their entire army closer. My spearmen made it back inside the gates, and now the enemies are just getting pegged by the castle's artillery.

Been letting it run at 3x speed for about an hour now. I've killed 60% of their army so far, while mine is down 30%. Maybe in a few hours I might win this battle. 

[Strazos]

That is perhaps the only thing I disliked about the series - if you cuold not win a battle (manually) quickly, it could be drawn out for hours.



Oh, I hated how rebel armies would just pop up all over the pace late in the game. After I went through the trouble to free eastern Europe/Asia Minor from the Mongols, they rebel against me.