very true, next i decided to try and avoid the malice all together but that just had me running in circles around the well, and every time it did manage to hit me it would freeze the game for a while. here is how i finally avoided the conflict all together...

Took my one fleet and divided it into 3
bugged out in all directions, scuttling everything
the AI suddenly notices i have a fleet pushing its terrirory
AI takes entire massive fleet (leaving 5 purges) through the worm hole
I jump back to my asteroid saving it with 300 health
Fortunatly the AI is as clumsy as it is stupid

It seems hellbent on keeping that wad of ships together, so im going to try some hit and runs and try and break it apart... for both the sake of my fleet and my CPU. I have learned a valuable lesson about the horrors of Malice and grouping your fleet in a huge ball when trying to fend off Advent.

Either way, I would have liked to have tried to have just taken it head on, i would have won it eventually and learned how to properly defend in that situation. Every time Malice hit it was unplayable. I'd sacrafice winning the game to win that battle, because well its just a game

I just added a post to the General forum entitled Clogged Furball, which described an identical problem I had last night, in a TEC vs. Vasari battle involving about 400 total ships.

It's not a computer problem. It's a game problem. I have a Dell XPS 600 gaming rig that is beyond the recommended specs.

In my case, the game did not lock up. It appeared to keep running. And after about 10 minutes of real time, I was able to warp my ships away from the battle and go on to win the game. But while the two mammoth fleets were at each other's throats at one planet, not a single ship was lost on either side, although the battle appeared to be raging, strikecraft were flying about, etc.

I suspect the game sets up some kind of hashtable for each battle, and some battles overrun the table due to too many variables. In my battle, which involved perhaps 1100 to 1200 supply points for each fleet, there were more than 100 air wings. I suspect that's more than the 1.04 engine can handle.

I think SD/IC should make a CPU benchmark based on these simulated battles, it seems we need some kind or way to gauge the best CPU for the game and to see at what point multicore benefits fall off. Can someone mod one???

But kjpwv, haven't you read the responses on my /General/Clogged Furball thread? It has been loudly stated that the problem is not the game but your lack of a computer that is lightyears beyond the recommended specs. He he. You need a computer with more acronyms!

sorry for dbl post, but instead of 'i'd HAVE to think' i meant i HATE to think that the fix would be to back off AI routines.

Is there a chance your comp is just overheating under high load? Have you run a stress test?

You could try opening up the case and pointing an extra fan in there to see if it helps. You never know, sometimes obvious things like this cause problems.

I recently had a computer freezing up under load and it turned out my GPU fan had completely broken and stopped spinning due to being too dusty.

just played around for 2 hours and CPU temp is at 42C and GPU is at 72C, pretty standard for me under load. I have a 95nm Windsor so its always a bit on the hot side, only gone above 50 a handful of times 10-15 min into a stability test. Have the CPU at 3.0, have the GPU at stock, that monster gets hot when i oc it but I only do for FPS stuff. I have a long haired cat so I open up and clean my computer parts way to often for my tastes, but i'm obsessive about that. Stopped smoking a month ago, amazing how much cleaner it all stays now

And for more...

I don't know why I'm so obsessed with the battle but I played it out last night while watching the Pens game, god it took forever, freezing all the time, every intermission I ran over and did some fighting/pausing. I did manage to micro out just enough clensing brilliance that I won the fight losing 1 Cap... and 500 supply of my fleet. The AI took losses to where the game was over, just had to run around cleaning up/resuppling the fleet. Worked all night, just got home and finished up the game. Here is another save, my final invasion of the AI home planet. My fleet is huge, the AI has little left, but the battle does pause for me for about 10 sec twice. Once when the AI fires off Malice and once when I do. WWW Link. Very least you may get some good screenies from it. if there is some more bit of proof needed that there is a CPU problem with Malice, I'd be happy to provide whatever. Sleepy time.

KP

FYI, IC acknowledged looking into it in another thread.

Here you go. Reply #1. He also alluded to it again on the last page of the clogged furball thread

I had a game that I was finishing up and was really disappointed to have slow down/freeze up on me. Scenario is pretty much the same as the thread authors post. Advent vs. Advent, massive fleet vs. massive fleet at one of my planets. My first small game on hard and I don't have the patience to wait the lag out. I have the G15 keyboard so i was watching my CPU and Mem usage, and I still had about 25% of my mem at all times and only one of my core's seemed to be spiking up to full usage. All of the rest of my cores were pretty much at less than 15% load at all times. 4 gigs memory, and a Q6600 OC'ed to 3.51GHZ stable on Vista Ultimate 64bit. Im only using a Geforce 7950GT but like previous posts have stated, lowering graphic settings has no effect.

My computer locks alot on big battles. I notice when I scroll in and try to build turret unit at the start of the battle it locks it a lot. I have had no problems with Company of Heroes, another resource heavy game. My computer main stats are

XP Pro SP2 and always updated
7900 gt
2gb dual channel ram
3.20 ghz celeron (never been an issue before)
1440x 900 widescreen

I dont OC. I have updated video drivers several times, those seemed to crash it hard before.

Probably 1.1 if they figured out what's causing it and how to tweak it, or they'll likely be releasing the MP Sync hotfix soon but I doubt it will go in with it.

i'm just impatient It really is gamebreaking for me, which sucks because I love the game. Just been messing around with random mods and not really playing the game, if its going to mess up whenever an advent fleet with a mothership is encountered, which it has twice now... why bother. Setting it to TEC/Vassari doesn't do it for me, hell 3 races are too few but 2 is blah. Been playing other stuff, but would like to play Sins again.

KP