Okay, I know about the slowdown fixes that affect later parts of the game (dragon's eye, the goblin warrens) but I'm finding the game is moving at crawling pace right from the start. Even wandering around the Targos docks with a single character with no NPCs on screen the game is painfully slow - I click where I want to go and my character just stands there, a few seconds later he starts moving in a really jerky way that takes forever to move anywhere.

I played through the game before and never noticed any problems in this respect unless masses of enemies were on the screen at the same time but now it's happening all the time. Anyone know how to sort it out? I've tried lowering the colour depth, turning off the sound and everything else that might make a difference but it doesn't seem to help. Boosting the frame rate doesn't help either.

Drop down the path search nodes to say 32.000. That works fine for me on a Duron 750.

Did you also try with disabling hardware acceleration for the sound? Also background programs can be source of such stuff (especially key capture trojans), so my suggestion is that you try with disabling all background processes while playing the game.

Slowdown fixes are to be applied only in special case on some machines where the certain script command doesn't work properly (engine problem). Those can not change the general game slowdown.

Sometimes are those slowdowns accompanied by "huge number of turns" - I have "pause" on turn end on. And I must unpause many-many times in such cases. I noticed it 5 or 6 times (not worth to deploy a patch). Some characters were "mostly" invisible - it seemed, they were rendered only in some frames. The sound was OK.

But this "huge number of turns" did catch me some more times. No video or sound problems, and turning pause on turn end helped -> the game went on smoothly (only the communication area was "crazy") - it stopped after some minutes, and I turned "pause on turn end" on.

I understand, that this topic is oriented on HW problem. But every diagnostics can help.

Thanks for the tips. I disabled the background features and lowered the search nodes and everything nips along at a merry pace now. No sound alas, although once I figure out which one of my applications handles the sound I should be well away.

Thanks again!

Had the exact problems for which Slowdown_Fix was written. Every one of the areas which might be affected... were.

The "overrides" did the trick.

Sys Specs: P4 @ 2GHz, 768MB RAM, NVidia GeForce2 APG w/64MB VRAM, SB Live!, 40GB ATA-100 EIDE (my "game disk", as opposed to my "main disk").

Thanks Again! (I've contributed via PayPal, and encourage everyone who uses this site to do the same.)