How many units?

[Guest Fury_007]

How many units can be put into a mission before it bogs down? It must be dependant on the pcs ram, cpu, right?

[Speed]

In our experience, you don't want to exceed about 600-800 units.

[VFA41_Lion]

Mine starts bogging down after 100 units. D:

[WildFire]

I have a lot of experience on this one. I created a mission called total war and tested the bejeesus out of it... It has 3 fronts of war with mixed infantry and armor +artillery +mortars +rockets. Both the attacking and defensive forces for each front have units that spawn after most die so the battle is continuous for about 40 minutes. A full wave of reinforce is around 200-500 units depending on which front/force. around 5+ waves, and timed correctly with a strong cpu/gpu no lag.

 

There are a few things to consider. One is contact. whenever there is a big battle the processor and gpu has to calculate and draw tracers, this can be a pretty heavy load, however if your not anywhere near it the gpu wont suffer. The size of AI groups makes a significant difference. A group of 100 units will not bog down the computer anywhere near as much as 20 groups of 5. If both groups are active then a ton of groups computing AI actions draws more resources than a single group obviously. Actions is a third, if they are in combat expect the load to be heavy, however just moving around or observer is going to basically be hardly any load on the cpu. Another issue is whether or not it is infantry or armor. Tanks and armor slow down everything more, I tried to intermix the groups but the tanks still slowed everything down. A big hit is once tanks get killed they begin to burn, and after a predetermined interval usually 15-20 minutes they smolder. So for each tank that is dead there are timers running for each one to generate smoke or smolder(two seperate animations) so it weighs on the cpu. That is a lot of calculation if you have a ton of units dead on the field, not to mention the weight on the gpu to draw all the smoke animations.

 

It is a tough question to answer depending on the scenario, as you can see there could be a multitude of possibilities. However I would say this, given a standard mission with a few simple objectives and a relatively simple map, no more than 30 AI aircraft and no more than speeds estimation on ground units, however if all are active your going to find it closer to the low hundreds most of the time(as if AI units are in direct combat with other AI units).

 

My .02.

[Guest Fury_007]

Thanks for the replies. I was planning on making a crazy mission with a crap load of tanks crossing the open fields. I guess I'll start at around 100 and see what happens.

[Bushmanni]

Triggers will also affect how the mission will run. "Part of coalition in zone"-trigger rule for example will hog resources worth many AI units. And the more you have units in the mission, the more that kind of trigger rule will slow down the mission. I had maybe 70 units in my mission and then added about 50 triggers and the triggers more than doubled the load on CPU.

[VFA41_Lion]

I have a lot of experience on this one. I created a mission called total war and tested the bejeesus out of it... It has 3 fronts of war with mixed infantry and armor +artillery +mortars +rockets. Both the attacking and defensive forces for each front have units that spawn after most die so the battle is continuous for about 40 minutes. A full wave of reinforce is around 200-500 units depending on which front/force. around 5+ waves, and timed correctly with a strong cpu/gpu no lag.

 

There are a few things to consider. One is contact. whenever there is a big battle the processor and gpu has to calculate and draw tracers, this can be a pretty heavy load, however if your not anywhere near it the gpu wont suffer. The size of AI groups makes a significant difference. A group of 100 units will not bog down the computer anywhere near as much as 20 groups of 5. If both groups are active then a ton of groups computing AI actions draws more resources than a single group obviously. Actions is a third, if they are in combat expect the load to be heavy, however just moving around or observer is going to basically be hardly any load on the cpu. Another issue is whether or not it is infantry or armor. Tanks and armor slow down everything more, I tried to intermix the groups but the tanks still slowed everything down. A big hit is once tanks get killed they begin to burn, and after a predetermined interval usually 15-20 minutes they smolder. So for each tank that is dead there are timers running for each one to generate smoke or smolder(two seperate animations) so it weighs on the cpu. That is a lot of calculation if you have a ton of units dead on the field, not to mention the weight on the gpu to draw all the smoke animations.

 

It is a tough question to answer depending on the scenario, as you can see there could be a multitude of possibilities. However I would say this, given a standard mission with a few simple objectives and a relatively simple map, no more than 30 AI aircraft and no more than speeds estimation on ground units, however if all are active your going to find it closer to the low hundreds most of the time(as if AI units are in direct combat with other AI units).

 

My .02.

 

The problem I find with 1 group of 100 units is placing the extra units. <_< Much easier to copy and paste, which then increases calculations.. D:

[LostOblivion]

I've found having many aircraft in the vicinity of the camera gives a lot of overhead in terms of GPU.