Massive slowdown

by **G Admiral Thrawn** » 22 Apr 2010, 18:46

When I play a particularly creature heavy deck (like my colorblind Aeriel Assault Deck, a 217 card monstrosity, black/white deck with almost nothing but fliers- save for 4 Royal Assassins and 4 Sorceress Queens- and supporting artifacts, like The Hive ect). My problem is once you get a lot of creatures in play (especially if the majority are Wasp tokens, and gets even worse if both players are making wasps), the game slows to where pouring cold molasses is quicker. I once waited 5 minuted for an attack by ONE Zephyr Falcon to start (hit the "Attacker fast effect phase") during the Arkazon fight. Had to ctrl+alt+del because nothing was happening. It was irratating for 2 reasons. First, you can't save before fighting Arkazon (so you have to beat the last wizard in his castle, and his minions to GET to him), and in that duel he was down to 38 life. I shouldn't have a problem like that with a computer that runs games like WoW flawlessly. Not a problem with a game that's, what, 17 years old?

by **aww1979** » 23 Apr 2010, 04:34

I've seen the same thing happen on my computer once enough creatures hit play. It's one reason I don't use cards like Mycoloth much, even though it's great; it bogs the game down too much.

by **stassy** » 23 Apr 2010, 04:54

You could run with a Cray XT5-HE Opteron Six Core 2.6 GHz coupled with 224162 cores and 1759000 Gigaflops capacity, the result would be the same with your deck.

Don't forget that Shandalar was supposed to run on MSDOS, the game is limited by the developpers code and won't run better or be more bugfree if you just use it on a recent computer (2k bug ps3 anyone?).

We know that Shandalar has a memory bug that make it stale if your game take longer, it can't be solved because it's a coding issue from the original game.

by **monopoman** » 23 Apr 2010, 07:21

The game does not utilize the high end hardware that we now have in our systems. It will lag and sputter no matter what system you have when you get enough creatures out.

by **stassy** » 23 Apr 2010, 10:27

I think it's related somewhat to the maximum of cards in play, also AI often lock the game when too much lands are played even though there is few creatures out.

When we had the 256 token creatures bug with Kitchen fink I had no slowdown but while playing Momir I would often crash if more than 15 lands on each side were up.

by **EviL_CLonE** » 23 Apr 2010, 15:08

The explanation I have found is that when you have a lot of creatures in play, AI forces a game-crash because it doesn't want to lose...