Finally spent the money

[blayzer13]

whelp I finally found myself with more cash than I have ever had at one time (16th bday ftw) and I went out and bought an 80$ graphics card (original prices 135$) it is an Nvidia 7600X running on agp 8x. my comp had the basic video card that gave colors or whatnot..regardless it sucked.

after installing this my game has turned AMAZING, i have spent my time with it seeing its capabilities in scenario editor. I did a large scale ship battle with 1 of each ship vs 1 of each ship and managed to do it WITHOUT ANY LAG AT MAX SETTINGS. now for those of you who do not understand the awe that i am in, before this card if I did a ship battle it would take about 15 min for a 1v1 due to the lag (stupid pirate mission in campaign takes me close to 3 hrs).

in addition my combat does not lag AT ALL so would anyone be willing to give me some ui tips of what should be turned on/off or what settings stuff should be at.. and could I get some general micro tips, treating me like I know nothing would be preferred so I can get the most understanding out of it.

thanks

[StrokeyBlofeld]

Depends. Are you using a custom UI or the standard one? I have pretty much everything turned on in my custom UI.......

[I__CHAOS__I]

happy for you blayzer, I know when I bought my new high end comp, gaming completely changed. If there is one thing that really upsets me in this game, it's lagg, it really drives me crazy like a coconut

anuway, get some recorded games out, I find that the best way to give pointers, if you want, we'll play a few tonight.

[KingKaramazov]

Yes, get some recorded games posted and I'll give you some critiques.

[ZoRPrimE]

I played through vanilla AOE3 on that card ran great yours sounds like it's doing even better maybe you had a higher RAM version.

I'm no micro master but a lot of times when Nav's whooped me like his army was 3 times bigger instead of close to equal in size. All that I notice is he keeps backing up moving into fire range then backing up again. I noticed somethign else too he can actually figure out what unit i've targeted and send that unit running off somewhere else while the rest of his army broadsides mine.

That being said here is a good online micro guide with pictures. Some moves work great on people but the AI figures em out instantly.

http://www.gamereplays.org/community/in ... pic=129038

read the guide even if you don't play russians a lot of what it covers isn't russia specific.

[KingKaramazov]

Yea, most of micro is moving different parts of your army around to gain and advantage, making the enemy units run around as you kill them, and hitting and running with ranged units.

Being able to micro skirmishers is part of why they dominate this game so much.

You should definitely watch some expert recs to get an idea of what they do with micro. Flanking with cavalry, protecting cannons with melee units, focus firing certain types of units on the units they are meant to counter, and doing hit and run with ranged units are the basic elements of micro, and you'll see all of those in expert recs.

[RascalJones]

I'm upgrading too. For free!

A friend of mine (former clanmante Ov3nmitt) just bought the mac-daddy Dell gaming machine because his hard drive was going out on his old machine, and he's going to pass on the old machine shell to me for free.

That shell has 1GB PC800 RDRAM and a nice 512MB video card. Processor is the same P4 2Ghz, but the better card and more memory should greatly improve my gaming experience.

Just bought a laptop too. Been playing a little bit on it, but it's not really a gaming laptop, so although it's better than my old machine, I should probably not use it as a primary gaming machine.

[blayzer13]

hmm my post earlier today never went through, ill post some recs for game help but for starters I would like settings suggestions for the ui you get to change by clicking on "options" from the ingame menu.
also what do you guys do for micro? ctrl groups or what and how do you use them effectively. any suggestions on how to practice micro skills like a battle that can only be won with good micro?
or do you use something besides control groups? Im lag free now so I can master w/e skills are needed now im at school for a while so i cant open the link but once i get home ill check it out, hopefully i can get a game in tonight.

my card is a nvidia 7600 512 graphics card

also i can explain how nav knows what units you targeting, when theyre shooting there is a setting that shows the trail of the shots so all you have to do is shoot once with 1 guy and it shows the target, not 100% sure if thats what he does but thats what it sounds like

[Navarone_Guy]

Huh? Blayzer, I actually have no idea what you're talking about.

[blayzer13]

=p

[Comadevil]

[quote=""Navarone_Guy""]Huh? Blayzer, I actually have no idea what you're talking about. [/quote]

THe last sentence he talks about the smoke effects..

But all about is that he has a new garaphics card, he doesn't lag anymore and has now a much greater online experience and has to try everything now (micro wasn'T possible with his big lag)

[blayzer13]

thanks for the summary coma lol pretty much sums up massive amount of unnecessary blabbering.