i have an overclocked celeron running at 450mhz on a 100mhz bus and early on in a game everything runs lightning fast. as the game progressess, however, it slows to a crawl.
one of the reasons for the slowdown comes from the fact that as the world population grows, so does the load on the processor. (remember that every unit in the game has attributes that must be tracked and more importantly each has AI processing to do)
the bigger problem though is the fact that AOK is a memory hog. when i run the game with 4 or 5 computer opponents, it will easily eat up over 100megs of ram. even if you have 128 megs of ram, windows will eventually allocate and use a swap file.
it is especially bad if you are running less than 128 megs.
to see what i'm talking about run sysmon during one of your AOK games and watch as your swap file grows.
you might think that going from real to virtual memory wouldn't have that great of an impact, but remember that ram speed is measured in nano seconds (billionths 10^-9) vs hd access speed of milliseconds (thousandths 10^-3). that's a big difference!
