Just a small rant. Love VC, hate all the random crashes. I end up giving up and going back to M&B:WB, where everything seems faster and smoother. It's really quite disappointing; I figured by now they'd have a lot of stuff worked out. Graphics card up to date. For the heck of it ran the patch and was told the installed game was newer than the patch. Sigh. I really wanna get my viking on.

Hmm... I recently got both (VC & the main game to play VC) specifically to play VC. Good thing then that I got distracted by the Ribhinn Wars mod while browsing Nexus while DLing the installers :P

It doesn’t just SEEM faster and smoother – it is faster and smoother. From my limited experience:

Viking Conquest does a lot of impressive things with the M&B engine, actually. But it seems to be badly optimized and lacking in proper communication with the player (WHY is the game crashing exactly is an important question). Most of my crashes and freezes were resolved with lowering graphics quality (by a LOT – personally, still worth playing for me). That said, if I play for too long, the game still chokes on itself in a way I don’t experience with any other title that PC can handle. Other games either run or don’t run – this one stops running properly after I spend too much time with it.

I have no idea what the issues are exactly. I suspect RAM problems, but that’s based solely on what the problem was before the Reforged Edition. but I do know that – while the Reforged Edition is more stable than the original release – these issues haven’t been patched out. I have serious doubts they ever will be at this point.

The only solution I found to play without getting very frustrated is to use quicksave very liberally and to treat a crash later in the game as a signal to get off my chair and do something else.

It’s a shame, but the lack of polish and proper workmanship of the two expansions to M&B have successfully robbed me of any good faith I had for the developer – I probably won’t buy anything else from that “series” if it isn’t heavily discounted.

If I recall correctly, the Warband engine tends to load any assets needed at the first instance when they're needed and then keeps them in the memory indefinitely. IF that is true, then the relatively much higher demands made by Viking Conquest on the system could explain why it clogs up like that. Just as a data point: I set character detail to 50 and in battles with many troops eventually to 30. They look pretty awful, but I get used to bad graphics very easily. I'm more frustrated with the fact that even that abysmally angular look doesn't guarantee full stability.

That said, I have a very old PC (haven't bothered to upgrade for... I think seven years now).

Strange, I don't recall that many random crashes in VC - though they do happen.

What drives me nuts is that battles with lots of troops get awful stuttering when you approach the mass of troops. It's really nasty, since you can't really do anything except back away and let them fight until the numbers are thinned out somewhat.

It's really bad in sieges.

just a note to self: last night I played it for hours and hours, no problem.

tonight, two crashes within 90 minutes.

I've been eyeing Viking Conquest ever since release, but if you guys are having so many stability and performance issues on (presumably) much better rigs than mine, I guess it's time to scrap it from the whishlist for good.

Thanks for talking me out of it, I guess. xD

Hey, though there are stutters during sieges for me, that is because I maxed out the battle size. Apparently the engine was only originally supposed to be able to handle 300 soldiers total (I think - from the vanilla M&B) - but with Vikings mod they upped it to 750.

It's not a massive deal most of the time - and when it DOES go into stutter-mode, I either hang back and let everyone fight amongst themselves for a while (which is probably more "realistic" than charging in like a nutter), OR if I AM keen to get in there straight away then I lower the battle size temporarily (you can do this ALMOST on-the-fly).

There's been a new patch out only a week or so ago - that should help fix some things.

What I WILL say is that there are many, many things in the Vikings mod that could be easily added/modded/changed that could POTENTIALLY improve the game a lot. Luckily, there's a simple modding tool available that fixes the vast majority of (in my view) questionable design decisions.

In theory, the game could eventually be modded to "perfection" - I guess the Vikings mod added so much to "vanilla" M&B that most Viking "sub-mods" don't change THAT much in the way of mechanics (yet).

October 20. Decided to try again. Crashed within five minutes. Going to totally degrade all options and see what happens.