So Cossacks 2 the black sheep of the Cossacks family...

The game isn't entirely stable at the best of times but I've noticed that Cossacks 2 BFE doesn't use more than one core from your typical quad-core (+++) processor.

This appears to be the cause of the heavy lag once several hundred player + AI units are in play.

It's especially noticeable on campaign missions against the AI; try the first French mission and play for a while...

Once set to use all cores the game performs much better.

The in-game settings i.e. resolution, animation quality - make little to no difference.

American Conquest makes full use of all available cores and doesn't slowdown.
Never had any slowdown issues with Cossacks 1 either.

I don't understand why this game doesn't utilise all cores by default ?

I can set CPU affinity on engine.exe once the game has started through Task Manager but I'm looking for an automatic solution ideally without third party tools.

ALT-TABBING every time I play gets a bit annoying :'(

So far I've tried:

> Using ImageCFG (a handy tool for fixing Heroes3)

> Various BAT file methods i.e:
start /AFFINITY [n] engine.exe
c:\windows\system32\cmd.exe /C start /affinity engine.exe

Nothing seems to stick. Any other ideas?

I've also tried various wrappers like , [url=http://dxwrapper]DxWrapper to stop random crashing, boost performance, etc - but they don't help.

I've not tried WINED3D yet.

My machine handles Cossacks 3 easily so it's not a lack of power.

Added some pictures which show what's happening

As far as third party tools are concerned: Prio – Process Priority Saver

Seems to be the best option.

Small background service. Integrates directly into the Task Manager.

You can set affinity to all cores on engine.exe which is remembered when the game is next run.

The game might still randomly crash every so often but at least it plays smoothly now.

I should probably start to use/learn Linux to get such basic functionality out of the box instead of clunky Windows 10.