One hint is to play battles zoomed up and out and it helps reduce load. So, to recap, your system is fine, try lowering resolution or unit size, it is still adjustable in DM. It isn't our systems as much as Total wars older school programing not taking full advantage of multi core, it allows lesser systems to work on lower resolution, and that is there marketplace trade off. and it just doesn't get too much better, I am able to run ultra max resolution on the new sys 4670k cpu, but DM does add to the numbers, and try 20000 troops in a battle in Total war Fos ( DM of course) and then we can cry in our beer, It actually runs, but at time if you go down low into the fighting can max out the single core it uses. Playing now on ultra and the way Total war codes the bottleneck is the cpu, not ram and not video, you have ample room there. probably 16 x 10 as I recall, and it helped on my older system which was a fast early quad core. Im familiar with your situation, I ran "reduced " resolution. The game is quite frankly a frigging mess. At one point I had to a reinstall of windows from the ground up then reinstall Empire just to get it running properly The cohesion factor is new and youll learn to love it. I rarely lost land battles on normal Empire and Darthmod, but Ive had a tough time with some of the battles in ETWII. ETWII has better audio and smoke visuals, as well as better AI imo. In some cases even that wont work and a full reinstall of the game is necessary. I started with Darthmod, but moved to ETWII as soon as I saw the difference. changing that modifier in the proper txt file will let you keep all the awesome that comes with Darthmod but with modified unit sizes your CPU can actually handle. There is a script somewhere that lets you designate unit size for the campain via modifier dial back troop numbers and you wont have a problem. Regardless your issue is because of troop numbers nothing more. Hyperthreading is also a hinderance as Warscape engine does not know the difference between a real thread and a hyper thread but with 1 thread handling graphics and renderer thus the game only uses 2 cores most users will see 1 core 99% 2 core at 30% depending on the Intel CPU. The game is SINGLE THREADED thus a single CPU core is handling physics / ai / animation subsystem / battle statistics etc. So many ppl here that dont know what there talking aboutÄarthmod usually cranks up the number of soldiers per unitsĤ x 20 = 80 units with units of 200 men thats 16,000 soldiers with even larger numbers I believe the last time I played Darthmod it was 300-400 men per unit at which case thats 24000-36000 soldiers.