Theatre of War 2 constant freezing (SOLVED)

[praedo]

I just bought the Theatre of War collection from Steam. ToW 1 works fine, but both ToW 2 games freeze up within a few minutes. Sometimes it freezes during the main menu, most often during the forces selection screen, and twice I actually got to start a game and play for a minute or two before it locked up on me. I need to do CTRL-ALT-DEL and end process to get out of it.

I tried putting it in compatibility mode for Win XP SP2, and running as an administrator, but it doesn't work.

My system: Brand new AMD 6-core processor, 4GB ram, 1GB NVidia video card, Windows 7 64-bit. In short, my system exceeds the recommended specs. I also have brand new drivers for just about everything.

Please help; I've spent $45 and am completely unable to enjoy this game.

[Sneaksie]

Hello praedo
Personally i play the Steam version of the game (Kursk) fine on PC with Win7 64-bit, 4Gb RAM, 9800GT 512Mb and Core 2 Duo E8400. As you can see, only CPUs and graphics cards differ between our systems, so it's one of them causing the problem.
The game wasn't tested on new six core processors, so the first thing i would try is to check how it runs on one or two cores, maybe this will solve your problem. Run the game normally, then press Ctrl+Alt+Del in the main menu and invoke Task Manager. There go to the processes tab and right-click Kursk1943.exe, choose 'Affinity'. You should see a list of all six cores, some of them checked. Check only one or two cores, CPU0 and CPU1 (check only one if checking two won't help), then Alt-Tab back to game and see how it goes.
If this helps, i think there is a command in Steam shell that lets you run a game with a specific affinity.
Also, i'm not familiar with modern AMD CPUs, but i do remember that early AMD dual-core CPUs required drivers installation for correct operation in XP (without this driver, game camera in ToW1 rotated uncontrollably). You have much more powerful CPU and your OS is Win7, but i suggest checking AMD site if setting affinity won't help.

[praedo]

That actually worked! Do you know how to adjust the affinity in Steam so I don't have to CTRL-ALT-DEL every time I play the game?

[Sneaksie]

Good to hear! :)
Right click on the Kursk or Africa icon in the games list in Steam client and select "Properties". In the General tab click Launch Options. Type \AFFINITY 0X3 into the box and click OK. Close the properties box and launch the game.
This command will set CPU affinity for this game to core0 and core1 upon launch.

I also posted this on Steam forum.

[praedo]

Ok, that worked very well. Thank you.

[Flanker15]

Bump!

Hi Sneaksie

I bought ToW 2 recently and have the freeze issue as well, I tried the launch command "\AFFINITY 0X3" but it still froze.
I then checked the process after launching with the prompt and it was still using 4 cores, switched to 2 cores and the problem disappeared.
Is there something up with the launch command that makes it not work with intel i7 processors? Or is there another way to launch it with the correct affinity?
Thanks!

[Sneaksie]

Hmm, try the \AFFINITY 0X1 command, it should launch the game using one core.

[Flanker15]

Nope still running all cores, I'll just do it manually when I start it.
Probably why other people with intel cores were complaining the fix didn't work.