I bought SH3-Gold from Steam yesterday and downloaded it. When I run the game it takes 45 minutes to reach the online login screen. If I actually bothered to wait that long for the game to load and try to play one of the campaigns, within a couple of minutes of playtime the game locks up and the best thing to do is reboot.

If the game was designed to function like this, then ignore this post and I'll just delete the game and never buy a Firefly Studios game again. However, if this isn't how the game was designed then please continue reading below.

System:
Core i5 750 (quad core 2.66)
4 gb RAM
Nvidea GeForce GT330 2 gb
Windows 7

- Nvidea drivers up to date (part of trying to get this damn game to work was updating them).
- Deleted and installed again through Steam.
- Steam says it downloads 4.3 gb, but game properties show 3.8 gb.
- Game version says 1.10.2287 or something (I'm not waiting 45 minutes again to find out).
- Config.xml changed to 1024x768 windowed, no difference.
- One thing to note is SH3.exe process hits 750+ meg in task manager when it locks up. Don't know if that's relevant, but that's when it locks up.
- My Steam folder is exempt in MSSECES.
- Oh and the obligatory "no issues with any other game or app".

I'm sorry, but this game is completely 100% unplayable due to technical issues. I feel completely ripped off and totally regret not waiting till some other suckers had bought the Gold and posted the problems.

HOWEVER, I DO want the game to work, and work as any person would expect a game to work. That is, not having to wait 45 minutes to play 2 minutes of game. I quite enjoyed the previous SH's and would rather like to enjoy SH3 as well. Prospects aren't looking good right now though.

Hi Dale,

Very sorry to hear about this problem you are experiencing.

a) No, that's not normal at all.

b) Can you try disabling the firewall, or checking if stronghold 3 is allowed to access the net in your firewall's settings.

c) Verify the Steam Cache for Stronghold 3.

Hi Daz, thanks for the reply.

a) Good to hear (I am hoping to get into the game, love a good city-builder).

b) I disabled Windows Firewall (no others installed) for home and public networks and it still took ages. I killed the process after 10 minutes. All that comes on screen is black with the hourglass icon.

c) Cache verified and no files changed. Still 3.8 gb. BTW something I noticed this time (since I'm taking notice of these things) is that Steam took ~4-5 mins validating at 13% then jumped straight to completed.

Other stuff I noticed this time around:
- I know it's happened at least twice before launching SH3, this time around I got an Nvidea graphics driver crash (which Windows recovers from). Nvidea control panel shows driver version 301.42 if it helps.

- I've noticed a lot of disk activity whilst loading so ran perfmon. Disk reads and writes whilst it's loading don't go over 25 (25 was the maximum), and paging usage changed like 0.1% during load. CPU usage isn't much at all during loading and the exe sits around the 170 meg RAM use mark.

- Loading will lock up the PC (can't move mouse, no other apps respond) for about 20 seconds, then response will return for about 5 seconds before locking up again. This is repeating all the way through loading. During those lockups the disk light is constantly on.

Hope some of this helps. Would supplying dxdiags or something help?

Is there a debug mode or some way to output a loading log in the final exe build? Or would I need a debug exe build for that? (Depends how the programmers did it).

If you could send your dxdiag file into us at - This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

Thanks.

Hi Daz,

Email sent.

Thanks

Please note I've diagnosed a possible dieing SATA controller on my mobo which appears to have started causing problems the same day I got SH3.

Apologies for my initial snarkiness in the OP.

No problem Dale, I hope you can resolved your computer problems and Stronghold 3 is fine.

Final update on this issue, and a warning to other forum readers!

A Windows Update that was available the other day was an update to Intel Storage Manager. I installed it and everything seemed good.

BUT, as I've found out today through lots of reading, just updating the Windows driver is WRONG! To update the Intel Storage Manager properly you need to re-install Windows and install the F6 pre-install driver too. If you do as I did you end up with the F6 pre-install driver and the Windows driver of different versions and it causes massive problems for your SATA controller. I had to format my drive and re-install Windows from scratch. The good news now is that the F6 pre-install and Windows driver version match and Stronghold 3 plays great.

So moral of the story, DO NOT upgrade your Intel Storage Manager driver if you have the option to do so. Hide the update in Windows Update so you never make the mistake like I did.