I have an intergrated card and a fairly capable laptop but Sorcerer King currently runs at a crawl on my system even using cloth map only.  I can run LH and only have slow down on large and above maps with dense monsters.  And it's still significantly faster than Sorcerer King.  I'm sure it's a BETA issue and I do like what I've seen so far but hope it is resolved sooner than later.

Hmm, I'm thinking that the graphics ARE good enough to warrant some dedicated cards and that would be why you're all having issues. It runs like a champ on my laptop with a dedicated graphics card

If the integrated graphics card is the issue (which I believe is at least partially to blame) then someone needs to do some serious work. I can run Civ 5, Endless Legend and other similar games without a hitch while SK is absolutely unplayable after several turns, even when closing and restarting the game. Memory leaks, poor efficiency and sloppy coding even for beta code.

I agree my comment is too harsh. The game is unplayable with integrated graphics however, and that is a major issue if this title hopes to hold up its chops in the marketplace and succeed. Coming from a longtime Stardock supporter, I'm hoping you find success, whatever magic it takes.

Thanks, Frogboy, for looking into it! I want to like this game (and have enjoyed FE in the past), but the graphics slowdown is a showstopper for me right now.

If it helps, here are the specs on the machine I am using:

Sony Vaio Model #: SVD112290X

Processor: Intel i7-3537U @2.0 GHz

Graphics: Intel HD Graphics 4000 @ 1920x1200

Memory: 8GB

It's not a gaming rig, but it's not a total lightweight either. Let me know if I can do anything else to help; love to see this issue resolved!

Oh, and this may be obvious, but have you tried turning dynamic shadows and anti-aliasing off, lowering the world FX, and/or lowering the resolution?  Dynamic shadows are used much more extensively than they were in FE.

As mentioned earlier, I do not experience the extreme slowdown on my desktop with a dedicated graphics card, only on the laptop that has integrated graphics. Laptop specs:

HP ProBook 6470b

Intel(R) Core(TM) i3-3110M CPU @ 2.40 GHz

4.00 GB RAM

Intel(R) HD Graphics 4000

I've turned off every available graphics feature to make it as bare-bones as possible, without any noticeable improvement when it comes to the slowdown described.

I have an update on this issue that I thought I'd pass along since it's fairly interesting.

It turns out that maps that have a tile that have >2 edges with different terrain really mess up the graphics shader.  

In FE/LH, this was never an issue since tiles were blended into one another.  But it is here.

The maps are being fixed for this Thursday to avoid this.

There is one map that is relatively free of this issue called Aereon.  The worst one, by far, is Oasis.

I hope this info doesn't bore people, I really like sharing this kind of stuff with you guys.

Anyway, thanks to our friends at Intel I am able to look deeply at the code.

Check this out:

For SK, I wrote, what I thought, was a clever function which lets monsters be placed NEAR someone's territory.  I had no idea how horrible the underlying code was until I started getting feedback like what Dsag reported above.  

What you should get out of the screenshot is this: ONE function by itself was using 30% of the overall CPU of the game.  Sadly, I wrote this function. So it's my fault.  It used over 30 seconds of CPU time (and this is on a Core I7-5960x monster) and I was only running the game for about a minute and a half.

So you guys keep kicking me in the ass to optimize.  

Dsag, curious, how many CPU cores are on your machine? 

I just checked in a ton of optimizations this evening (as in, moments ago) based on a quick perusal.  The biggest difference will boil down to cores.  The game must have been absolutely horrible for people with only 1 or 2 cores. 

The Thursday update should be massively better.

Now, however, I am feeling pretty terrible for LH as I really need to look at some of this stuff for that too. Maybe this weekend.

If you guys haven't heard of Vtune 2015, it just came out and it's far better than the older editions.   

When it comes to perf, be LOUD.  I work for you guys.  

Thanks, Frogboy, for digging this one out! I look forward to the update and will look for (and report on) improvement!

I've tinkered in code before... it's always the clever bits that bite you!

Not boring at all IMO, I'm pleased to learn there are solvable solutions to the major performance issues we're experiencing. Thanks for the update.